Here’s a dilemma for liberals in the media: the only religion you ever actively defend is the only religion whose adherents toss gays off roofs. The very few attempts to reconcile these contradictory facts are generally as embarrassing as they are embarrassed.
Take the June 5 Huffington Post video entitled “‘Being Queer and Muslim Is Possible’ And This Woman Is Proof.” The video was an interview with Wazina Zondon, a New York-raised Afghan woman who is both muslim and lesbian. According to the site “She teaches sex education and speaks about the intersection of homophobia and Islamaphobia.” The point of the video was to show by her example that Islam and the LGBTQ movement are compatible.
They say the first step to recovery is admitting there’s a problem. So it’s encouraging that Huff Post is acknowledging friction between Islam and “queerness.”
Alas, the “proof” that Islam and gay rights are reconcilable is pretty thin. One story about one woman who grew up in a non-Islamic state doesn’t disprove evidence to the contrary.
Back in 2015, CBS News posted a story based on the testimonies of several gay men from the middle east, in which they described the persecutions homosexuals underwent under the hands of ISIS, a militant Islamic organization. According to the article “ISIS reserves one of its most brutal (methods of killing) for suspected homosexuals” and that the militant group “bases its punishment on one account in which Muhammad reportedly says gays ‘should be thrown from tremendous height then stoned.’”
Granted ISIS is notoriously radical, but this brutal mistreatment of homosexuals is documented as part of family culture in Islamic countries as well. Earlier this year, BBC News posted an article about Chenchnyan persecution of gays in which they quoted the spokesman for Mr Kadyrov, the Chechnyan leader, as saying, “Even if such people existed in Chechnya…their own relatives would simply send them to a place from which they would never return.”
In another article in 2016, The Washington Post analyzed ten countries, including Iran, Afghanistan, and Quatar in which homosexual activity is punishable by death under the law. All of the countries were either Islamic states or had a heavy Islamic population.
Yet because Zondon has made it to age 35 in non-Islamic and decidedly liberal New York, Huffpo thinks that her one example overrides the almost innumerable examples of homosexual persecution by muslims and Islamic countries outside the United States. Ironically, Zondon admits that she’d “never known somebody who was 25 and over from my family, from my background living this permutation of identity.” Perhaps that is because people with her “permutation of identity” are persecuted and sometimes killed in the name of her religion.
The Huffington Post has a habit of trying to abrasively force the LGBTQ way of thinking on religious beliefs. Just yesterday it ran an article haranguing Christians to embrace the LGBTQ movement as part of their faith.
