"A court of the #Iranian-backed #Houthis in #Yemen has sentenced 13 people to public #execution on #homosexuality charges, the French wire service AFP reported on Tuesday. Another 35 people have been detained for similar charges."
#Queer#history#fact: Before the Nazis came to power, #Berlin was one of the safer places for queer #people in #Europe. A rich queer culture had developed there, one that embraced open-mindedness and the study of queer lives. There were queer bars, clubs, societies, libraries, and so on. Despite the general atmosphere of safety, however, #homosexuality was still illegal under Paragraph 175.
Andrew Whitehead describes what it was like to grow up as a white Christian in a small northern Indiana town in the 1980s and 1990s:
"We determined our national morality in terms of abortion, divorce, and homosexuality. This is a well-worn tune for those who have followed religion and politics for any stretch of time."
"So if your experience was anything like mine, you probably never heard a message from the pulpit of a majority-white megachurch about racial inequality. Equality for Black Americans wasn’t a moral issue for white Christians like me. That was a political distraction. Not a moral imperative.
Which is curious to me now, given the 'pro-life' mantle we all claimed."
I read this report, and think right away of Linda Gordon's important historical study, The Second Coming of the KKK, which finds that Indiana — and its white Christian ministers — were a particularly prominent hotbed of Klan activity in the 1920s.
White supremacy is, as Robert P. Jones tells us over and over, deeply rooted in white US Christianity.
"People who are so obsessed with homosexuality, to the point of being deeply involved in promoting 'ex-gay' therapy as well as leading such efforts, are often trying to suppress something about themselves. …
A study of implicit bias published in 2012 concluded what many of us long thought: the most strident homophobes are often closeted homosexuals:"
"#LGBT people are discriminated against in Malaysia where #homosexuality is forbidden and sodomy can be punished with imprisonment and corporal punishment, although enforcement is rare."