It’s a homophobia problem. It’s a problem of conservative theology that uses gods as an excuse for heinous crimes.
This particular news program goes out of its way to get liberal ministers to oppose the hatemongers, but they’re just as bad: rationalizing your behavior as “this is what my god wants me to do” is just as fallacious when it’s supporting humanist views as when it’s supporting murderous views. How about suggesting that we not kill, because they are fellow human beings, or that we should be tolerant, because human beings have diverse views, and behavior that does not harm others ought to be accepted?
Investigators say shooter showed typical signs of mass shooter but few of religious radicalisation
Zack Ford has an excellent article about this very issue: No, We Cannot Weep Together.
If the shooters motivation (which was my suspicion after I heard the shooter had frequented the nightclub) in the penultimate paragraph of the report in Giliell’s comment #1 is correct, the references to ISIS, etc., were just a cover-up for his suicide-by-cop.
Even if it was Islamic homophobia – that doesn’t say anything about my Muslim neighbors and coworkers.
rietpluim:
No. It’s not Christian homophobia. It’s not Islamic homophobia. It’s not Jewish Homophobia. It’s just fucking homophobia. Yes, religions of various kinds do a lot to foster homophobia, but all the bigotry and hatred being embraced by countries encourages bigotry and hate, of a kind some people will act on. There’s zero need to try and take bigotry and slice it up into little fucking factions.
Counterpoint: understanding bigotry makes it easier to fight it.
@PZ:
While I absolutely agree with this in principle, there’s a problem: religious authoritarianism is a real social and psychological phenomenon. And I doubt that religious authoritarians consciously choose to think the way they do; it’s something they’re indoctrinated to be, or that shows up as part of their personality.
So while a non-authoritarian might well try to persuade people on purely humanistic arguments and values, religious authoritarians are going to think first of religious authoritarian arguments when trying to persuade other religious authoritarians to not be bigots.
I really don’t see any way around the problem.
Muhammed Syed has a guest post at The Friendly Atheist that takes a comprehensive look at homophobia in the Muslim world – After the Orlando Massacre, We Cannot Ignore the Connection Between Islam and Anti-Gay Bigotry:
Granted, this post came out a few days ago, before the latest information came out regarding the confused motive and pattern behind the attacks. But I think it’s important for us, as atheists, to actually listen to our fellow atheists who came from Muslim backgrounds before we decide to turn a blind eye to the problem of Islamic homophobia. Erasure has consequences, too.
One of the most important points Syed makes in his argument, however, is that ‘a weakened faith correlates with greater tolerance.’ In this sense, the higher level of homophobia in the Muslim world probably has less to do with the general ‘essence’ (for lack of a better word) of Islam than it does with the fact that currently, ‘Compared to Christians, more Muslims take their religion literally.’
Erasure. You mean of the Queers suffering under the wannabe Christian theocracies pushed by Republicans? For fuck sake, Mateen was an All American Hero, it is not erasure to suggest that Islam’s relevance in his life is at most equivalent to the American culture in which his “Islamic” homophobia bloomed. As I said in my post, dad and mosque can plant the seed, but it still needs soil, sun, and water to grow. Where do you suppose Mateen got those other 3?
It was an American shooting, by an American. Brutally oppressive Islamic Republics are terrible, and also NOT THE FUCKING CONVERSATION WE’RE HAVING HERE
Did you read the post? There’s nothing in there denying the importance of the general American climate of homophobia. The reason I opened with a global analysis of homophobia in Muslim communities is because I don’t think progressive causes are served by choosing to remain ignorant, even when the ignorance is well-intended.
I want to emphasize the last point I made, however, because I think it’s important, and I might not have done enough to stress it in my first comment:
One of the most important points Syed makes in his argument, however, is that ‘a weakened faith correlates with greater tolerance.’ In this sense, the higher level of homophobia in the Muslim world probably has less to do with the general ‘essence’ (for lack of a better word) of Islam than it does with the fact that currently, ‘Compared to Christians, more Muslims take their religion literally.’
The point I was trying to come around to was that fundamentalism of any kind is the clearest link to cultural homophobia. Hence the commonality between the most conservative Imams and the Texas pastor alluded to in the OP.
iggles:
Try reading the article of Zack Ford’s I linked to #2. Y’know, do some reading before playing armchair know it all. Yeah, religions are seriously complicit in preaching and fomenting queerphobia, however, for every person such as yourself, you are completely erasing all queer people by insisting on focusing on “Islam! Islam! Islam!”, and trying to say that Christians don’t take their religion literally (not like Muslims do, oh no!), which is a fucking crock.
Mateen was an American. A not particularly religious American, but surrounded by the culture of violence, bigotry and hate in this country. A country where guns are seen as a solution to everything. A country where everyone is free to hate, hate, hate. A country that is so full of queerphobia that it’s damn near surreal.
Qwints:
This, in response to me, is absolute bullshit, and you should be ashamed. This attempt at divvying up queerphobia is not about understanding it, it’s about blame shifting and denying complicity, and I expect you damn well know it, too. There is a raging problem in uStates, and it’s fucking ignorant and stupid settle into the “Islam!” idiocy, which conveniently ignores everything happening right here in uStates, and it’s even worse to see so-called rational people playing the “hey, it’s not me or mine!” blame game.
But that’s not what I said. I actually took a direct quote from the post I linked to, and it said this: ‘Compared to Christians, more Muslims take their religion literally.’ Not all. Not even most. More.
I’ll be content to let the point drop and focus on Christianity, since that is the main point of the OP. I was motivated to post my comment because I saw the engines of denial starting to rev up again, and I wanted to post something fact-based to add a different perspective. (If I’d wanted to push the point even harder, by the way, I wouldn’t even have to wander outside the FTB network to find several posts making similar points about Islam with much more inflammatory rhetoric than I ever used. I won’t link to them, but they’re easy enough to find on the homepage.)
But to bring us back to the OP. The solution in any case is to push for secularism, and widen the distance between a religion’s adherents and its holy book. To riff on a common phrase: ‘The bigger the hate, the closer to God.’
iggles @8, quoting Muhammed Syed :
This is blatantly false. According to the Pew data at that link, American support for same-sex marriage is slightly higher among Muslims (42%) than among Protestants as a whole (39%), and considerably higher than it is among Evangelicals (28%), Mormons (26%) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (14%). We see the same pattern in support for legal abortion, women in the workforce, and evolutionary theory.
On the “should homosexuality be accepted by society” question, the Muslim agreement rate was slightly lower than the Protestant agreement rate (45% vs. 48%) in 2014, but exactly equal (37%) in 2007. In both years, Muslims were more likely than Evangelicals, Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses to say that homosexuality should be accepted.
Are Muslims the most QUILTBAG-friendly religious group in the US? Obviously not. Are they unusually homophobic, compared to other religious groups? No. Do they align with Evangelicals, Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses? Hell, no. Actually, in their poll responses on social issues, Muslims align most closely with Protestants from historically black churches. (Which may partly explain why the vast majority of American converts to Islam are black.)
I can see that the majority does seem to be having difficulty with the horrible nature of the latest massacre and their feelings about the victims sexuality. Very akin to their reaction when the perpetrator is some one who belongs to the more radical right wing of politics by focusing of their mental state.
I would not mind so much if all of the influences were taken into consideration every time these things happen but it ends up just being deflection and misdirection more often than not.
The focus is always on some one’s agenda and not any kind of workable solution.
uncle frogy
Oh, and the same pattern occurs with scriptural literalism in the US. In the Pew data, only 42% of Muslims agree that their scriptures are the literal word of God. That’s a smaller percentage than for Protestants as a whole (46%), Evangelicals (55%), Protestants from historically black churches (59%), or Jehovah’s Witnesses (94%).
As a group, US Muslims really aren’t particularly fundamentalist.
@ Anton Mates, #13
Yes, I can see that being a problem. I tried to verify the stats on pewforum, but the site was down at the time. I’m checking them now – I think these are the same stats linked by Glenn Greenwald, featured recently here on Pharyngula. Here’s a link to one of the relevant graphs, for easy access: % Who Say Homosexuality Should Be Accepted By Society
You’re right. It looks like that particular stat doesn’t pass the smell test.
Caine
The blame shifting and denying complicity going on here are the few commenters who seem intent on shifting the to american christian homophobes whom there’s no evidence Mateen had contact with and denying the complicity of the father who raised him, the mosque he attended, and the extremists he read online. It’s one thing to correctly point out that christian homophobes are spouting the same range of bigotry – from the subtle (not our place to judge those evildoers) to the explicit and obscene, to point out that the overwhelmingly vast majority of oppression of queer people in the US comes from christians or to point that no group is free from the implicit biases a queerphobic culture implants in all of us. It’s another to say that Mateen, who attended a mosque three to four times a week, wasn’t particularly religous or to suggest that his professed religious inspiration was a coverup.
Look, I understand that this is a reaction to the horrific policies proposed by Trump and his ilk, and their attempts to paint all muslims as terrorists. #notallmuslims is a legitimate argument when you’re arguing against people who literally mean all muslims. It’s just incredibly disingenuous to bend over backwards to connect this to a group that there’s no evidence had any influence over Mateen.
@ 15
It looks like the whole article needs some more thorough fact checking, doesn’t it? I’m sorry I brought it up. I was familiar with some of Syed’s other work, which has always been progressive and respectful, so I wasn’t scrutinizing him as carefully as I might have with another source. I’ll take it as a lesson to wait for the sources to come back online before posting.
qwints wrote:
Then watch the video. This pastor insisted that gay folk were predators, perverts, pedophiles, the scum of the earth, etc. None of those are religious justifications, but rather series of bullshit secular ones instead. Yes, they insist their bigotry is grounded in religion, but their own words betray them.
Thanks be to Allah that my parents moved us AWAY from Tejas, the most filthy, polluted, stinky, ugly, racist, horrible, barren, proudly ignorant, nasty, fetid, backward, putrid place I ever lived.
Before my mother died and during her advanced dementia, I was still thanking her for this one even though she didn’t know me from Donald Drumpfh.
iggles, I think you’re missing a nuance here.
I don’t think anyone is trying to say that Muslims are less homophobic in the West than Christians are (nor are they more homophobic, particularly, as above evidence indicated). For me, as a trans woman and lesbian who’s been out in the community for 24 years, it is that what homophobia Muslims may evince has almost no effect on my life*. Muslims aren’t out there trying to get bathroom bills passed. Muslims aren’t passing bills arguing for the religious freedom to discriminate against us. Muslims aren’t picketing gay funerals. Muslims aren’t on TV arguing for the persecution of queer folk.
All of those things are things that the Christians do (see Pat Robertson for the arguing on TV part; Westboro for the picketing; and any number of denominations and stripes of Christian for the legislation, and no #NoTrueChristian arguments, please).
So all of these “the Gulf states are so oppressive” arguments are just Dear Muslima, over and over again. We KNOW things are bad for our folk there. Give us credit that we know damn well who’s likely to be oppressing us here at home, and trust me when I say it sure as fuck isn’t Muslims. Give us credit for being able to hold two ideas at once in our queer little heads: that when things are bad here, Christians are almost always behind it, and that when things are bad there, Muslims are almost always behind it. We can advocate for our folk who are in repressive countries, and still be able to recognize who our oppressors here are, and advocate for ourselves here.
This is the problem arseholes like mmark always make: they assume we’re too stupid to know who to fear. But I’ve never been raped by a Muslim; never been beaten by a Muslim; never been publicly ridiculed by a Muslim. All those things are Christian specialties, in my life. I’m sure if I lived in Yemen, I’d not be the least bit worried about Christian homophobes, because they’d have no power to make my life hell.
* My daughter has converted to Islam, and her newly-learned homophobia (she was bisexual herself, before converting) has become something of an issue in our family.
Caitiecat, I agree with the general thrust of what you’re saying, here. I think we can safely ignore the article I posted earlier (sorry again) due to the inaccurate stats, but one of the reasons I posted it was that it attempted to place the homophobia of US Muslim communities within a larger global context, since the reach of organizations like ISIS is global, and Mateen’s father likely imported much of his worldview from outside the US (Afghanistan). Of course, that context is now in doubt, due to the aforementioned stats.
Most of the dead were Latino, Latina and Latin@.
How did all those Pastors® miss that?
chigau (違う) wrote:
Lemme try that again…
chigau (違う) wrote:
The same way the rest of the conservatives did: They’re too busy rebranding the attack as an assault upon themselves and their country to notice something insignificant like that.
It’s the same reason the conservatives who are more blinded by their hatred of Muslims than their hatred of LGBT folk are constantly omitting the fact that the target was a gay bar, and that LGBT folks were the primary victims. They never say “homophobia”, only “Islamic Terrorism”.
ck #25
yeah
That’s what I thought.
To add to what CaitieCat said @21 when you look at Canadian politics how much clout do conservative Muslims pushing homophobia have? Very little if any. Compare that to a conservative Christian like Charles McVety, or groups like Campaign Life and REAL Women, all of whom have considerable influence on the Conservative Party.
I think there’s several different angles here that intersect:
-General homophobia (you wouldn’t believe how often I have to reprimand 6th graders for using “gay” as a slur. OK, you probably would)
-Christian inspired homophobia
-Islam inspired homophobia
Those different forms affect different populations. Even after Orlando, non-muslim queers are at a much higher risk from general homophobia and christian inspired homophobia than from muslim inspired homophobia because those people have power, they can kill without having to resort to mass shootings (though they do murder trans people on an almost weekly basis and are allowed to cite “trans panic” as a defence).
Things are different for muslim or ex-muslim queers from homophobic muslim communities who are marginalised on several axis. They suffer from the homophobia in their communities, general and christian inspired homophobia AND racism and islamophobia. The latter points make it much harder for them to escape those communities because they need the support network, so we shouldn’t erase the additional struggles they face, which are similar but not quite the same as those faced by queers from christian homophobic communities.
What’s my solution? Well, obviously the muslim communities need to do their own work. We can only move over and make room for them, give them space to do that work. Because obviously I have no idea if the woman in the hijab or the guy with the beard are straight, gay, bi,pan, trans, queer friendly or homophobic and transphobic. That’s not the same as giving them a pass, but communities under attack are usually very resistant to change. If general discourse makes “homophobic” synonymous with “muslim”, this will rub off on muslim communities, it will become a larger part of their identity and harder to change.
This.
The opposite is true of Islam, where the Qur’an, the Hadith, the interpretations from Muslim scholars both Sunni and Shi’a, the laws of the most religious countries, and the teachings of the most radicalized terrorist groups all advocate for the killing of gays. And there are some people go out of their way to de-link their bigotry with their religion.
PZ – I read your “I thought it was an American malady” blog post, and the cognitive dissonance between that post and your posts on Islam are striking. Here, I’ll fix this paragraph for you:
Where is the Christian terrorist group dissolving European borders and establishing a Christian protectorate in its place, gleefully filming the execution of gays? Why does Germany – a deeply Christian country – not put on trial and execute LGBTQ persons? Why does the Pope say that it is not his place to judge people who are gay?
You have to deal with all of these questions (and many more) before you get to say that Muslim homophobia (in general) is just the other side of the homophobic Christian coin.
And once again, for the people in the back row who can’t hear very well – it does not constitute homophobia to point this out, nor does it constitute Christian apologetics. I can think Bill Cosby is a horrible person who should be in jail for the rest of his life for his crimes, but I can make a distinction between him and Ted Bundy, who was a hell of a lot worse and rightly executed for his crimes (and I’m against the death penalty).
It’s an imperfect analogy, but you get the point. Or, given some of the responses to my arguments, maybe you deliberately won’t.
mmark
Is the Pope sending you cookies already?
Giliell @29, great analysis. I’d only substitute support and solidarity for moving over and making room and include ex-muslims as well.
Mmark @29, not our place to judge is literally what Mateen’s mosque taught based on multiple accounts.
So the muslims in muslims countries are more homophobic than the muslims that have spent time in western society?
21.
If it ain’t inappropriate to ask*, I don’t suppose you could tell us more about that? What level of homophobia, and how much self-hatred do you think she’s mainlining?
*Feel free to smack me if it was.
Jeep-Eep, it’s all way too complex to go into in a blog comment. Suffice it to say that her moms are both pretty wounded about it, as we raised her better than that (homophobia).
I suppose if you ever want to talk about it, there’s affinity or what I assume is your own blog linked in your title.
Edit: Though it makes me feel sad and worried for you and her just thinking about it.
Jeep-eep:
While people are free to talk about whatever they like on TNET at Affinity, please don’t bring it up in any way that might come across as pressure to talk. I’ll assume if CaitieCat wishes to discuss this particular personal issue, she’ll do so.
Bleh, sorry.
Edit: Why in blazes am I posting when I’m still sleep deprived from my last term?
Apropos of almost nothing – The Ottomans (the actual honest to goodness caliphate) removed homosexuality from being a criminal offense in 1858 . Europe followed a century later. Homophobia finds its support in whatever social conservative context it can find and religious identity is very often the context but the causality is debatable. Russian Christianity is no more or less homophobic than Scandinavian Christianity. The same cannot be said for Russian society and Scandinavian society. To say Islam is more homophobic than Christianity or vice versa is a red herring.
Dear batshit “Ban all dem Mussims!” Christians… You worship the same god. Get the fuck over yourselves already.
This history lesson view of religious beliefs is the red herring.
The “Caliphate” used to be tolerant of homosexuality. So what? Turkey, the modern descendant of the Ottoman Empire, just banned gay pride parades out of fear of attacks from religious fundamentalists. And the only “Caliphate” that exists today, ISIS, throws gays off buildings.
If we were living in 1858 you might have a point. But in 2016 the calculus has changed considerably.
mmark declares muslims to be inherently and unchangeably homophobic.
empty shows evidence of an explicitly muslim state legalising homosexuality way before christian societies
mmark decides that this doesn’t count because reasons.
Pro tip: If you declare something to be inherently and eternally X then somebody showing you a single instance of something being not-X, you lose.
While I don’t harbour any sympathies for the current Turkish government and fully believe that they’re happy to use safety concerns as an excuse to ban pride parades, that’s not the same as being homophobic (in principal) any more than cancelling a football game because of terror warnings is being anti football.
If I get this right homophobia is in the west specifically the United States and it exists in Islamic countries. The difference being primarily the governments and society in the west are more or less liberal democracies and have been forced by political pressure and their core democracy in law to grant some protections for all citizens. In Islamic countries there is no restraining force in fact the religion is used as a means of justifying all form of discrimination.
Less anyone doubts it is the law in the democratic countries that protect their citizens just look up the extreme anti-gay laws being enforced in christian african countries at the urging of American christian missionaries then try to explain it to me in simple language how Islam is worse then christianity.
uncle frogy
@45: Well, sort of. On average, LGBT people have more rights in “western liberal democracies” and fewer in “Islamic” countries. However, not every country that makes homosexual sex illegal is Islamic, not all Islamic countries ban homosexuality. Indonesia, for example, gives few protections to LGBT people, but does not illegalize homosexuality as Christian Uganda and Kenya and Hindu India do. Nigeria, which is about 50/50 Muslim/Christian, has the death penalty for homosexual acts. Africa is a real hotbed for oppression of LGBT people, probably because both Christians and Muslims have been sending missionaries there for decades (well, centuries, really), resulting in radicalization of religious belief in many African countries. Really, the only thing that makes Islam more dangerous is that there are more Islamic theocracies at the moment. If a “western” country, say, the US, takes up theocracy, the results would be just as bad as if a moderately secular Islamic country did.
(Source, BTW: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/world/gay-rights/)
mark @30 and 43,
Answer #1: I dunno. But if we bomb some European countries to ruins, install puppet rulers and plunder their natural resources for a few decades, we’ll probably find out!
Answer #2: You’re looking at the wrong continent. The group you want is the Lord’s Resistance Army. They think Uganda’s original Kill The Gays bill didn’t go far enough.
That’s a really, really unfortunate choice of example.
Fortunately, Germany no longer executes LGBTQ persons! Of course, neither does Turkey or Jordan or Tunisia or about fifty other Muslim-majority nations. In fact, same-sex intercourse is legal in twenty of those nations. I guess they just forgot to be Real True Muslims or something.
Hey, did you know that homosexuality is officially legal in the West Bank, but illegal in the Gaza Strip? You know why? Because the West Bank was previously governed by Jordan, which decriminalized homosexuality in the ’50s. (Well before most of Europe, in fact.) But the Gaza Strip retains the older criminal code established by Britain when it ruled Palestine, and that prohibits homosexuality. Many other anti-gay laws across the Middle East and Africa are also legacies of British imperialism.
As for the most draconian laws—there are seven or eight Muslim states where homosexuality is a capital crime, IIRC—almost all of them were passed within the last forty years or so, when
the Quran was writtenparticularly fundamentalist and anti-Western Islamic groups came into power.Because the Pope says a lot of nice-sounding things that the Vatican’s actual behavior contradicts?
Great. Now, can you make the far more obvious distinction between Muslims who think gays should be killed, and Muslims who think gays should be accepted by society and protected by the law?
Heavens! Why, that’s exactly the same thing Israel did for Jerusalem Pride parades in 2005, 2006 and 2014. (The 2015 parade went off okay, except that a Jewish extremist stabbed six participants, killing one. Oddly enough, this happened shortly after he was released from prison for stabbing three people in an earlier Pride parade.)
Meanwhile, Pride marches have been banned all over (Christian) eastern Europe. Among others, Serbia banned Pride marches from 2010 and 2014; Poland banned Warsaw Pride in 2004 and 2005; and in 2012 Russia banned Pride marches in Moscow for literally the next 100 years.
Clearly this is somehow Islam’s fault.
Sweet Azathoth, how many ways there are to be wrong.
In the first place, Daesh/ISIL/whatever is not the only “Caliphate” that exists today. Tens of millions of Muslims worldwide belong to the Ahmadiyya movement, which has recognized a caliphate since 1908. Of course, Ahmadis aren’t interested in conquering the world. They don’t believe that the caliph must be a political ruler; they are very tolerant of other faiths; they condemn terrorism; and they think the concept of military jihad is inapplicable to the modern world. That may be why they’re invisible to you.
In the second place, the reason there are no other competing caliphates is that most Muslims don’t think anyone has a valid claim to it. That includes Daesh, as should be obvious given that a) Muslims outside of Daesh-controlled territory have overwhelmingly negative views of the group, and b) about 15 different Muslim countries are actively at war with it. So Daesh is not the greatest exemplar of mainstream Islam, you know?
mmark@43
The current authoritarian government has been banning all marches and protests for the last two years including the May 1 parade – always over “security concerns.” The last time a gay pride parade took place in Istanbul (I think two years ago) more than a 100,000 people showed up. Even though Istanbul has elected an Islamist mayor for the last two decades, during the same time the fight for LGBT rights has become more mainstream. Homophobia is a curse. Religion is a red herring.