To the editor:
I'm certain I was not the only one to suffer the tragic irony of reading a story on page 2A of the Journal-World (1/2/02) about Showtime's popular "Queer as Folk" TV series only to turn to a story on 5A about the legal decapitation by sword of three men in Saudi Arabia for the crime of "sodomy." The deaths of Ali bin Hatan bin Saad, Mohammad bin Suleiman bin Mohammed, and Mohammed bin Shalil bin Abdullah are even more horrendous than the torture and murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming because they were beheaded by their own government.
We may be forced by necessity to rely upon Saudi Arabia to combat evil in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, we should spare no effort in using diplomacy to persuade these "allies" to abandon the barbaric practice of decapitation by sword and application of the death penalty to lifestyles I believe most Americans now take for granted.
President Bush and politicians on both sides of the aisles should swiftly and publicly condemn these violations of basic human rights. Until Saudi laws are changed, we should offer immediate asylum to those persecuted by practices that sound more like something from the year 1002 than 2002.
John Hoopes,
Lawrence
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