Emily
MikeI began my morning by reading some local news. I’m in the Dallas area right now, and came 
across a blurb on Friday night’s raid on the Eagle, a Dallas gay bar. This raid comes only a few weeks after the police raid of a Fort Worth bar on anniversary of Stonewall. The latter involved unnecessary force and a man ended up in the hospital. Though there have been no claims of violence or direct harassment by the Eagle, law enforcement showed up in ninja masks– and many gay rights activist have labeled these two events, “obvious selective enforcement” of liquor laws, specifically targeting gay bars.
It only gets worse from here.
I followed this piece of bad news up with an article on Lithuania’s vote to ban any reference to homosexuality in public information that could be viewed by children, including a ban on discussing homosexuality in schools. According to Amnesty International’s article:
The amendment classes homosexuality alongside issues such as the portrayal of physical or psychological violence, the display of a dead or cruelly mutilated body of a person, and information that arouses fear or horror, or encourages self-mutilation or suicide.
Apparently, lawmakers in Lithuania think that discussions of homosexuality will cause self-mutilation and suicide. Talking to children about gay people is on par with displaying a cruelly mutilated body. That’s right– erasing homosexuality apparently will make things easier for children. That is, until they confront its existence in the real world. Laws like this only serve to raise a new generation of ignorance and homophobia.
My final piece of news from this morning comes from Iraq. As a warning, the article I’m linking to is pretty disturbing. Reports on post-Saddam era gay rights have come out– and they aren’t pretty. At all. The numbers aren’t clear or well-recorded, but torture and murder of gay people, particularly men, has escalated since 2003. One man describes what happened when his partner was seized by militia one night:
“We found his body the next day dumped in the garbage, his throat cut out, his genitals cut off.”
I’m not going to lift some of the other quotes because they’re particularly gruesome, but I suggest going to the link above to read about specific methods of torture practiced on gay men. The bottom line is– Iraq has never been a friend to homosexuality. But polls of gay people in Iraq today show they felt safer under Saddam. We read about deaths every day in the country, but we don’t hear about the homophobic violent attacks, which are systematically executed, unreported and covered up.
Filed under: GLBT, Harassment, International, Law, Violence Tagged: | Dallas, Gay rights, homophobia, Iraq, lgbt, Lithuania, torture
