LGBT Magazine Calls Trump 'Racist' For Telling Iran to Stop Killing and Jailing Gays

Brittany M. Hughes | February 20, 2019
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You just can’t make this stuff up. Because in 2019, the truth really is stranger than fiction.

Out Magazine, a pro-LGBT news publication that doubles as a gay advocacy platform, actually published a piece Wednesday claiming that it’s – stay with me here – “racist” for the Trump administration to pressure nations like Iran to decriminalize homosexuality.

I’ll restate, for the record: an openly pro-gay magazine is calling Donald Trump racist for trying to get regimes that jail and kill people for being gay to stop jailing and killing people for being gay.

Again, you can’t make this stuff up, so I’ll let Out’s Matthew Rodriguez do the talking for me. In his article, entitled, “Trump’s Plan to Decriminalize Homosexuality Is an Old Racist Tactic,” Rodriguez states:

There are several signs that this decision is denoted in a colonial sense of paternalism rather than any true altruism. According to the report, the decriminalization campaign is set to begin in Berlin where LGBTQ+ activists from across Europe will meet to hatch a plan that is “mostly concentrated in the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean.”

That sentence alone should set off several alarm bells. First of all, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean are huge geopolitical entities. Attitudes toward gay people differ greatly among countries and regions within those entities and attempting to gather a room of European activists on how to deal with queer issues in those regions is the definition of paternalism.

The initiative Rodriguez is referring to is a newly announced plan spearheaded by U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell (who's openly gay) to gather Western world leaders in denouncing dozens of nations including Iran for laws that criminalize or even carry the death penalty for being gay. By pressing the issue, experts have noted that Trump runs the risk of straining otherwise positive U.S. relations with certain nations like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.

But yes, gathering a group of countries who don't systematically kill people for their sexuality to try and end a massive abuse of human rights in backwards countries that murder people for not kowtowing to their violent theocracy is totally authoritarian.

As for Iran, well, their history of incarcerating, stoning or hanging homosexuals is a little rough – but it’s getting better, Rodriguez argues, noting that the county’s “enforcement of anti-gay laws has softened somewhat” in recent years.

I'm sure that'll make Achmed and his lover Farhan feel better as they’re getting pitched off a roof by an angry Muslim mob. But hey, before they go flying without wings, someone please let them know we'd have done something about it...but we didn't want to come across as culturally insensitive.

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