this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Hey, so I wanted to talk about this point a bit more. I’m LGBT+ myself, and I used to have issues with countries that are definitely not queer friendly. What changed my thinking about this was seeing how so-called progressive countries are far more harmful to us than most countries that have actual anti-LGBT+ laws.
The main example I would point to is Israel. I used to be somewhat supportive because I bought into the fact that they do give us some rights, whereas the main groups fighting for Palestinian people are not friendly to us. However, because of how many civilians are killed by Israel they objectively kill more LGBT+ people than Hamas or the PLA. A few years back there was a major bombing campaign against Gaza in which over 60 Palestinian children were killed. Statistically some of those kids would have grown up to be LGBT+ if they had been allowed to live. Now, being LGBT+ in Palestine is NOT a great situation, but it’s still better to be alive and have a chance to fight for better rights.
This applies even further for NATO and the US military. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan alone. Many of those people were LGBT+. Statistically the US war machine is the single biggest killer of people like us in the world.
This doesn’t even go into how our countries prop up anti-LGBT+ regimes like Saudi Arabia or the other gulf states. In the Israel example, they will entrap gay men and force them to act as spies, placing their lives in greater jeopardy. The recent burst of anti-LGBT+ laws in African countries are being funded and even written by American churches, churches which are untaxed and thus funded by the US government.
In geopolitics, the only thing countries care about is their interests. No state department cares about human rights in other countries, only that they get theirs.
I'm also replying to your bottom comment, and lots of you generally, but I can shit on everything antilgbt and still hate russia, and not like nato. It's not some fucking wild thing. Stop acting like people here are fucking ignorant of the world.
Hating Russia is fine. It might surprise you but I, and many other hexbear users, also hate Russia. There are a lot of issues and I'm not speaking to the beliefs of the person you were responding to, but part of my issue is that neoliberals tend to take "hating Russia" as an opportunity to swallow the most ridiculous claims made against them, including actual Nazi historical revisionism and soft Holocaust denial, and then just say "I can hate two things at once!"
This isn't directed at you -- I don't know your views -- but there are a lot of self-identifying "leftists" online who just love to disavow the US but then believe everything the US (or western bloc in general) says about its enemies. I consider this part of that broader phenomenon.
Again, not speaking for the other person or for you, just thought it was worth mentioning.