Don’t Ask, Don’t Tennessee: Why Muslims and the LGBTQ Community Should Be Allies
July 10th, 2011 | Posted by: Chris Stedman
Please check out my new post on forging Muslim-queer alliances, originally featured on muslimahMERICAN, The New Gay, The Huffington Post, Tikkun Daily, and altmuslimah. (Also, Towleroad — which I’ve been reading since high school! — quoted from it and linked to it. Totally geeked out over that one.) It may seem idealistic, but my work in solidarity with Muslims has taught me that intentional boundary-crossing can transform all involved. I’m so grateful to those who’ve opened up their lives to me and allowed me to do the same. Without further ado:
This year, two notable controversies have been brewing in Tennessee: a proposed bill that would forbid educators from using the word “gay” in the classroom, and a court battle to determine if Islam is a religion. (The verdict? Islam is in fact a religion — for now, anyway.)
These two issues may seem unrelated, but I believe they’re actually symptoms of the same problem: our nation’s historical difficulty with those who are seen as disrupting the status quo. Intolerance against Muslims and LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) individuals isn’t exclusive to Tennessee. With a fever-pitched debate over Park51 (or the “Ground Zero Mosque”) and headline-grabbing concerns about anti-LGBTQ bullying, these issues are a national concern.
July 11th, 2011 at 3:07 am
Hi Chris –
I have tweeted this question to you before, but I’ll post it in the comments here this time for more robust consideration.
Do you honestly believe that violent hatred of others — and you can class “others” any way you want — is actually a core American value? That is, do you really believe that’s a mainstream value and not simply the actions of the militant and lawless few?
See: I think that you are willing to write off Islamic violence as marginal because it satisfies your central paradigm of religious homogeneity, but you are unwilling to write off violence against gays as marginal because that doing so would militate against your core paradigm of LGBT as a persecuted class.
You know: the DOJ reports that the rate of all hate crimes in the US thru 2009 is 0.5 per 1000 people. Now, here’s where we give you the massive benefit of the doubt:
1. Let’s assume all hate crimes are violent crimes
2. let’s assume all hate crimes are against LGBT
3. Let’s assume the rate of LGBT in the general population is 10% (100 in 1000).
That means that 1 LGBT person in 200 is a victim of hate crime. Compare that to the rate of violent crime in the general population: the rate of violent crime in the general population in 2009 was 20 per 1000. That’s 40X the rate of hate crimes, and 4X the rate we have assigned to LGBT.
I make a big deal out of this, Chris, because this is the second time in less than 2 weeks that you are featuring a tale of someone’s woe at the hands of thugs and linking victims as somehow victims of a systemic inclination against “others” in American society. It’s completely wrong that anyone should be physically assaulted because they are wearing a religious uniform; it’s wrong to attack someone because they aren’t keeping the 10 commandments. It is actually against the law as the law stands. But it is utterly of the same stripe to irrationally impugn American culture — that is, all mainstream Americans — for the work of the few self-righteous vigilantes.
You can do better. I hope you consider it.