Today marks the one year anniversary of the execution of two Iranian teens for being gay. Other blogs have been writing about this for weeks now, but on this, another solemn and frightening anniversary out of the Middle East, we should remember that places like Iran, Iraq and Lebanon weren't always hell on earth. They were in fact beacons of modernity and civility in the Middle East, until a tide of fanaticism swept these countries.
So when you wonder why I'm coming down hard on the Christian right in the U.S., look at this pic for an answer...
NOTE: BLOGGER SUCKS TODAY AND WONT LET ME UPLOAD PIX.
5 comments:
I am no fan of the Christian right being a gay Jew - but until Bishops begin public hangings of gay people in America , your comparison is rather gross, actually.
I completely agree with Berdo, as a Jewish American fag hag.
I want to add something else. Right now, there is no Christian nation who hangs gay people for being gay. That is limited to only one type of nation - an Islamist nation.
I am no fan of the Christian right, and find their prejudices to be disgusting, however, to even put them in the same universe with Islamists is to be totally blind to reality.
Whoa!
Bishops once publicly burned gays.
Christianity went through a period of reform brought on by reaction to excesses and by the Enlightenment.
Islam has yet to reform itself. It is to be hoped this reform will come sooner rather than later.
Judaeo-Christian history is rife with bloodletting in the names of Yaweh and Jesus.
While the excesses of the Western religions have abated, the books still have the proscriptions and there are still unscrupulous people who will misapply those proscriptions and the danger is present--submerged, true, but still present.
We must continue to be vigilant until all metaphors which can be used against us are purged or at least relegated to historical context and not relevant to our times.
The universe is wide enough to encompass all sorts of horrible behavior.
Be alert.
Agape.
GRT -
It may be true that "certain" people will misapply the lessons in the Bible and the Torah. By and large they don't - and if they do - they are immediately condemned and punished by practitioners of the very same faith. The issue is whether the Muslim community generally accepts this violence - and promotes it. I generally believe they do not - though Miss R and I both agree that the voices on the moderate side of Islam have been disappointingly silent for the most part.
The sad thing is that the only thing that got the bishops to stop burning gays and Jews and other heretics was centuries of religious wars in Europe. Wars that so exhausted all sides, slaughtered so many people, that they finally gave up and backed off from fighting with armies to fighting with rhetoric. Of course, having vivid and recent memories of this, that's why the Founders were so insistant on church/state separation when they wrote the Constitution.
Unfortunately, it's hard to envision Islam reforming itself and moderating its murderous views with regard to gays and others without such an exhausting drawn-out cataclysm. And it will be harder for them. Christianity at least has a basis for church/state separation: "Render unto Ceasar those things that are Ceasar's; render unto God those things that are God's." I know of no similar instruction in the Koran. That's gonna make it hard.
The hardest thing of all is that in the 16th century, at the height of Europe's convulsion of religious war, there was no such thing as a nuclear bomb in the world. And now?
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