As a gay man, should I celebrate this diversity?

Tomorrow evening Channel 4's Dispatches programme will show women preachers at London's Regent's Park Mosque urging followers to kill homosexuals.

The programme is a follow-up to the Dispatches on Undercover Mosques.

In this new documentary, a female reporter infiltrated women’s study circles. In one, a preacher using the name Umm Amira tells followers: “We are not going to be like animals . . . or to be like the homosexuals, God save us from that, you understand? We have to take the judgment, the judgment is to kill them.”

There is only one single valid response to this. They should be prosecuted for incitement to murder.

It would be tempting to dismiss these calls as the ravings of a lunatic fringe.

So it is important to point out that last year a wide-ranging survey of Muslim opinion showed that 71% - yes, 71% - of young Muslim men (aged between 16-24) thought that homosexuality should be illegal. 

I hope that the gay community wakes up a little, so far as this issue is concerned.

I am sometimes exasperated, as a gay man, by the lack of reaction from the gay community to incitement of the kind above, or indeed to the uninhibited hostility of a large section of the population.

Many gay men still think that civil partnerships and adoption are the big issues. Islamic hostility doesn't affect many of them as yet. But it surely will.

Take a hypothetical yet very feasible example. A school in a largely Muslim area faces calls from parents that they do not want their children taught by an openly gay teacher.

In this situation, who would The Guardian support?

I think it likely that the teacher would be sacrificed in the name of cultural sensitivity.

The real reason however is that, in the liberal multi-culturalist pantheon, fear of being caused racist sits right at the top, easily trumping accusations of homophobia and, for that matter, sexism. They are willing to go through extraordinary intellectual contortions to justify their position.

In the meantime, gay men might like to look more seriously at this issue. They should read While Europe Slept, a brilliant book by a gay liberal author Bruce Bawer, who lived for years in a number of European countries.

Too many gays trot out all those tired old cliches about the dangerous Christian Right. They are to be opposed, or course, but here, they are hardly a great power in the land, are lampooned and savaged in a way that Islam is not, and, so far as I know, are not calling for gays to be murdered. 

And in the field of the arts, where there are so many gay men, could we not see more plays, pieces of visual art or films - or even a few organised protests - highlighting this new breed of hatred towards gay men?