What liberal fundamentalists get right.
Pappy Bush clowning about athiests is plenty amusing, but on the subject of intolerance, this (via The Plank) is unspeakably horrible:
Following a death-to-gays fatwa issued last October by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, death squads of the Badr Corps have been systematically targeting gay Iraqis for persecution and execution, gay Iraqis say. But when they ask for help and protection from U.S. occupying authorities in the Green Zone, the secure area officialdom has carved out within Baghdad, gays Iraqis are met with indifference and derision.
...Badr militants are entrapping gay men via Internet chat rooms,” Hili said. “They arrange a date, and then beat and kill the victim. Males who are unmarried by the age of 30 or 35 are placed under surveillance on suspicion of being gay, as are effeminate men. They will be investigated and warned to get married.
...There is great fear that the Badr Corps-SCIRI campaign against gay people will become official Iraqi policy, especially if the report that a top SCIRI politician may become the new prime minister turns out to be true. Under the Iraqi Constitution-virtually written by the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and his associates-Sharia law, which mandates death for homosexuals, is the foundation of all Iraqi law.
Note that these attacks aren't geared toward or reacting to a pereceived need to control public behaviour. They're designed to systematically root out homosexuals, even those who aren't "out" in Iraqi society. Given that homosexuality itself (if not the way individuals choose to practice is) is almost certainly genetic, there's not even techically a difference between this and ethnic genocide.
Which makes the US complicit in proto-genocide:
“These assaults and murders have been reported to the Green Zone, but the Americans don't want to upset the religious authorities, and so they do nothing or treat gay Iraqis with contempt or as an object of humor,” Hili explained, adding that the reports to U.S. authorities were made by underground gay activists.
The U.S. has long sought to court Ayatollah Sistani, and gave its approval for SCIRI's participation in the current coalition government. SCIRI has since brokered the current plan for talks between the U.S. and Iran over Iranian interference in Iraq, a plan much in the headlines last week.
Digression: I used not to support legalizing gay marriage in any country wherein a majority of the public did not agree with the position. I had good debates on the subject with open-minded "liberal fundamentalists" who did support it, polls be damned. They were right and I was wrong.*
I changed my mind about gay marriage about six months ago because of stuff like this. You can't be half-hearted in opposing this worldview. You have to go the whole way in forging the alternative: full, symbolic equality. This isn't my preference: in a near-perfect world, I'd want the government completely out of the business of therapeutic symbolism except on the broadest, most generic levels. But just like there's no room for Holocaust denial or anti-semetic polemic in a decent society given the historical reality of the Holocaust and the enduring pathologies that led to it, there's no room for Sam Brownback's nonviolent bigottry in a world in which the exact same bigottry, founded on pretty much the exact same tenets, curdles this easily and overtly into violence just half a world away.
When Western homosexuals read the news they see pure unadulterated hate-killing being systematically carried out against people just like them, and the West mum (regarding Iran or in much of the Middle East) or, worse, complicit. The toppling of Saddam created this situation, at least in Iraq. There's no getting around that fact. There's no glossing over it. There's no fudging it by appealing to Saddam's other atrocities (or Sistani's other merits) as if they negate the awfulness of this dilemma. This is not a political or material dispute; dealing with Sharia politicians who would have the state murder gays is not a question of acknowledging the awful truths of global realpolitik or tiptoeing around repression in the name of stability. The gay-bashing in Iraq (or anywhere else) is pure in-group selfishness brought to its bloody, untenable extreme. It's simply intolerable. We don't support it, but we precipitated it, and now we swallow and tolerate it. Then you see Sam Brownback's creepy puritanism or Bush promoting the FMA to score cheap political points off his decadent, selfish conservative audiences, and you wonder -- gay or straight -- how great the distance is between our bigottry, our zenophobic populism, and theirs.
Sometimes there's nothing to do but oppose -- full-throated, demanding, obnoxious -- because anything less is appeasement of the very worst we can be.
* Actually, what I argued and still ideally would prefer is to see a broader form of civil unions defined for any emotionally and/or financially dependent couple independent of any declared or implicit sexual relationship. But that's a whole other topic of discussion, and its feasibility depends on the non-existent postulated near-perfect world in which, say, Sam Brownback and not al-Sistani or Ahmadinejad, represented the extreme of politically acceptable bigottry.
Following a death-to-gays fatwa issued last October by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, death squads of the Badr Corps have been systematically targeting gay Iraqis for persecution and execution, gay Iraqis say. But when they ask for help and protection from U.S. occupying authorities in the Green Zone, the secure area officialdom has carved out within Baghdad, gays Iraqis are met with indifference and derision.
...Badr militants are entrapping gay men via Internet chat rooms,” Hili said. “They arrange a date, and then beat and kill the victim. Males who are unmarried by the age of 30 or 35 are placed under surveillance on suspicion of being gay, as are effeminate men. They will be investigated and warned to get married.
...There is great fear that the Badr Corps-SCIRI campaign against gay people will become official Iraqi policy, especially if the report that a top SCIRI politician may become the new prime minister turns out to be true. Under the Iraqi Constitution-virtually written by the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and his associates-Sharia law, which mandates death for homosexuals, is the foundation of all Iraqi law.
Note that these attacks aren't geared toward or reacting to a pereceived need to control public behaviour. They're designed to systematically root out homosexuals, even those who aren't "out" in Iraqi society. Given that homosexuality itself (if not the way individuals choose to practice is) is almost certainly genetic, there's not even techically a difference between this and ethnic genocide.
Which makes the US complicit in proto-genocide:
“These assaults and murders have been reported to the Green Zone, but the Americans don't want to upset the religious authorities, and so they do nothing or treat gay Iraqis with contempt or as an object of humor,” Hili explained, adding that the reports to U.S. authorities were made by underground gay activists.
The U.S. has long sought to court Ayatollah Sistani, and gave its approval for SCIRI's participation in the current coalition government. SCIRI has since brokered the current plan for talks between the U.S. and Iran over Iranian interference in Iraq, a plan much in the headlines last week.
Digression: I used not to support legalizing gay marriage in any country wherein a majority of the public did not agree with the position. I had good debates on the subject with open-minded "liberal fundamentalists" who did support it, polls be damned. They were right and I was wrong.*
I changed my mind about gay marriage about six months ago because of stuff like this. You can't be half-hearted in opposing this worldview. You have to go the whole way in forging the alternative: full, symbolic equality. This isn't my preference: in a near-perfect world, I'd want the government completely out of the business of therapeutic symbolism except on the broadest, most generic levels. But just like there's no room for Holocaust denial or anti-semetic polemic in a decent society given the historical reality of the Holocaust and the enduring pathologies that led to it, there's no room for Sam Brownback's nonviolent bigottry in a world in which the exact same bigottry, founded on pretty much the exact same tenets, curdles this easily and overtly into violence just half a world away.
When Western homosexuals read the news they see pure unadulterated hate-killing being systematically carried out against people just like them, and the West mum (regarding Iran or in much of the Middle East) or, worse, complicit. The toppling of Saddam created this situation, at least in Iraq. There's no getting around that fact. There's no glossing over it. There's no fudging it by appealing to Saddam's other atrocities (or Sistani's other merits) as if they negate the awfulness of this dilemma. This is not a political or material dispute; dealing with Sharia politicians who would have the state murder gays is not a question of acknowledging the awful truths of global realpolitik or tiptoeing around repression in the name of stability. The gay-bashing in Iraq (or anywhere else) is pure in-group selfishness brought to its bloody, untenable extreme. It's simply intolerable. We don't support it, but we precipitated it, and now we swallow and tolerate it. Then you see Sam Brownback's creepy puritanism or Bush promoting the FMA to score cheap political points off his decadent, selfish conservative audiences, and you wonder -- gay or straight -- how great the distance is between our bigottry, our zenophobic populism, and theirs.
Sometimes there's nothing to do but oppose -- full-throated, demanding, obnoxious -- because anything less is appeasement of the very worst we can be.
* Actually, what I argued and still ideally would prefer is to see a broader form of civil unions defined for any emotionally and/or financially dependent couple independent of any declared or implicit sexual relationship. But that's a whole other topic of discussion, and its feasibility depends on the non-existent postulated near-perfect world in which, say, Sam Brownback and not al-Sistani or Ahmadinejad, represented the extreme of politically acceptable bigottry.
1 Comments:
The problem as I see it, is that many liberals (not really the fundamentalists, more the high tea and Save the Whale $5000 a plate dinner crowd) share many of the sentiments of what we call "Middle America."
The pathologies related to gays are deeply engrained in our cultural consciousness and it will take a full two generations more for the pendulum to swing entirely to the acceptance side.
I like bashing Right Wingers as much as the next guy, but this even draws parallels tothe history of racism in the USA: the South was racist and made it damn clear from the antebellum era right up through the Civil Rights era (and some would argue to the present, although we are at least progressing). The North probably did have less de facto racism (and certainly fewer Jim Crow laws), but that did not mean that racism was a purely Southern phenomena.
Yes gay bashers are bad, but at least they`re honest. Sam Brownback thinks homosexuality is an abomination and his constitutients agree.
Bill Clinton and John Kerry almost certainly do not agree with the above statement, but they court those that sympathize with it nonetheless.
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