Alana lentin.net

Archive for the ‘Gay Imperialism’ Category

Today’s Guardian brings us a gem from Patrick Strudwick, described recently on Twitter as a ‘warrior for gay rights’. The article, ‘The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s Choice is Beyond Belief’ claims that

After supporting several gay equality cases, the EHRC now believes the rights of religious people are not being upheld. It stated: “Judges have interpreted the law too narrowly in religion or belief discrimination claims,” leading to insufficient protection for freedom of religion or belief. It continued: “It is possible to accommodate expression of religion alongside the rights of people who are not religious and the needs of business.”

To rectify this supposed shortfall in religious protection, the EHRC will now push for a new legal principle of “reasonable accommodations” so that believers can negotiate the boundaries of their contract with employers.

Strudwick then uses this decision to argue that the Commission will uphold the right of homophobic individuals to use their religion as a basis to discriminate against gay people. He cites the example of “Lillian Ladele, the Christian registrar who refused to perform civil partnerships and so was disciplined. And that of Gary McFarlane, the Christian relationship counsellor who was sacked for refusing to counsel gay couples,” claiming that “the EHRC has decided to back these people in the name of ‘reasonable’ compromise.” Read the rest of this entry »

This is a real 'Christmas ornament' that can be purchased at http://www.cafepress.co.uk/+gay-muslim+ornaments

Johann Hari just tweeted about his article, ‘Can We Talk About Muslim Homophobia Now?‘. I tweeted back, ‘@JohannHari What do you mean by ‘now’? This was echoed by Gary Younge who joined in with his tweet: ‘Johann It implies ‘we’ weren’t discussing muslim homophobia before. But ‘we’ were. Alot. It’s hardly been taboo’.

And that is the point: it is not new or brave to discuss Muslim homophobia. It is what everyone does, whether – by the way – you are gay or straight and whether you in fact care about gay rights. It is not that we should not be outraged about violence against gay people, it is that the fact that some Muslim people have been violent against gays is used as another stick to beat all Muslims with in the current climate.

Johann Hari obviously cares about gay rights, but that does not mean that his message cannot be boiled down to: all Muslims hate gays and therefore should be discriminated against. This may not be the intent of Hari’s article, but it is its not altogether undesired outcome. When he says, ‘In the Netherlands, they now show all new immigrants images of men kissing, and if they object, they tell them they should go and live somewhere else. We should be doing the same’ he is pandering to argument that liberal values need to be protected by illiberal means. The conflation between ‘Muslims’ and ‘immigrants’ hardly needs mentioning.

When he says, ‘I believe British Muslims can change. I believe they can accept and love their gay children, just as surely as my parents – who also grew up in horribly homophobic places – accepted and loved me’ the civilizing mission that he has embarked upon could not be clearer. Do Muslims, and gay Muslims in particular, need Hari to ride in on his white horse to save them? Clearly not.

Read Mikki Stelder’s critique of the recent Sexual Nationalisms conference that took place at the University of Amsterdam.Although touted as an event critiquing homonationalism and gay imperialism, certain elements in the conference, in particular the racist outbursts of Dutch scholar Gert Hekma, appeared to recompound these racisms. As reported here in several posts over the last year or so, the silencing of the voices of queer people of colour, through for example the censoring of Out of Place, continues. There is a lot to be learned from the Sexual Nationalisms experience…

Following on from last week’s guest post by Aren Aizura, I am posting Sara Ahmed‘s incisive comment on the censorship of ‘Gay Imperialism’

by Sara Ahmed

Sara Ahmed

Peter Tatchell invites us to find evidence of ‘my Islamaphobia, racism or support for imperialist wars or the “war on terror”‘ in the articles that can be downloaded from his website. I would like to say that a brief glance at some of these articles shows some very serious problems in terms of the employment of racialised vocabularies for example in: Their Multiculturalism and Ours; Why has the left gone soft on human rights?; The New Dark Ages (you don’t need to read Frantz Fanon to discuss the problem with the use of the very term ‘the new dark ages’ though Fanon, as always would help) and Islamic Fundamentalism in Britain. I don’t have the time in this brief informal response for the call to respond to go through all of the problems with these pieces, for example, with how some of the critiques of ‘universal human rights’ discourse which have been an important part of LGBT, feminist, socialist as well as anti-racist histories are represented as ‘going soft’. I do intend to offer a systematic critique of some of the terms of the arguments used in due course, which I will publish where they can downloaded, in the interests of sustaining and enabling a debate. But I do want to question here how Mr Tatchell is responding to the critique, and even to the critique of the response to the critique (offered by very thoughtful and careful pieces of writing such as the one offered by Aren Aizura). Critiques of racism are reduced and misheard as personal attacks, which is what blocks a hearing of the critique. In the end, the situation becomes re-coded as a question of individual reputation and good will: we lose the chance to attend to the politics of the original critique. Read the rest of this entry »