{"id":9124,"date":"2019-02-20T09:24:30","date_gmt":"2019-02-20T08:24:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=9124"},"modified":"2019-02-20T09:24:30","modified_gmt":"2019-02-20T08:24:30","slug":"homologic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/9124\/","title":{"rendered":"Homologic"},"content":{"rendered":"

So the Trump administration decides to launch<\/a> a global campaign to decriminalise homosexuality:<\/p>\n

U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, the highest-profile openly gay person in the Trump administration, is leading the effort, which kicks off Tuesday evening in Berlin.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, the notoriously homophobic Trump regime which inspires fake attacks on Jussie Smollett and causes the Canadian actress Ellen Page to complain<\/a> about the US vice president not approving her lifestyle choice has appointed an openly gay man as ambassador to Germany. Trump really is turning out to be the lamest Hitler ever.<\/p>\n

Anyway, here’s how those at Out<\/em>, a magazine catering to gay folks,\u00a0reacted<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Rather than actually being about helping queer people around the world, the campaign looks more like another instance of the right using queer people as a pawn to amass power and enact its own agenda.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

The plan has reportedly been spearheaded by the U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, who is also the administration\u2019s top-ranked gay official, in response to news that a young gay man was hanged in Iran recently. Grenell has had his eyes on Iran for some time and just a week ago, he was trying to get several European nations to pass sanctions on Iran, unrelated to the country\u2019s stance on homosexuality,\u00a0to no avail.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thank goodness for those enlightened European nations who defied Trump trying to impose sanctions on a regime which hangs men for being gay!<\/p>\n

Homosexuality has been illegal in Iran since the theocratic 1979 Islamic Revolution. By at least one\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0account, since the exit of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2013, enforcement of anti-gay laws has softened somewhat. Homosexuality, according to the writer, is an \u201copen secret\u201d and most queer people fear homophobic reaction from fellow citizens more than the authorities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Didn’t you just say a young gay man was hanged in Iran recently?<\/p>\n

The truth is, this is part of an old colonialist handbook.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The conquest of Africa couldn’t have taken place without frantic reports from remote jungle outposts regarding native turd-burglary.<\/p>\n

According to the report, the decriminalization campaign is set to begin in Berlin\u00a0where LGBTQ+ activists from across Europe will meet to hatch a plan that is \u201cmostly concentrated in the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The American plan for achieving hegemony over Iran features an auxiliary army of European LGBTQ+ activists part of which will head to the Caribbean from an HQ in Berlin?<\/p>\n

There are two things happening here: one is a campaign to decriminalise homosexuality and the other is America’s belligerence towards Iran. The author has lumped one in with the other in order to play politics and virtue-signal, which is stupid because he does eventually make a valid point:<\/p>\n

That sentence alone should set off several alarm bells. First of all, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean are huge geopolitical entities. Attitudes toward gay people differ greatly among countries and regions within those entities and attempting to gather a room of European activists on how to deal with queer issues in those regions is the definition of paternalism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now while I would like to see homosexuality decriminalised everywhere, I think this campaign is stupid and counterproductive: a bunch of ultra-woke activists turning up in foreign to lecture the locals is going to harden attitudes, not soften them. Such changes need to occur organically and domestically, but there is a large and lucrative industry in which European and American NGOs and supranational agencies based in Geneva go to places like Africa and demand society be turned on its head in order to accommodate trendy western ideas on issues such as female empowerment, environmentalism, and homosexuality. The author is quite right to call this paternalistic and liken it to colonialism. The trouble is, I can’t tell if he’s genuinely against this campaign or he’s pretending to be because the Trump administration is now involved.<\/p>\n

The other problem is he’s downplaying the situation gay men face in Iran in order to bash Trump. There were many valid reasons to oppose the Iraq War, but a lot of lefties instead chose to whitewash the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Since Trump took office, people have been doing the same with Iran. Criticising Trump’s sanctions on Iran ought not to entail defending a regime for publicly hanging men for the crime of being gay. That a gay magazine should do so speaks volumes about where the priorities of contemporary activists lie. Quite rightly, the article and its author are being monstered on Twitter this morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So the Trump administration decides to launch a global campaign to decriminalise homosexuality: U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, the highest-profile openly gay person in the Trump administration, is leading the effort, which kicks off Tuesday evening in Berlin. Yes, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[111,18,20,44],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9124"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9124"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9127,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9124\/revisions\/9127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}