Anti-LGBTQ+ Arabs? Sounds Sus: Debunking Islamophobic Talking Points About LGBTQ+ Rights
The favorite talking point of the pro-Zionist, Islamophobic coalition this week is an old favorite: a familiar appeal to social superiority (read: White Supremacy) claiming that Arab nations are violently opposed to the dignity of LGBTQ+ rights as a matter of culture, as something inherent. While, as always, I feel the ridiculousness of this statement should mark anyone repeating it as woefully ignorant at best, I think the time is right to put this into the appropriate context of misogyny, racism, and Islamophobia from which it sprouts.
The White House lit with the LGBT rainbow flag in celebration of the passing of same-sax marriage. Source: White House, Public Domain
There is no denying that certain prerequisites exist for the formation of specialized social justice movements in a society—that for a nation to arrive at a place in which it can openly deal with the rights and dignities of its minority populations, it must first find basic security for all. Looking to the United States once more, we can see how social movements have grown in diversity of opinion and orientation as the nation itself has grown more prosperous, secure, and stable generally; how as the dignities of the many were developed, the understanding of justice too evolved and diversified toward other, more marginalized communities and issues. Had the United States not grown fat on the stolen wealth of Native/Indigenous and Black/Brown Peoples across the entirety of the territory—the vast majorities of industrializing people finding a level of comfort previously unimaginable now a daily reality—would the question of slavery as a moral, humanitarian issue have taken such hold across the northern states? Had these conveniences and marvels not become mundane and expected, would concerns over suffrage, economics, education, and universal justice have been able to not only develop, but flourish into the high-and-mighty United States that lectures all others today? How can one do any of this when your concern is not what music to listen to, the traffic on the way to work, or whether you're going to be able to make it to the store before it closes, but rather a direct, daily threat to the lives of yourself and those you hold dearest? Can a community concern itself with the rights of minority populations when it cannot even guarantee security to its own children?
Looking to our own history, it is telling that our most regressive periods are those in which our economic and basic security have been most at-risk: the Slavers' Rebellion coming on the heels of decades of labor violence (both White and non-White) against unscrupulous, abusive corporations; the post-Reconstruction dislocation and disenfranchisement of Black communities following years of political and corporate corruption that stripped Americans of basic needs and set the stage for Jim Crow laws for more than 50 years; the anti-minority crime laws of the 1980s built upon a slew of industrial scandals and economic insecurity following the initial successes of the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s.
If you're gay, know that you would not have enjoyed the basic right to marriage until the joining of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon 40 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. That's right—the first legal gay marriage in the United States was only 20 years ago, in 2004, and even then, it was challenged until 2015 when Obergefell v. Hodges found that marriage is a fundamental right regardless of sexual orientation. If you are reading this, you were alive and cognizant when gay marriage became federally recognized as a right in the United States; we have all been here for the evolving fight against equality as the very same politicians who fought to limit lesbian and gay rights are today the ones leading the charge against our queer and trans community members. There is no shortage of stories from our very streets of hatred and bigotry toward LGBTQ+ people, and the positions of our most influential politicians and legislators as outright anti-equality for these groups is beyond argument. So, to hear anyone say that Palestinians or Iranians or Lebanese are more bigoted toward LGBTQ+ members than our neighbors in Texas, Ohio, or Florida is nonsensical on its very face—a completely myopic view of our society informed only by the lens of nationalist zeal and imperialist superiority.
There is a supreme irony in a nation claiming to be a bastion of liberty abroad while inflicting atrocities on those same peoples at home. A United States that reported nearly 3,000 hate crime "incidents" against LGBTQ+ people alone in 2023—which 15 years ago had to pass the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 following the lynchings of the bill's respectively gay and Black namesake martyrs—telling those same populations that things for them would be worse elsewhere reeks of the self-victimization common to the neoliberal "moderate." And this is not without the additional context of the first decade of the millennium: the flagrant normalization of anti-LGBTQ+ slurs and stereotypes that I myself learned first on the playground and then was quick to use in a Call of Duty or Halo lobby for years afterward. This was a social conditioning built against these very attempts to secure equal rights for LGBTQ+ couples and one that every one of us is still reckoning with today in the resurgence of anti-LGBTQ+ perspectives, policies, and hate crime incidents taking place across the country—the imparted bigotry that many of us have been working hard to dismantle in our own lives ever since.
If you wish to opine on the state of rights in Arab nations and countries, you should first recognize the material realities of the world in which they exist, the struggles that demand the vast majority of their daily energies and attention. There can be no pro-equality movement while an occupying country bombs your neighborhood, steals your water, and limits the availability of food and medicine at will; no protections for the most vulnerable when all are left naked before the same wall for execution. Do you think the gay Palestinian is primarily concerned with having their day in court against an imagined anti-LGBTQ+ attacker, or are they wondering whether the water they are drinking will make them sick? Does the hypothetical bigot care about where and with whom you sleep when their own family is hiding from the same drones, jets, missiles, and bombs?
If you are LGBTQ+ or just an ally trying to do what's right, remember what they are saying when they claim that one side hates you more. Remember your own lived history in this country and take that grain of salt with every mention of the bigoted Arab or anti-gay Muslim. Think on the indignities faced every single day by the allegedly enlightened among us here who are using their own religious understandings daily to persecute and otherize the same people they claim to protect; ponder how the same people who openly fantasize about the extermination of trans people to their constituents can in the same breath tell you it is worse somewhere you don't live. There is meaning to the phrase "bombing into the Stone Age" that goes beyond the technologies we enjoy today—an underlying threat that far exceeds any loss of cars or phones or even electricity: if you resist, the empire will take your very human dignity.
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