It’s no secret that Pakistan isn’t really the most gay-friendly country in the world. Hell, do you know how many people think society should be accepting of LGBT people? Two percent. There’s as much fat in milk as there are non-homophobes in Pakistan.
The ironic part is that, according to Mother Jones, Pakistan is the world leader in gay porn searches. Which is . . . amazing. Do you know how much porn you have to search to beat North America?
“Islamic conservatives, whether they’re actually in power or the governments in power are trying to placate them, they will tend to go to very narrow definitions of Islam,” she says. “One of the easiest ways to do this is to come down hard on the role of women, and particularly around sex and homosexuality.”
Advertisement“You find in most civilizations in the Global South a much more open approach to homosexuality—irrespective of its status in religious and theological doctrine—than you find today,” she says. “So very often, any attempt to open a dialogue in the Arab region is branded as some ‘Western conspiracy’ to undermine traditional Arab and Muslim values. The reality is that long before the West was talking openly about homosexuality, Arabs in particular were writing about this very frankly. Our history has come to be rewritten by Islamic conservatives.”
So basically, if you work really hard and believe in yourself, you can operate on a precariously narrow world view by justifying your own irrational hatred and hypocrisy with the most arbitrary bullshit imaginable. You wanna watch as much porn as you can handle? God bless. But when you’re pulling off the kind of cognitive dissonance where you get off on two men having sex, then decry them as second-class citizens, you’re kind of an idiot.
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