Andy McCarthy is right:

‘What,” Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was asked, “is [Islam’s] judgment on sodomy and lesbianism?”

“Forbidden,” he curtly pronounced. “Those involved in the act should be punished. In fact, sodomites should be killed in the worst manner possible.”

So what does Barack Obama have to say about that?

Cynically mounting his high horse last week in the cozy confines of Jay Leno’s late-night TV comedy program — a venue popular with his ill-informed admirers, one where hypocrisy won’t be noticed, much less challenged — the president declaimed, “I have no patience for countries that try to treat gays or lesbians or transgender persons in ways that intimidate or are harmful to them.”

This was his purported human-rights rationale for canceling a summit meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin, who in June signed an anti-gay law banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations.” Obama told Leno that “making sure people are treated fairly and justly” is a “precept that’s not unique to America” and “should apply everywhere.”

Seriously?

Does the president truly mean what he said? Or was he just pandering to dreamy millennials and the Hollywood glitterati, who are too uninformed or in the tank to mark the chasm between his righteous finger-wagging at Putin and his kowtowing to Islamic leaders? The answers depend on whether he finally condemns sharia’s oppressive and often brutal strictures against homosexuality, which are zealously enforced in most Muslim countries.

That brings us back to Ayatollah Sistani. He is not some wild-eyed al-Qaeda jihadist. Sistani is the most influential sharia jurist in Shiite Islam. He is Iraq’s grand ayatollah, and he was considered a critical ally of the post-Saddam democracy project by the Bush administration and the State Department — which were apparently unembarrassed by his directive that Muslims avoid physical contact with non-Muslims because, as Sistani put it, it is akin to touching “urine, feces, semen, dead bodies, blood, dogs, pigs, alcoholic liquors, and the sweat of an animal that persistently eats filth.”

In calling for homosexuals to be “killed in the worst manner possible,” Sistani was not being even slightly controversial. He was reciting mainstream Islamic doctrine — again, not al-Qaeda doctrine, Islamic doctrine.