True, but only to “learn about the actual scripture and teachings directly from the Church”. The LDS church did not like the Book of Mormon musical, but they realized trying to sue would be counterproductive.
I wouldn’t give the asshole behind the complaint that much credit. He’s not currently advocating to make being gay illegal. But if he wins the fight over books in this school, he’s going to need a new angle to keep himself in the papers, which means finding another way to attack gay people.
Showing a degree of “read the room” awareness, that some other religious or socioideological alignments often fail at.
You’re not wrong, but I can just as easily see Christians in the same position (I mean we have countless examples in the US of such crusaders like Moms for Liberty.)
I can also see them advocating for illegalizing LGBTQ. Some of them have advocated for banning adults from reading romance novels. They’re nuts.
I’m inclined to see this not as a Christian or a Muslim thing but as a general wave of anti-LGBTQ sentiment pushed by the authoritarian Right. This specific example is right out of the Moms for Liberty playbook. I would not be surprised if some right-wingers are bankrolling both this guy and some Christian nut job. With the caveat that I’m not as sure about the political climate in the UK as the US.
To be clear, I’m responding to the claim in the original article, which is that the Muslim diaspora is substantively worse for LGBTQ than Christians, that it’s uniquely bad somehow. When the other article on that specific incident shows a huge variety of attitudes towards LGBTQ people coming from the Muslim community, which rather undermines that claim.
Mormonism has the benefit of being a highly centralized religion. It’s breakaway sects are small groups of freaks. This is the one way both Islam and Protestant Christianity have something in common. It’s a lot easier for lunatics to become the public face of their faith. There’s no methodology to discredit protestant churches and leaders that defy core doctrine the way a Catholic or Mormon church can.
As a general answer to the OP, you can be opposed to Zionism without being anti-Semitic but the lines get really blurry sometimes and such criticisms often slip into anti-Semitism.
Perhaps there’s a similar dynamic with Muslims. Homophobia is wrong coming from any culture but (and this is speaking from an American perspective) there is such a pervasive mistrust of Muslims that any criticism may be either valid or couched in anti-Muslim rhetoric. Some people may want to avoid that entirely and so keep their mouths shut.
I was in my first week of college on 9/11 and my college had a diverse student body with a high international population. It’s hard to understand the impact of that single event on the treatment of Muslims but I witnessed it, and I witnessed the effect it had on people I called my friends, and of people in my community.
And if you witnessed that, I don’t think you’d want to go anywhere near negative stereotyping of Muslims. At least I don’t.
and vice versa:
Sure there is, you just declare that they aren’t “real” Christians as seen above in this thread.
“tiny radical cults that call themselves Christian”
And therein lies part of the difficulty in any such debates: Any time someone wants to point out an issue, the response is “Only a few people do it and they don’t represent the whole.” This is often the argument with religion, race, gender, politics, nationalities, etc.
But then when it comes to “my side and your side”, then your side is a monolithic group as a whole who can be broad-brushed while my side is diverse individuals who must all be seen as unique in their own right with no common responsibility.
I’m not critiquing you personally or even meaning “you” as you, just saying this is a motte-and-bailey tactic that inevitably appears sooner or later. I know I’m guilty of it at times too.
I wasn’t saying “don’t trust this guy because he’s a Muslim, and this is how Muslims act” if that’s what you thought my point was. I’m saying “don’t trust him because he’s a bigot, and this is how bigots act.”
Moms for Liberty is running exactly the same grift. It’s never just about the current issue with these scumbags, it’s always a wedge. Any success in one area simply emboldens them to broader attacks on LGBT rights.
This is, incidentally, also true of Islamophobes, and is why you get a lot of the confusion that led to this thread being created in the first place. The Christians throwing around dire warnings about the danger posed by Muslim immigrants to LGBT people, or women, or Jews, absolutely do not care about those groups being in danger, they’re just using it as a wedge to attack a pluralistic, secular society, and any win they notch against Muslims will be used to fuel more attacks against the rest of us. But if you don’t go along with them, they start talking about “double standards” and “sheep voting for wolves,” like they aren’t the exact same type of religious authoritarian in a different religious wrapper.
It’s why I’ve got no interest in who’s a real Christian/Muslim/Jew/Zoroastrian. The religions aren’t inherently good or bad. There are even asshole Quakers.
When people sign on to specific, discrete systems, like Christian Nationalism or Wahabbist Islam or Maoist Communism or MAGA, I’ll criticize them for that. But the big religions are so broad that it’s useless to try to assign beliefs or behaviors to people based on their religious identity.
I don’t normally do this, but perfectly said.
Okay, but does the identity or motive of the speaker change the truth of the situation?
Suppose that, instead of far-right or AfD or MAGA preachers or whatever warning about Islam, it were a closed-door, calm discussion of secular Swedish, German or French progressives sitting in a conference room, saying, “We’re having a large influx of Muslim immigrants from northern Africa and the Middle East these days and we’ve observed that, so far, many - but not all - of them have cultural views and practices that are in clear conflict with the feminist, pro-LGBT, secular values we adhere to in the public square, and we’re seeing its effects play out in our schools and elsewhere. We need to talk.”
Is that…somehow more acceptable? Because it’s still the same essence, just under different packaging.
Out of curiosity, why did they close the door to progressive Muslims? Why didn’t they invite them into that conference room? Why didn’t they ask the progressive Muslims, who are organizing in their own community, how they could help?
Bigotry can be very calm and a lot of Europe has done plenty of deliberate and thoughtful sounding nonsense. This is why secularism doesn’t get a pass either because western European nations instituting burqa bans is unacceptable no matter how calmly they explain it. The same would be true if a country banned yarmulkes, rosaries, crosses, or bindis.
Christians are a minority in South Korea and Taiwan. That hasn’t stopped some Christians there from being just as obnoxious or domineering as Christians in the United States.
Not sure about Taiwan, but Korea’s Christian identity needs some clarification. About half of adult Koreans claim no religious affiliation. Of the remaining Koreans, about half identify as Christian and half as Buddhist. Of the self-identified Christians, a good number of these are Unification Church or “God ther Mother” or some other aggressively-recruiting cult. Still, by many metrics, Korea is a Christian nation, or as much Christian as Buddhist.
Well the article was from 6 years ago…
The protesters got banned from campaigning directly outside the building and the protests seem to have fizzled out. The guy highlighted in the article reportedly insisted this was utterly unfair because most of those involved in the prosecution were white, which is therefore discrimination..
Since then he’s continued with podcasts, picked fights with a bunch of people, including fights with the right wing on racism and made some misogynistic comments that got pushback from Muslim women’s groups. He also had a couple of unsuccessful attempts to run for election as an MP and city mayor describing himself as a human rights focused pro-Palestine candidate (losing the mayoral election to a guy who is also Muslim, incidentally) and got arrested a couple of months back for non-payment of legal fees and fees related to being a landlord.
Not featured; major escalation of anti-gay campaigning.
In the school concerned, incidentally, a lot of the parents didn’t speak much English, so it was an easy opportunity for an opportunistic rabble rouser to lie shamelessly about what was actually being taught to the kids. Some of the protestors were apparently genuinely under the impression that their 5 year olds were being taught how to have gay sex by teachers, rather than the reality of occasionally reading a book in which a child has two daddies or a boy wears a sparkly skirt.
Thanks for the update.
I am shocked, shocked, to learn that he is a bigot in other ways, and also a generalized asshole.
I agree, and that’s kind of what I’m coming around to. There’s definitely a double standard when we treat Muslim beliefs as a threat but not also Christian beliefs.
I’m not anti-theist, though I have some specific theological issues with Christianity (and probably Islam, who knows? Not my area of expertise.) But I think of religion as kind of an accelerant. If you are a loving person, it can intensify your drive to love others. And if you are a bigot, it can intensify your bigotry. People read into this stuff according to their values. I like Buddhism and I took the precepts because it’s a useful shorthand for the way I already want to live my life. It’s just a reminder of that.
I can’t find the post but someone mentioned upthread that Buddhism does not require belief in a deity. I just want to clarify that really depends on the type of Buddhism. True of Zen, not so much true of Tibetan Buddhism, for example. Or Pure Land Buddhism. A lot of Mahayana sects have beliefs in enlightened beings or the supernatural power of transcendental meditation, in fact Zen is kind of the odd one out, and even then we have the concept of bodhisattvas, which you can interpret either as divine entities or just people who really had their shit together. I choose the latter and so does my Sangha. Zen is so distinct that I’ve heard some Buddhists argue it isn’t Buddhism at all. That said, it’s not hard for me to conceive of a Zen infused with local cultural supernatural beliefs. And perhaps more to the point, there are plenty of Zen monks rife with misogyny or cultural beliefs that would exclude LGBTQ people. In my fact my current teacher left his old sangha precisely because of its treatment of LGBTQ people and women – and that sangha is located in arguably the most liberal city in Michigan.
Like don’t get me wrong, I love Buddhism, but I think in the West some people have a tendency to think of it as an inherently more enlightened religion/philosophy than all the other ones. But there is a lot of evidence that Buddhism is just as vulnerable to shitty people and viewpoints as any other religion. And because teaching lineage is so important in Zen, it’s especially prone to corruption and abuse of power. I think religion can reinforce bigotry, but in a lot of cases people just bring their bigotry to their religion. (That said, I’m not aware of any explicit textual rejection of LGBTQ people or women in Buddhism, so that’s something, I guess.)
Buddhists generally supported Japanese expansionism and militarism in WWII.
Buddhism is just another slightly less shitty religion.