A just cause. .

What's your worst political nightmare? Here's one to ponder. By some awful turn of events, the radical religious right, spearheaded by Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and even more extreme elements among Christian Reconstructionists, orchestrates a military coup. The Constitution is abolished. Biblical law is established as the only legitimate form of authority. Adulterers are stoned. Women are barred from going to work. And homosexuals are tortured in order to expose others; the ones flushed out by omnipresent religious secret police are systematically turned into informers, executed by mass stonings, or buried under piles of rubble.

This isn't likely to happen, of course, even in our most paranoid fantasies. However bad Falwell, Dobson, and Robertson are, they're not that extreme. But the truth is, in hard and irrefutable detail, this is the kind of regime under which millions of gay people live. Throughout the Arab and Muslim world, vicious persecution of gay people is the norm. Under the most brutal Islamist dictatorships, the violence is about as awful as it can get. In the Taliban's Afghanistan, for example, gay people were routinely executed. In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the death penalty for gay people was the law. On the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, under the Palestinian Authority, gay people are regularly harassed, arrested, and tortured.

One such victim's story was recounted in The New Republic last year by Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi. After a young man, whom Halevi calls "Tayseer," was discovered having sex with another man, he was arrested by the Palestinian police and hung by his arms from the ceiling. "A high-ranking officer he didn't know arranged for his release and then demanded sex as payback," Halevi wrote. Tayseer fled Gaza for the West Bank, but he was arrested there too. Halevi reported, "He was forced to stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head covered by a sack filled with feces, and then he was thrown into a dark cell infested with insects and other creatures he could feel but not see. ('You slap one part of your body, and then you have to slap another,' he recounts.) During one interrogation, police stripped him and forced him to sit on a Coke bottle. Through the entire ordeal he was taunted by interrogators, jailers, and fellow prisoners for being a homosexual."

Another gay couple under Palestinian rule told Halevi that they woke up one morning and "found a letter under our door from the Islamic court. It listed the five forms of death prescribed by Islam for homosexuality, including stoning and burning. We fled to Israel that same day."

We know these stories because these people have fled to a free Western country, Israel. Can you imagine the untold stories, the unheard screams of torture, the web of fear and terror that envelopes gay people under the auspices of Islamist dictatorships where there's no escape, no hope, no refuge?

Now imagine it's you. And imagine that there's another country, miles away, with the military power to stop this in some instances. A country that allows gay freedom to an extent you and your friends cannot even dream of. How would you feel if you heard that many gay people in that country described the attempt to liberate you from this terror as "state terrorism"? How would you feel if those gay people sided not with your bid for freedom but with the dictators who oppress you? How would you feel if these gay people preferred instead to march and protest against any war to liberate their imprisoned and persecuted brothers and sisters?

We are at war now--with regimes and terrorist groups whose loathing of homosexuals is matched only by their utter contempt for human dignity, their sadistic violence, and their hatred of women's freedom. We will have good and important debates about how and when to intervene. But what we shouldn't debate is the morality of our system as opposed to the depravity of theirs. And in all these debates, two questions should resonate more powerfully than many others in the minds and souls of gay Americans: Whose side are you really on? And how much longer can you afford, actively or passively, to side with the oppressors?