Via Foreign Policy:
In his 1961 religious treatise A Clarification of Questions(Towzih al-Masael), [Ayatollah] Khomeini issued detailed pronouncements on issues ranging from sodomy ("If a man sodomizes the son, brother, or father of his wife after their marriage, the marriage remains valid") to bestiality ("If a person has intercourse with a cow, a sheep, or a camel, their urine and dung become impure and drinking their milk will be unlawful").
Let’s just get this out of the way: Yes, that sentence is goddamn hilarious. Of course, the question of whether or not a marriage remains valid if a man sodomizes his father-in-law’s sheep is left unanswered, but let us at least acknowledge that there are serious aims in such peculiarly specific pronouncements about the manifold permutations of the human sex act. Religion is a source of political authority, therefore playing the holier-than-thou game by setting out detailed rules about sex is all part of the political process in Iran.
Which, of course, doesn’t stop outsiders from finding the whole thing amusing. Tee hee.
