Posts made by Higgs

It may be true that the West no longer has a monopoly on gay rights (though the whole idea of 'gay rights' and even  'homosexuality' is - in my view - unquestionably a Western one). But nor does the West have a monopoly on decency and dignity - or even on 'progress'.  There may well be ways for sexual minorities to exist quite happily in non-Western cultures without embracing Western sexual identities or politics, including rhetoric about 'rights' and 'equality'.

The problem is that we live in a world where Western cultural and moral assumptions are still spreading globally, even at the moment when Western economic and military power is beginning to be eclipsed. Media and popular culture carry Western assumptions about sex and sexual identity, but Western nations no longer have the power to defend their worldview against reactions. This is doubly unfortunate for sexual minorities in many countries (like Uganda or Russia or Iran) which have existed happily for many centuries, but are now confronted on the one hand with labels and political rhetoric imposed on them from the outside, and on the other hand with a reaction from politicians who perceive them as an insidious foreign influence.

None of this, of course, is in any way to condone what is going on in Chechnya. But it may be that noisy condemnation from Western nations and from gay rights lobby-groups is doing more harm than good. Which raises a question: what do we want to achieve here? Do we want to end this police harassment and improve conditions for men who have sex with men in Chechnya? Or do we want to try to impose our own ideas about sexual morality and identity on another culture?

Although I suspect this won't be very popular, I want to suggest another possibility.

Chechnya - even more than the rest of Russia - is a conservative society where same-sex activity is tacitly tolerated but seldom talked about. The influx of liberal Western sexual ideologies and discourses has upset this fragile equilibrium, threatening to make homosexuality far more visible and openly accepted. This police clampdown on gay men in Chechnya was prompted by an application for a series of gay pride parades in the Muslim-majority Caucasus region. This kind of visibly-'gay' ideology is obviously foreign to Chechnya, and it has provoked a violent and repressive reaction. But the reaction is not simply a clampdown on men who have sex with men (which is hardly a new phenomenon, even in Chechnya). It is also, more importantly, an attempt to resist the incursion of Western sexual norms and ways of talking about sexuality.

And Chechnya is not the only place where this has happened. In Africa and the Middle East too, violent and repressive responses have emerged not simply to gay people, but to the attempt to 'import' Western notions of homosexuality and gay rights. Which makes me deeply suspicious of the complacent Twitter-warriors who think that more visible queerness is the way to help men who have sex with men in non-Western and non-liberal cultures. The fact is that banging the drum of gay rights and attacking indigenous attitudes to sexuality may simply be making their situation much worse.

It's not racist, but I would say it doesn't reflect well on you. At the very least, it seems superficial and rather tactless. Or at least, it does to me.

When you say something in a public forum, people may draw conclusions about you. They may draw conclusions about your depth of character, your intellectual capacity, your personal beliefs, your maturity and wisdom (or lack thereof). They may form conclusions about whether you are the kind of person they would like to get to know, or even meet fleetingly.

This goes a lot further than just the simple question of whether something is or is not racist. Another poster on this thread has said the following:Personally I would never date a Muslim, won't even be friends with them. And this poster defends this statement on the grounds that it is not racist. This is probably correct: the comment is not racist, but to my mind it reveals quite a lot about the character of the person who wrote it, and some readers will draw conclusions about him (I will assume it is a male - I don't know many women who write such things) on the strength of it.

Finally, I would add that while it is true that we all have preferences (and perhaps even prejudices!), we don't necessarily all have to say everything that we think. The fact that we may have the right to say something doesn't mean that it's a good idea. There is something to be said for moderating things we say, not only out of a wish to avoid causing offence (what we old-fashioned types used to call 'politeness' and is now sometimes labelled 'political correctness'), but also because we recognise that things we say might come back to bite us.  It's not always bold and brilliant and daring to say something just because it's true. Sometimes it's just being a jerk.

Mr Corbyn's choice of words was unfortunate, and he subsequently apologised for using the word 'choose.' It seems a bit petty, however, to pick out this one inopportune phrase in a whole frickin speech dedicated to expressing solidarity with the rights of LGBT people. In fact, it seems perverse. You'd almost think that people on Jeremy Corbyn's own side were trying to undermine him by any means possible, or something.

Moreover, I wonder if the LGBT movement is really this hyper-sensitive. Are we really so up our own collective arse that we throw a fit every time somebody uses the word 'choose' or 'choice' in conjunction with sexuality? Even when that person has laboured for decades alongside LGBT people? I can only imagine what these mental midgets would do if anyone dared to suggest that sexualities might be socially-constructed roles. Maybe some of us need to get over ourselves just a little bit.

Obviously it's possible. This shouldn't even be controversial - it's simply a matter of empirical fact. There are religious people who are non-heterosexual. In fact, there are quite a lot of them.  Indeed, it has been suggested that there is a phenomenon called 'gay religiosity,' which suggests that gay men (in particular) are more likely to be religiously active than the average member of the population. Why this might be is still controversial.

Obviously, some religious groups pose particular problems for gay members. And non-heterosexual members of some religions have additional issues to negotiate. These vary from one religious/cultural group to another.

But the simple answer to your question is, yes of course. It seems odd to me that anyone would even need to ask it.

Apropos of some of the responses here, I'm curious to know why shaming your brother with nude photos is more wrong or "fucked up" than shaming a total stranger (or a partner, or a celebrity) with nude photos.

If invading people's privacy is objectionable - and I for one think that it is - then it shouldn't matter whom you are "catfishing."

Spiders.