Feel the Spreading Freedom

[Trigger warning.]

Iraq's Newly Open Gays Face Scorn and Murder:

The relative freedom of a newly democratic Iraq and the recent improvement in security have allowed a gay subculture to flourish here. The response has been swift and deadly.

In the past two months, the bodies of as many as 25 boys and men suspected of being gay have turned up in the huge Shiite enclave of Sadr City, the police and friends of the dead say. Most have been shot, some multiple times. Several have been found with the word "pervert" in Arabic on notes attached to their bodies, the police said.

...The chief of a Sadr City police station, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak to reporters, said family members had probably committed most of the Sadr City killings. He played down the role of death squads that had once been associated with the Mahdi Army, the militia that controlled Sadr City until American and Iraqi forces dislodged them last spring.

"Our investigation has found that these incidents are being committed by relatives of the gays — not just because of the militias," he said. "They are killing them because it is a shame on the family."

He said families typically refused to cooperate with the investigation or even to claim the bodies. No arrests have been made in the killings.

But this shit doesn't happen in a void, and if indeed families are killing their own members in some kind of newfangled honor killing (like I just said in comments, misogyny and homophobia so frequently arrive hand-in-hand at the same parties), the "shame" used to justify that murderous hatred is fueled by religious leaders and by the police, even as they point their fingers at the families.

Clerics in Sadr City have urged followers to help root out homosexuality in Iraqi society, and the police have begun their own crackdown on gay men.

"Homosexuality is against the law," said Lt. Muthana Shaad, at a police station in the Karada district, a neighborhood that has become popular with gay men. "And it's disgusting."

For the past four months, he said, officers have been engaged in a "campaign to clean up the streets and get the beggars and homosexuals off them."

America didn't import homophobia to Iraq, but here's the problem: Because we're still chockablock with institutional homophobia ourselves, we've barely got a moral leg on which to stand in order to bring diplomatic pressure to bear in the country we continue to occupy.

Still, I'd nonetheless like to see Secretary of State Clinton "be really vigilant and outspoken in our total repudiation of those kinds of actions and do everything we can, including using our leverage on matters such as aid, to change the behavior so we can try to prevent such atrocities from happening," as promised.

Contact the US State Department.