Why does the battle for gay rights stop at the borders of Islam?

You can tell when a battle has been won.  Read the Pink News or any other gay news site and you will see that there are almost no stories left to report.  A politician in Northern Ireland may be caught expressing an opinion on gay marriage which was the view of all mainstream UK political parties ten years ago.  There might be some gossip about various celebrities (so no different from any other newspapers).  But otherwise gay news sites are reduced to tentatively wondering if Transgender rights are the same as gay rights (the jury is out) and otherwise running mainstream politics stories which strangely favour the Lib Dems while expressing an inherited hostility towards the Tories and Ukip.  This is no tragedy.  It is a demonstration of the fact that after victory people get on with life as normal.

Of course not very far away there are people who take a quite different view of these matters.  In the newspapers today we can see photos of events in the Syrian town of Raqqa.  There Isis have just carried out another ‘execution’ of someone accused of being gay.  The victim – this time a man in his 50s – was thrown off the top floor of a seven-storey building.  He appears to have survived the fall and so was stoned to death by the crowd on the ground.

What are right-thinking people to do about this?  For most of them it isn’t easy because they don’t even know where to begin thinking about this and have been taught to be almost fearful about speaking about it.

I think we can probably say with some confidence that if an evangelical Christian group threw gays off towers in the Deep South, gay media outlets would currently be lambasting the Christian churches for a history of homophobia which had led to this pass.