By Michael Malice
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
In the wake of the Jussie Smollett fraud, podcaster and
culture critic Ira Madison III tweeted a challenge: “If white people wanna go
tit-for-tat about false crimes on this here app we can open up a history book
and look every lynching that occurred in America. But y’all don’t wanna talk
about that.”
Madison has a point. It makes as much sense for the
nightly news to cover racial violence that actually occurred in the past as it
does for them to cover racial violence that hasn’t actually occurred in the
present.
An editorial at Out.com already anticipated Madison’s
challenge and took it one step further. Rather than having a national
discussion about lynching, they made the issue international. Their headline is
a simple one: “Trump’s Plan to Decriminalize Homosexuality Is an Old Racist
Tactic.” The term “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is often used in an overly loose
sense these days, to cover pretty much all opposition to the president. But
while an attack on decriminalizing homosexuality on a gay website might not be
deranged per se, it certainly bears further examination.
The author complains that Trump’s plan “centers
homophobic violence in Iran” while pointing out that homosexuality “has been
illegal in Iran since the theocratic 1979 Islamic Revolution.” What is left
unmentioned is just how liberal the previous regime had been on the subject
prior to the shah’s overthrow. No less a gay icon than Andy Warhol was a
frequent guest and, in his published diaries, can be read complaining about the
varying portions of caviar he was served as the shah’s fortunes waxed and
waned.
However, the editorial continues, “By at least one Guardian account, since the exit of
president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2013, enforcement of anti-gay laws has
softened somewhat.” While “one Guardian account” might be all one needs to know
to offer an opinion on a given topic, the conclusion reached is close to
unconscionable.
Sure, the laws are on the books—but they’re not enforced
as heavily as they used to be! And yes, the legal punishment for homosexuality
still includes everything up to the death penalty, but things are kinda sorta
getting better for gays in Iran, which means progress, which means progressive,
which means Iran is pretty much Stonewall 2019, right?
Besides, “most queer people fear homophobic reaction from
fellow citizens more than the authorities.” While I don’t know what it’s like
to be gay in Iran, I am fairly confident that “private homophobic hostility is
a more likely occurrence than state hostility” is hardly as reassuring as the
author would like to think.
The article also fails to mention that Iran subsidizes
and encourages transgenderism for gay men. In other words, the claim is that
male homosexuals aren’t “really” men since they are attracted to men—they are
actually psychologically female, and should have the hormone treatments and
gender-reassignment surgery to match. As a result of this policy, Iran competes
with Thailand as the sex-change capital of the world. Besides “one Guardian account” on this topic, it’s
also been covered by the BBC and BuzzFeed, among others.
Of course, none of this context is relevant, because
President Trump is involved. What was the president’s impetus here? As the
author puts it: “The plan has reportedly been spearheaded by the U.S.
ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, who is also the administration’s
top-ranked gay official, in response to news that a young gay man was hanged in
Iran recently.”
Perhaps the author is being pedantic. Lynchings, after
all, are technically the actions of the private mob and not the state. This was
a hanging, and we can rest assured
that “most queer people fear homophobic reaction from fellow citizens more than
the authorities.” This hanging isn’t the norm, it’s a one-off thing. What
business is it of ours anyway? Iran is so far away.
The President Is
Racist for Preventing Lynchings?
Many people support gay rights who could still be
considered homophobic. Take the dad who endorses such matters as a legal
principle but wouldn’t want his daughter to be that way—or is fine with his gay
son in theory but still doesn’t want to think about what that means in practice
in the bedroom. If someone fought slavery despite being a racist, however, the
fact remains that he fought slavery. If someone risked herself to prevent a
lynching despite personally being a racist, the fact remains that she saved a
human life.
As the author puts it, “Grennell’s attack might be a case
of white men trying to save brown gay men from brown straight men.” We have now
reached the point where the president and his openly gay ambassador are being
explicitly called racist for acting to prevent
lynchings.
Leaving aside the conflation of African-Americans and
Persians under the fatuous umbrella of “brown,” the claim that white men should
be exclusively or preferentially concerned with saving white gay men over brown
gay men has a name: white supremacy. Yet if these same white men refrained from
“trying to save brown gay men from brown straight men,” would that not be
homophobic?
This is what contemporary discourse has become. If one
starts with the axiom that “Trump = bad,” then one can blithely claim that
fighting for gay rights—up to and including preventing legal murder overseas—is
an act that requires not just skepticism but outright condemnation. This is
something far worse than mere derangement. This is depravity, pure and simple.
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