Is Homophobia the New Anti-Semitism?

from the American Prospect:



Is Homophobia the New Anti-Semitism?
As the gay-rights movement has been globalized, so has religious and political opposition to homosexuality.

Michelle Goldberg | May 19, 2009 | web only



On May 17, 1990, the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. That's why gay-rights activists chose May 17 for the International Day Against Homophobia, a worldwide series of events, now in its fourth year, designed to spotlight the terrible abuses gay and lesbian people face in much of the world. (In what might be seen as a prescient tribute to Larry Craig, it goes by the acronym IDAHO.) Even before this year's IDAHO began on Sunday, events in Moscow offered a lurid demonstration of why global homophobia needs our attention.
Moscow gay-rights activists had planned a march to coincide with the finale of the ultra-campy Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday. It was a brave and risky undertaking -- in the past, gay-rights demonstrators in Russia have been met with violence from both police and right-wing thugs. Moscow's mayor has called gay-rights marches "satanic," and his spokesperson told journalists that the activists threatened "not only to destroy the moral pillars of our society but also to deliberately provoke disorder, which would threaten the lives and security of Muscovites and guests of the city." The Independent reported that organizers hid out in a country house to avoid arrest in the days leading up to the march, then dodged police roadblocks to make it into the city.

In the end, the protest was quashed before it could begin. "The demonstration lasted for about a minute before the police set upon them from all sides, clambering through the shrubs and knocking news cameramen out of the way to seize the demonstrators, pin their arms behind their backs and drag them off into waiting buses and patrol wagons," reported the Los Angeles Times. Added The Telegraph, "Some activists were detained for doing little more than talking to reporters, including a female campaigner who had her glasses and shoes torn off and her dress pulled up above her waist as she was carried screaming into a bus." Far-right anti-gay demonstrators were allowed to have their own event elsewhere in the city.

As the organizers of IDAHO know, this kind of official repression is all too common. Opposition to homosexuality in conservative countries is, of course, nothing new. But right now, partly in response to the increasing visibility of gay rights in the West, we're seeing a ratcheting up of anti-gay demagoguery and persecution throughout the world. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=is_homophobia_the_new_anti_semitism

as they pursued the Jews and Gypsies.

...anyone who they considered to not be "pure."

there is nothing "new" about homophobia and anti gay bigotry...

Homophobia is rooted in fear of loss of manliness, whatever that is.