LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA — An openly gay Saudi Arabian diplomat in Los Angeles who requested asylum in late August said he had received death threats since making it public on Saturday that he had asked to be allowed to stay in the United States.
The diplomat, Ali Ahmad Asseri, was still awaiting word from American officials on his application Tuesday, and said he feared execution if he returned to his home country.
Mr. Asseri sent a letter Saturday to various news outlets saying that employees at the Saudi Consulate had harassed him after they began to suspect that he was gay and after learning that a close friend was a Jewish Israeli woman.
“My life is in a great danger here,” Mr. Asseri wrote in the letter, “and if I go back to Saudi Arabia, they will kill me openly in broad daylight. I want my voice to be heard, and I want them to know that I am not alone.”
On the phone Tuesday, Mr. Asseri said he had received several threats on his life this week since posting comments on a popular Arabic Web site that criticized “militant imams” and threatened to expose embarrassing information about Saudi royalty living in the United States. Mr. Asseri’s lawyer, Ally Bolour, said Saudi officials had terminated his position with the consulate and refused to renew his diplomatic passport.
“He has a tremendous amount of courage to put his life on the line like this and come out in such a public way,” Mr. Bolour said.
Mr. Asseri, who is in his 40s, had announced his intention to gain asylum “against my advice,” Mr. Bolour said. “I wish he hadn’t gone public.”
Nail al-Jubeir, a spokesman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, said Saudi officials had not terminated Mr. Asseri’s position, but transferred him last spring to a post at the foreign ministry in Riyadh. Mr. Asseri said he has been in hiding since earlier in the summer, Mr. Jubeir said.
“His tour of duty in Los Angeles was completed after four years,” Mr. Jubeir said. “He applied for a one-year extension, and we granted that. But we didn’t renew his diplomatic passport because it was for his position in L.A., and his position does not exist there anymore.”
At the consulate, Mr. Asseri was a first secretary, “a person with a college degree who has about 12 years in the foreign service,” Mr. Jubeir said. Mr. Asseri has worked in diplomatic positions in at least two countries, he said.
Mr. Jubeir said possible consequences for a Saudi diplomat who announces he is gay “have not been discussed.” But, he added, “In general, homosexuality in Islam is unacceptable.”
The last Saudi diplomat granted asylum in the United States, Mr. Jubeir said, was Mohammed al-Khilewi in 1994. Mr. Khilewi, a first secretary for the Saudi mission to the United Nations at the time, applied after making public statements criticizing Saudi Arabia’s human rights record and linking the country to support for terrorist networks.
from The New York Times

Governor Charlie Crist

Continuing his makeover from Republican to independent U.S. Senate candidate, Gov. Charlie Crist on Monday affirmed his support for civil unions, adoption by same-sex couples, and doing away with the military’s ban on openly gay soldiers.
Equality Florida, the state’s leading gay rights group, called Crist’s statement on a range of gay issues “the most comprehensive, pro-LGBT equality stand of a sitting governor in Florida’s history.”
Crist’s Democratic opponent for Senate, U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, called it “too little too late.” He and the Republican nominee, Marco Rubio, noted the governor had backed a 2008 amendment to the state constitution banning same sex marriage, flip-flopped on the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell policy” earlier this year and opposed gay adoption in his 2006 campaign.
The dust-up reflected a central question facing voters evaluating Florida’s open U.S. Senate race: Is Crist a political opportunist, as Meek and Rubio contend, or an independent who puts “people ahead of politics,” as he says in his new television ad?
“It’s never too late to support gay rights,” said Crist’s advisor Eric Johnson, a Democrat who took issue with Meek’s criticism. “If Kendrick Meek is truly a supporter of gay rights, he should be applauding Crist for these positions.”
Crist has been increasingly tilting leftward as he seeks to siphon Democratic votes from Meek and pitch himself as the only true foil to the conservative Rubio.
In the first formal position paper released by the campaign, Crist laid out his position on nine issues relating to gay rights, including his support for a federal ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation and for allowing gay citizens to sponsor their partners for legal immigrant status.
But it was the sections on adoption by same-sex couples and the military’s policy on gay soldiers that piqued the attention of his rivals.
Both the Meek and Rubio campaigns circulated mailers from Crist’s 2006 campaign for governor, which blasted his Democratic competitor, Jim Davis, for supporting gay adoption. It said Davis “is opposed to traditional families” and “turned his back on our values.”
from The Miami Herald