[Marxism] Moscow police break up gay pride rally

[David Thorstad <binesi@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:

I don't support the Moscow cops but I am leery of anything that Peter
Tatchell gets involved with. Here's a good analysis of his role:

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2005/11/tatchell-and-pink-veiled-islamophobia.html

I share Louis's leeriness about Peter Tatchell, but of course that was 
immaterial to the most recent assault on same-sex protesters by the 
Moscow police, more than once egged on to arrest gay activists by the 
city's bigoted mayor. All quite ironic in view of the progressive 
position taken by the Bolsheviks in repealing the tsarist sodomy 
statute, itself repealed only in 1993 after Stalin reintroduced it in 1934.
    The linked article doesn't mention Tatchell's widely echoed and 
hyped crusade against Iran a couple of years back over the alleged 
hanging of teenage youths for gay sex (also retailed by Doug Ireland, 
among others). I don't know all the facts about that notorious case, but 
my suspicions were aroused by the fact that (1) the two youths in 
question were Arabs (a persecuted minority in Iran), not Persians 
(though none of Tatchell's hype, to my knowledge, addressed that 
aspect), (2) whether their crime had been rape or consensual sex was 
never clearly established, and (3) none of the gay press, including 
Tatchell, at the time bothered to point out that sex between men and 
male youths is de rigueur in Iran, a part of the country's culture and 
heritage, because that would complicate their agenda: furthering an 
(imperialist) agenda of "LGBT-ism" (surely a bizarre amalgam that 
doesn't relate at all to most third-world cultures, even if most 
leftists now mouth it in rote as if it meant something), and 
anathematizing the historically most widespread form of male-male love 
in Western culture: pederasty. Tatchell's anti-Iran campaign also 
coincided with a stepped-up campaign at the time by the United States, 
Britain, and Israel, among others, against Iran.
David


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