BY BRUCE BAWER
September 20, 2017
Geert Wilders of the Dutch far-right Freedom Party, chairwoman of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) Frauke Petry and French National Front (FN) leader Marine Le Pen give a press conference during their European Parliament's Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) congress in Koblenz, western Germany, on January 21, 2017. / AFP / Roberto Pfeil
For decades, in both America and Europe, the gay establishment – gay magazines, gay rights organizations, and self-designated gay leaders – have been dictating politics to the gay multitudes. Those politics have been consistently left-wing and Democratic. Not all gays have played follow-the-leader, but most have, so that in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections Hillary Clinton won a far larger percentage of the gay vote than Donald Trump.
Even though Hillary had opposed same-sex marriage until 2013, had taken millions of dollars from governments that execute homosexuals, and was married to the man who signed the Defense of Marriage Act, the gay mafia had managed to depict her as gay-friendly while depicting Donald Trump, a longtime gay marriage supporter, as an enemy of gay rights.
Even more perverse than the official gay take on Trump vs. Clinton is the official gay party line on Islam. To get a good picture of this party line, all you need to do is glance through the archives of The Advocate, a gay news magazine.
“Islam is not intrinsically homophobic,” wrote Trudy Ring in a 2013 Advocate report about Muslim “activists and scholars” who, she claimed, were making progress in their effort to make Islam “more welcoming to LGBT people.” In a 2014 piece, Stevie St. John promoted a Muslim lesbian's claim that the Koran “prescribes no punishment for being gay or transgender.”
True, but wildly deceptive: in fact, the Koran contains explicit condemnations of homosexual conduct, while the punishments for such conduct are spelled out in Islamic law. Then there's the 2017 Advocate article in which one Samra Habib happily noted that after the Orlando Pulse nightclub massacre, many news media eschewed anti-Islamic “finger-pointing” and instead “offered many queer Muslims a platform to share how they too were in mourning and how they often felt doubly ostracized” – victimized, in other words, by both “Islamophobia and homophobia.”
Any whitewash of Islam is reprehensible. But when gays whitewash Islam in a publication read by other gays, it's downright dangerous. No ideology on Earth is more anti-gay. In ten Muslim countries, gay sex is punishable by death. To pretend that there's any way of reconciling homosexuality and Islam, or any chance of transforming Islam into a gay-friendly faith, is to encourage a menacing fantasy.
So it's promising to observe that as Islam plants its roots ever more deeply in the soil of Western Europe, more and more European gays are wising up, breaking ranks with the fools and liars in their midst who preach that the “gay community” and the ummah are natural allies, and casting their ballots for politicians whom they'd previously scorned.
In April, for example, Thomas Adamson of the Associated Press reported that although gay rights groups in France had not wavered in their fierce opposition to Marine Le Pen's Front National (FN), the party now enjoyed a higher level of support among gay voters than among straights.
Adamson quoted gay artist and Paris resident Kelvin Hopper: “Faced with the current threats, particularly from radical Islam, gays have realized they’ll be the first victims of these barbarians, and only Marine is proposing radical solutions.” The historically anti-gay FN, noted Adamson, now had “more top aides who are publicly known to be gay than any other French political party.”
On September 14, CNN's website ran a story about gays in Germany who are supporting the Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD). A middle-aged Bremen couple interviewed for the piece had been violently gay-bashed by “two locally known Muslim extremists” who “were never arrested and later fled to Syria.” After failing to receive justice from local prosecutors and the mayor's office, the couple had cast their lot in with AfD.
“I don't like everything they say,” admitted one of the two gay men, a longtime leftist and former Green Party voter, “but this is too dangerous for gay people to live openly here, if we get attacked like that. We need a party that's talking openly about this.” Like FN, AfD opposes same-sex marriage – but also has gay people in its leadership, and is supported by a higher percentage of gays than of straights.
That many gays are embracing parties like FN and AfD is a source of bafflement and outrage for politicians, journalists, academics, and gay activists who are used to the idea of gays as docile field hands on the leftist plantation. Their response to this new development is to smear the right-wing parties as cynical exploiters of the gay electorate, and to find some condescending way of interpreting gay support for these parties.
For example, German social psychologist Beate Kupper told CNN that gays are joining AfD because it makes them feel better, as members of an “out” group, to demonize members of another “out” group.
In March, J. Lester Feder of BuzzFeed interviewed a “group of queer and immigrant activists” in Amsterdam who angrily dismissed politician Geert Wilders's expressions of concern about Muslim gay-hatred as “racism dressed up in liberal drag.” Wilders, Feder warned, wasn't alone: Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte was also now saying that immigrants who “harass gays” should leave the country.
Gay former MP Tofik Dibi, whose parents came from Morocco, admitted to Feder that “anti-LGBT attitudes are a real problem in some immigrant communities” (euphemism, anyone?), but insisted that politicians who raise this issue don’t care about gays: they're using it “as a weapon” against Muslims.
Note that rhetorical sleight of hand. In reality, gays aren't bashing Muslims in Europe; Muslims are bashing gays. But Dibi turns that reality on its head, transforming perpetrators into victims.
Then there are the out-and-out lies served up by the likes of Tanja Ineke – head of the Netherlands' leading gay-rights organization, no less – who told Feder that “immigrants don’t pose a special threat to LGBT people.” Tell that to the countless Dutch gays who, fearful of being beaten by Muslim gangs in a city that was once the safest place on Earth for them, have fled Amsterdam for provincial towns or moved abroad. Because of the city's demographic revolution, Amsterdam's gay scene is a shadow of what it was twenty or even ten years ago.
To his credit, Feder at least included in his article a memorable quotation from the late, great Pim Fortuyn, the gay sociologist-turned-politician whose stern warnings of the dangers of Islamization led to his assassination fifteen years ago. “I have no desire,” said Fortuyn, “to have to go through the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again.”
Alas, unless Wilders and other politicians who dare to criticize Islam gain power very soon, the closing down in Western Europe not just of gay rights but of all kinds of rights will proceed apace, and emancipation of any kind will increasingly look like a pipe dream.
