Does the battle for gay rights not extend to Islam? (Photo: Qais Usyan/Getty)
You can tell when a battle has been won. Read the Pink
News or any other gay news site and you will see that there are almost
no stories left to report. A politician in Northern Ireland may be
caught expressing an opinion on gay marriage which was the view of all
mainstream UK political parties ten years ago. There might be some
gossip about various celebrities (so no different from any other
newspapers). But otherwise gay news sites are reduced to tentatively
wondering if Transgender rights are the same as gay rights (the jury is
out) and otherwise running mainstream politics stories which strangely
favour the Lib Dems while expressing an inherited hostility towards the
Tories and Ukip. This is no tragedy. It is a demonstration of the fact
that after victory people get on with life as normal.
Of course not very far away there are people who take a
quite different view of these matters. In the newspapers today we can
see photos of events in the Syrian town of Raqqa. There Isis have just
carried out another ‘execution’ of someone accused of being gay. The
victim – this time a man in his 50s – was thrown off the top floor of a
seven-storey building. He appears to have survived the fall and so was stoned to death by the crowd on the ground.
What are right-thinking people to do about this? For most
of them it isn’t easy because they don’t even know where to begin
thinking about this and have been taught to be almost fearful about
speaking about it.
I think we can probably say with some confidence that if
an evangelical Christian group threw gays off towers in the Deep South,
gay media outlets would currently be lambasting the Christian churches
for a history of homophobia which had led to this pass. There would be
demands for every prominent and obscure Christian pastor to condemn this
brutal act. And they would. If a group of group of deeply extrovert
Jews did a similar thing we could, I think, expect a similarly stern
response. But the most that can be done with Isis is simply to report
the facts and let them sit there, as though they come from nowhere. As
if the traditions of throwing gays off buildings or collapsing walls on
them and so on are probably just accretions of colonial times with no
connection to any religious tradition. And so, anyway – back to minor
stories about Tom Daley or Clare Balding.
There are those who believe that the fight for gay rights,
or indeed human rights in general, stops at the borders of Islam. Very
few people seem to realise that they should not. Of course we have
legions of celebrities who are willing to sign letters calling for
posthumous pardons for Alan Turing and others. But how do these people
select their targets? Well, whenever I ask that question the best
answer I hear is that people try to do things in their own societies
because that is where they can make most difference. Well, Alan Turing
is dead. It is hard to think of anything more tokenistic or pointless
than ‘pardoning’ a man after he’s been tormented and many years after he
has died. But it is, of course, really really easy.
As for encouraging grass-roots responses on the ground
(which is where everybody of course hopes it will come from), for the
forseeable future is it hard to see the opportunities for a decent LGBT
society to flourish in Isis-held territory. So where are all these
people who profess to care about gay rights? Their absence suggests to
me that agreement has broadly been reached that religious sensitivities
trump human rights, as long as the sensitivities in question are
Islamic.
No comments:
Post a Comment