Periodically, I re-post the following quiz. Because, while it may well be in congruence with Kinsell's Law, it should be remembered anyway. A gay man named Paul Varnell wrote the following quiz. Can you answer these questions correctly?
LET'S TAKE A QUIZ. No peeking at the answers directly below.1. Which Middle Eastern country has no sodomy laws, nor uses vague charges such as "offenses against religion" or "immoral conduct" to prosecute and imprison gays and lesbians?
2. Which Middle Eastern country has a variety of gay organizations which safely conduct gay advocacy efforts?
3. Which Middle Eastern country has a gay and lesbian community center in its capital city?
4. Which Middle Eastern country holds annual Gay Pride parades?
5. Which Middle Eastern country has members of parliament who actively support and speak out on behalf of gays and lesbians?
6. In which Middle Eastern country did the head of state meet with gay activists?
7. Which Middle Eastern country lets gays and lesbians join its military services?
8. Which Middle Eastern country has broadcast programs about gays and lesbians on its television stations?
9. And a bonus question: When gays in Palestine are forced to flee persecution, what Middle Eastern country do they usually flee to?
Answers:
1) Israel
2) Israel
3) Israel
4) Israel
5) Israel
6) Israel
7) Israel
8) Israel
9) Israel
Among anti-war protestors, I have seen pictures of a group that calls itself "Lesbians for Palestine."
Fascinating.
But here I quote Paul Varnell once again:
The contrasting treatment of gay men in neighboring Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt is well known: Gays are beheaded or sentenced to long prison terms.What seems less well known, however, is the appalling treatment of gays under Yassir Arafat's Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza. At least it was less known until Yossi Klein Halevi wrote about it in the August 19th New Republic. Palestine makes rural Texas look like San Francisco.
According to Halevi, one young man discovered to be gay was forced by Palestinian Authority police "to stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head covered by a sack filled with feces, and then he was thrown into a dark cell infested with insects." During one interrogation Palestinian police stripped him and forced him to sit on a Coke bottle.
When he was released he fled to Israel. If he were forced to return to Gaza, he said, "The police would kill me."
An American who foolishly moved into the West Bank to live with his Palestinian lover said they told everyone they were just friends, but one day they "found a letter under our door from the Islamic court. It listed the five forms of death prescribed by Islam for homosexuality, including stoning and burning. We fled to Israel that same day," he said.
The head of a Tel Aviv gay organization told Halevi, "The persecution of gays in the Palestinian Authority doesn't just come from the families or the Islamic groups, but from the P.A. itself."
Palestinian police have increasingly enforced Islamic religion law, he said: "It's now impossible to be an open gay in the P.A." He recalled that one gay man in the Palestinian police went to Israel for a short time. When he returned to the West Bank, Palestinian Authority police confined him to a pit without food or water until he died.
A 17-year-old gay youth recalled that he spent months in a Palestinian Authority prison "where interrogators cut him with glass and poured toilet cleaner into his wounds."
The U.S. State Department, which more and more seems to be living on some other planet, blandly noted in a 2001 human rights report, "In the Palestinian territories homosexuals generally are socially marginalized and occasionally receive physical threats." That's one way to put it.
In the last few years, Halevi reports, hundreds of gay Palestinians, mostly from the West Bank, have fled to Israel, usually to Tel Aviv, Israel's most cosmopolitan city. Many are desperately poor, he says, "but at least they're beyond the reach of their families and the P.A."
So it seems clear that Israel is the one country in the region in which gays have legal rights as citizens and live in safety and freedom.
Oddly, however, some gays and lesbians over on the anti-capitalist ("progressive") left sympathize with Palestinian terrorists and support the Palestinian Authority. One such fledgling group calls itself "Queers for Palestine," another is named "Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism" (as if trying to stop terrorism against Israeli civilians is itself terrorism).
To be sure, no one should argue that gays and lesbians must support Israel just because it is vastly more gay-friendly. They don't. They may feel that some other political principles are more important than gay-friendliness.
But gays who support Palestine, and they seem almost entirely on the far reaches of the political left, give the lie to the frequent demand made by gays on the left that the rest of us must support some "progressive" politician or position because it supposedly benefits gays, even though doing so would compromise or violate some basic political principle we as individuals may hold.
Keep "Queers for Palestine" in mind next time some gay left advocate says that because you are gay you have to support some approved "gay" position. And remember the pit, the sewer water, the bag of feces and the toilet bowl cleaner.
Indeed.
And?
Dean, for the anti-Idiotarians the treatment of homosexuals in the Middle East by every country other than Israel isn't surprising. The so-call anti-Zionist anti-Israelist would pretend otherwise, or would evoke the ever so popular moral equivalency (or condemn you for cultural chauvanistc behavior for pointing out this little tidbid of information). As the saying goes: There are none so blind, as those who would not see.
Iran?
Can't remember who said it: "Queers for Palestine is like Turkeys for Thanksgiving".
That quiz was offensively obvious.
This says everything that I've been saying for a very long time, that can possibly be said, about Israel and the Paleshitians. I SUPPORT ISRAEL 100%!!!! I am proud to be a Politically Incorrect Homosexualist Zionist Western Imperialist Warmonger.
Israel is apparently way ahead of San Francisco.
It seems they are going to have a new sex research center. See SFGate.com
"Sexuality Research Center opens in San Francisco , January 30, 2004
It oozes from the pores of our society and makes a brow sweat here and there, but despite its omnipresence, most people are still afraid to talk about it, according to the founder of a new research center that opened today in San Francisco to deal with the taboo topic: sex.
Author and San Francisco State University researcher Deborah Tolman says she hopes the Center for Research on Gender and Sexuality will help bring the hush-hush topic out into the open, where people can deal head-on with sexual issues relating to race, class, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation.
"It is unbelievable to me how taboo it still is to talk about sexuality,'' Tolman said."
Well, Paul Varnell was addressing a particular group of people who I don't think are all that well-represented here. In pretty much every major urban area, there's a crew of activists at the ready to tell you that we're all going to be rounded up and shot unless we change society through a certain hard-left policy wish-list. Such people aren't the majority, or even a plurality, of gays. But they do achieve the highest decibel level, and the ambulance-chaser aspect of their program (The Palestinians are oppressed like us! Let's form a healing circle around them!) has a definite appeal if you're still feeling raw and vulnerable from coming out. I think Varnell's point to those who are tempted to sign on is, a specific position isn't pro-gay just because it happens to be part of the progressive litany.
Eric Scheie: "Silence = Death? ...Never Again!"
http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/2004_01.html#000738
It just to show that there are as big a percentage of bloody morons is the homosexual population as there are in the straight one. I am with the commenter who said this quiz was "insultingly obvious". The homosexuals who are anti-Israel and pro-Arab are equivalent to the self-loathing Jews that exist out there.
I would agree with Sean Kinsell - but add that in certain places like in my town, it seems that the entire GLBT population are idiotarian leftist extremists. I am sure there are sane GLBT folks out there, but they obviously dont go about shouting and hollering, proclaiming their gayness. Thus, one sees folks like the Queers for Palestine-types, and, it is easy to jump to making wrong conclusions, and generalising.
Though, I think the saner GLBT folks need to speak out, in order to prove to the masses that gayness is not to be equated with freakish, outlandish behavior, or anti-Americanism and traitorous behavior.
Gays and Lesbians Against Israel = Jews for Auschwitz
I'm gyno (woman-oriented) sexually, but ideologically I'm in the "HomoCon" (Homosexual Conservative) quadrant of any spectrum. It's the only position that is not suicidal and/or totalitarian.
http://lavenderbutnotpink.com/index.html
I know a girl who avoided the draft on the grounds that she's a girl, and the IDF demanded that she be checked by an army gynecologist to make sure she isn't just a transvestite.
Compare that to "don't ask, don't tell".
Ronin:
There are sane GLBT people out there. We just don't define ourselves principally by our sexual orientation, any more than straight folk define themselves by their preferred position! so we aren't out there (har har) being raucous.
Although we "normal" folks are becoming more active in the community. Apparently a number of gay pride parades are starting to change because families with children want to march and don't particularly care to be marching next to the sexual extremists.
I too get tired of the lunatic left fringe. They make me ashamed of being a liberal.
What about the head-up-ass Berkeley group called QUIT (Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism)? Morons.
"Though, I think the saner GLBT folks need to speak out, in order to prove to the masses that gayness is not to be equated with freakish, outlandish behavior, or anti-Americanism and traitorous behavior."
Possibly, ronin, but there are a few other issues to consider. For one thing, you can "speak out" against poster-waving ninnies on the opposite street corner fairly easily (though it's not easy for those with jobs and other obligations to make a practice of it). However, the media like groups they recognize and are used to doing business with. The Independent Gay Forum and other more reasonable organizations didn't form until it became obvious to a lot of people what damage our existing public advocates were doing, and there's still a sense among journalists, I surmise, that they skew "conservative" and aren't capable of giving a convenient soundbyte of "the gay opinion."
Also, the leftish end of gay activists tend to have a slick, sexy program of "We wants." It's quotable, and it posits government action as the engine of social change in a way that computes with journalists who cover policy. But there's not much human interest drama in the all-American position that we have a long, slow job of convincing people in our daily interactions that they can live and work alongside us, and of thinking in legislative terms only when there are real threats to our equality.
One slight bright side of all of this is that the undemanding day jobs favored by "progressive" activist types tend to leave them more time to spend at the gym. If you're going to make a public nuisance of yourself about your pet cause, you may as well be oglably hot while you're at it.
I only hope to see more men's men and Lesbian women come out of the closet who _don't_ have a death wish. Being starved to death in a pit or having a wall bulldozed over you doesn't protect homosexual rights in any way.
Perhaps "Paleshitians" was the wrong word. Perhaps I should call them PalestiNazis instead. Either way...
Political Correctness = Slavery
Religion of Peace = Death