Trust Me, It's Always A Shame When The Hot Swarthy Dude Turns Out To Be Homophobic

Updated and Pushed to the top: Andy Samberg sees what I see:

It's a Red Letter Day here at the we-blog: like Red, I'm a little torn about saying anything about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to New York, speaking at the UN, wanting to see Ground Zero and winding up at a Columbia forum; Like her I tend to think what we have here is a lot of heat with very little light, so there's no illuminating a discussion of ideas out of it.

And like Red, I have the experience of my school to point to as well - my experience there when the Speakers Union brought up Phyllis Schlafly for a colorful evening of protest by the Women's Center, open hostility and Schlafly's smug anti-feminist lines, which came off, sadly, as mostly dated and irrelevant. It's the sympathy I tend to feel for schools that get Ann Coulter... or really, even Al Gore.  All too often, with these big name, high visibility speakers you get some fluffy stuff that trades on their celebrity reputation, precious little useful insight, and a student body that's primed more to argue and protest for entertainment than substance. (I was slightly renowned at school for questioning Jesse Jackson in 1988, just prior to his announcing his run for President, when he made a boilerplate, silly, statement about believing in "family values"; to my surprise I actually got to the mike something like second to ask what in the world that meant - was he suggesting someone didn't value families? He hemmed an hawed for a bit, and then pretty much wilted. Shortly thereafter, he seemed to drop the whole line.)

Ahmadinejad has been so demonized that there's little way to dress up an appearance at Columbia as little more than sensationalism; Columbia's long, undeserved rep as both the happening place in student protests (proximity to New York's media outlets accounts for a lot of that cred) and the Ivy League bastion of educational excellence (more money than God, less than stellar output, by most accounts... easily eclipsed by Harvard and Yale... which is really rather sad) isn't improved with this.

And really what is there to say? Expecting Ahmadinejad to either a) turn out to be so crazy that he'd walk in front of large American University audience and do things like deny The Holocaust or b) turn out to be so crazy that he'd say "Oops, there really was a Holocaust after all and we're closing down our nuke program" are both fantastical, and neither one amounts to much of anything anyway.

Still, Red offers one serious point, and I'd like to talk about it as well, because I think it, too, is people making a mountain out of very little: Ahamdinejad's supposedly asinine announcement that Iran has no gays.

Of course, it does, and they're being systematically watched, arrested, tortured and killed.

I think what Ahamdinejad said was asinine, but not because he said Iran had no gays; what he said was translated as "we don't have homosexuals like in your country".  That could mean "we don't have gays," or it could mean " we don't have openly gay people who flaunt their sexuality as you do here" - a parsing which would more closely reflect Islamic perceptions of the West as morally loose.

What Ahmadinejad said is asinine to me not because he doesn't believe gay people exist... but because he doesn't believe they want the life we have in the West - a life, simply, of being able to be who you are, openly, and without fear. The homosexuals he has in his country, want to be like the homosexuals here - he just won't let them. It's also fascinating to me that this deep concern for the gays has suddenly become a talking point for conservatives - which is done mainly to suggest that "liberal hypocrisy" is in play on not condemning Ahmadinejad as forcefully (or wanting to invade Iran) as they would like.

Color me a little skeptical of their "deep concern" for the well being of Iran's gays; at the very least, when the question of gays being beaten and killed in the US comes up, they seem awfully, awfully silent, or awfully awfully hedge-y as to whether it's so bad. Much like Laura Bush's "concern" for the women of Afghanistan and the requirement for a burqa, the right can't quite get either its feminist, or its gay rights hats on quite right - It's hard to talk out of both sides of your mouth when you hate the veil and you hate Britney Spears for overexposure.  And similarly, it's hard to demonize American gays for wanting to be married, while piously proclaiming your love for persecuted gays in Iran - let's airlift those Iranian gays here tomorrow, and tell me who on the right will be happy to see them.

In that sense, I think too much is made of all of this - people who seriously think that Ahmadinejad or the regime in Iran can be talked out of persecuting women, or gays for "loose morals" as defined by a rigid Islamic code  is either youthfully idealistic or willfully naive. And we can't save them - or change that country - by doing, as the Bush Administration has, round after round of hostility designed to isolate them further from the small exposures to Western culture that help foster liberalized ideas. Telling Ahmadinejad "we see you" as he tortures gays and abuses women is meaningless, as is trying to prove to him a Holocaust he's really not opposed to even more than he plays at disbelieving it. It's always sad when you realize that someone you consider hot looking - there's just something so perfectly sized about that dark little man - has such awful, hateful ideas locked in his head. That's why it's good to be gay like we are here in the US - you can find more appropriate, but still hot man candy to crush on. Which, really, is the best reason to go to those protest marches - big crowds, angry rhetoric = easy pickups.

Comments

[j in baltimore]

Spot-on on the right's hypocrisy on this...but really, you find this swarthy dude hot?

thank goddess we rarely have to fight over boys.