All 64 of the countries where it’s illegal to be LGBTQ+ – and yes, it’s all colonialism’s fault
All 64 of the countries where it’s illegal to be LGBTQ+ – and yes, it’s all colonialism’s fault
We take a look at all the countries and territories where it is still illegal to be gay or LGBTQ+ – and examine the role colonialism played.
We take a look at all the countries and territories where it is still illegal to be gay or LGBTQ+ – and examine the role colonialism played.
Cool, now let's see a map of countries where the majority religion is islam. I fully expect to be down voted to hell but fuck it. India was Britain's favourite colony and it's clear. All of North and South America was colonised and it's clear, as are Australia and new Zealand. Not to mention all the countries that colonised them.
Yes colonisation was particularly terrible and has a great deal to answer for, but that doesn't explain the laws today. If you think that ex colonies aren't capable of changing, then you are a racist, plain and simple.
Religion is the problem and it always has been. Some religions are worse than others. The abrahamic religions are particularly bad. Of those islam is by far the most draconian. Seriously pull up the map.
We get it you love doing an islamophobia and will jump at any opportunity to hate on it.
This isn't about islam right now bud, the topic's colonialism.
I thought the topic was the hate of LGBTQ+, and right now it’s Islam that’s acting with said hate most of all. British colonialism, and homophobia for that matter, ended (to a larger extent, at least) a while ago, and you can’t actively blame dead people for it (well, you can, but they aren’t going to fix anything, and you won’t solve anything by blaming them), while Islam is remaining anti-LGBTQ+ right in this very moment. Isn’t it more productive to oppose whatever’s present right now?
India was Britain’s favourite colony and it’s clear. All of North and South America was colonised and it’s clear, as are Australia and new Zealand. Not to mention all the countries that colonised them.
when did these countries become "clear"? do you know? it wasn't a billion years ago, lemme tell you that, and it isn't all sunshine and roses in the modern day. as it happens, there are quite a few queer people from all the places you've mentioned who would probably disagree with this perspective, myself included. queer rights and queer liberation is an ongoing process in all the places you've mentioned. we've not reached some post-homophobic utopia by any means.
If you think that ex colonies aren’t capable of changing, then you are a racist, plain and simple.
right. so you don't want people to think about the ways that colonialism impacts the cultures of the colonized people (that's racist, apparently), and just straight up deny the fact that a great deal of these laws are, as written, directly sourced from British colonial law codes, to support your particular interpretation of Islamic depravity. many of the states on the list are majority christian, especially the ones in Africa, but its whatever. don't let nuance get in the way of your Islamophobia.
Religion is the problem and it always has been. Some religions are worse than others. The abrahamic religions are particularly bad. Of those islam is by far the most draconian. Seriously pull up the map.
yeah, right, a single image of a map "proves" your extremely common right wing opinion beyond refutation. and the whole "religion is the problem" bullshit. as if the ills of the human condition can be reduced to a single solitary source. i get it, you like Sam Harris (or maybe Richard Dawkins, considering your spelling). you're an Atheist. but the world is more complicated than that, and injecting your own biases about people that aren't like you does nothing for nobody. religion didn't happen in a vacuum. it's not some outside force that warps us into a state of conflict and subjugation. religion is just culture, power, and hegemony. it was made by humanity's stupid monkey brains, and is shaped around the biases inherent to our cognition. we'd find a way to hate each other without it.
the world won't automatically be better by its absence, and rhetoric pushing Islam as somehow quantitatively worse than others is just fuckin' bigotry. that's why people give you shit about this. you aren't some free thinker by thinking Muslims are icky, you're just reproducing dominant cultural narratives about the backwardness of people you don't know, narratives built by Christian nations to justify conflict and conquest, just as modern Muslim nations have identified themselves in contrast to secularized formerly Christian nations.
in short, learn more about the world, and stop relying on the baked in biases we all inherit from our culture to decide which quarter of the world population has the bad evil religion. its not a good look.
Why was this removed by mod?
Highly upvoted and removed by mod? Must have been a doozy!
Well, there's a difference between settler colonialism (which replaces the indigenous population) and the sort of imperialist and classic colonialism in a lot of parts of this map, where people move in and resources are extracted, but you're left with a traumatized population instead of a genocided one, like in North and South America as well as Australia, so we'd expect the results to probably be different.
Not that I think religion helps these matters, as the US which is slowly turning Christo-fascist and reversing LGBTQ rights, probably not coincidentally, shows. I just don't agree with the Islamophobia part. Christianity looks pretty draconian on these issues too in some parts of Africa.
Not enough people are aware of colonialism's role in spreading queerphobia across the globe. When I try to explain it, they look at me like I'm making it up.
Palestine: Same-sex sexual activity is technically illegal in Gaza. The provision was introduced by Britain during its mandate over Palestine, although there’s little evidence that the law is enforced today.
No, it is still not safe if you are queer. They tortured and executed a Hamas commander via firing squad for being suspected of being gay.
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2016/03/hamas-commander-accused-of-gay-sex-is-executed/
Wasn't Ethiopia never colonized?
Yes. From the article:
Ethiopia: [...] It is one of the few African countries that enacted its own anti-gay laws – most others inherited those laws from Britain.
Ethiopian here, Ethiopia was never colonized but unfortunately we've managed to be incredibly anti-lgbtq all on our own.
Personally, I blame our long history of Christianity and Islam which both carry anti-lgbtq beliefs.
It was occupied by Italy in WW2, which is outside the "Scramble for Africa" period but is an occupation by a European power
Is it not illegal in Russia?
No, because in Russia there are no gays according to Putin.
Technically it's participating in pride events and displaying symbolism that's illegal, but in practice yes, pretty much.
Would Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and arguably Afghanistan be the fault of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist colonialism?
Stalin made homosexuality illegal in the Soviet Union and continued the Russian colonization of central Asia. Brezhnev invaded Afghanistan. The laws weren't repealed until Russia seceded from the Soviet Union in 1991
Idk about the others, but for Afghanistan, it's probably because it was taken over by religious fundamentalists trained, supported, and armed by Pakistan, Iran, and the US in order to fight off Soviet Union influence, along with some other countries (China, UK, probably some others). They basically invaded because they were called in by the local government afraid of these terrorist groups, who also called problems in the Soviet Union (similar to the US invading after 9/11). (Interestingly enough, the Pakistan influence can also be said to be a result of colonialism since it's existence is basically a result of English colonialism in India and the Middle-East.) After this, Afghanistan was basically a civil war zone between religious fundamentalist warlords fighting each other, the most extreme being the Taliban, but the other US allied ones weren't great, either, and were all still fundamentalist Muslim.
The official anti-LGBT laws were vague when the Republic (the Soviet friendly government) was in charge, all of the terrible attitudes were probably still there but under religious rules and unofficial, and being invaded by the USSR for years never helps those kinds of things, either. It was more intense when the US friendly war lords were in charge and made Sharia more official, making LGBTQ laws worse as a sort of collateral. It then got even worse when the Taliban officially took over, now it's even more explicit and the punishment even worse (death). I haven't read the article yet so not sure if it talks about any of these things, or if I got anything super off, but I've just been listening and reading stuff about this lately and felt I could contribute lol.
uk, australia, and the us definitely need to be on the list
I prefer the pride flag from NASA...