Beaten, Jailed, Tortured, Killed
Violence against LGBTQ people rises in the US and internationally
Violence against LGBTQ people in the United States and around the world is rising. Tragically, fueled in part by right-wing politics and political leaders, violence against members of many minority groups is mounting, and intersections of persecution are obvious.
Among LGBTQ communities, transgender people experience violence at the highest rates. According to Transequality.org, one in four transgender people in the US have been physically assaulted because of their gender expression. Among transgender people, women of color are the most vulnerable.
Here’s a very partial list of recent violence and persecution —
Jacksonville, Florida — According to reporting by the ACLU, four Black transgender women have been shot in the last six months. Three of them were killed.
Juazeiro do Norte, Brazil — Based on my personal contacts, violence against LGBTQ people has become so normalized since the presidential election of outspoken homophobe Jair Bolsonaro, that high schools and universities are becoming unsafe for LGBTQ youth. Youth advocates in Juazeiro tell me that “many” formerly open trans and gay teens have quit school due to violent attacks. One 16 year old told me in a personal interview that he’s afraid to leave his home.
Austin, Texas — Spencer Deehring and Tristan Perry were severely beaten last Saturday night for being gay. Four or five men surrounded them after they left a gay bar, taunted them with gay slurs, then punched and kicked them, breaking bones and teeth and causing internal bleeding.
Chechnya, Russian Federation — Roundups, beatings, and jailing of gay men have ramped up again. Reporting indicates that at least two gay men have been tortured to death in recent days. In a video address last week, Igor Kochetkov of the Russian LGBT Network, said at least 40 other people have been arrested and tortured.
Lagos, Nigeria — Just yesterday, high-ranking Nigerian police official Dolapo Badmos, posting on social media, warned gay people to flee Nigeria or face up to 15 years in prison. She urged citizens to turn gay people into the police. According to CNN, Badmos received “scores” of comments, most of them expressing support for the proposed prosecution of gay people.
Dallas, Texas — Dozens of gay men have been lured with Grindr and other dating apps, then robbed, humiliated, and beaten, sometimes severely. Two men were recently charged and jailed, but similar attacks continue.
The rise in violence in the US is linked to Donald Trump —
Rates of violence against LGBTQ people on the whole in the US started to rise in 2016, reaching a years-high peak in 2017 and continuing to rise, with 2018 predicted to be the most dangerous year for LGBTQ people since sometime in the 1980s.
The Anti-Violence Project’s recent “Crisis of Hate” report cites an 86 percent increase in homicides of LGBTQ people in 2017, with a total of 52 reported incidents. Violent assaults short of murder also rose dramatically.
Beverly Tillery, executive director of the Anti-Violence Project, recently told the Huffington Post that she blames Donald Trump and his normalization of bigotry for the rise in violent attacks.
There are more instances of violence because the climate in the country has changed. Trump won the election by saying it was time to take back America for people feeling pushed out by LGBTQ people, immigrants and people of color. It was a tactical move to attack those communities. It worked, and there are more instances of violence because the climate in the country has changed. It has given an opening for people to feel like they can commit acts of hate-based violence without much repercussion.
Whether or not Trump and his alt-right supporters are directly responsible for a rise in violence is debatable, but the correspondence is remarkable.
Around the world, the US is encouraging right-wing demagogues like Bolsonaro,
and doing nothing to discourage persecution of LGBTQ people. The US has abandoned its former leadership role (however anemic in places) in encouraging nations to treat LGBTQ people equally instead of persecuting them.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo conducted a three-day U.S. Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom last summer, for example, during which Mick Mulvaney, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, announced that America will no longer pressure African nations to repeal anti-LGBTQ laws.
Astonishingly, Pompeo and Mulvaney see that as an affront to religious liberty.
They apparently believe, as do the majority of Trump’s white, evangelical Christian allies, that religious liberty entails the right of Christians to hurt people, to throw people in prison because of who they have sex with, to impose their private religious beliefs on the public at large.
In fact, Tony Perkins, head of the hate group Family Research Council, extolled the conference in a radio interview with the Secretary of State. He openly calls for the United States to re-criminalize sex between consenting, same-gender adults.
With the rise of Trump and the drumbeat of “religious liberty,” conservative Christians in the US are fighting harder than ever for the right to stigmatize, shame, and even criminalize LGBTQ people. Mainstream thinkers are beginning to counsel LGBTQ advocates that the new US Supreme Court political alignment is going to enshrine religiously based discrimination againt LGBTQ people for the forseeable future, and that we need to accept that reality.
Discrimination and violence are on the march —
As I mentioned in a previous article, Sauron is lose in the land. The devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. Nothing could illustrate my point better than the example of Google, a company that prides itself on being inclusive and on rejecting hate speech and persecution of minorities.
The influence of conservative Christian religious-liberty hate mongers is apparently too intense for Google to resist. Even after vociferous public protest, Google refuses to remove an app from their play store in which a Christian group fraudulently offers up “conversion therapy” to “cure” same sex attraction and in the process calls gay men diseased, rutting dogs.
The app Google hosts features over-the-top vile insults and mischaracterizations of LGBT people. If it hasn’t spawned violence yet, I’d be shocked.
But such is the new climate of conservative hatred that we live in, that Google won’t follow its own internal policies and remove obvious hate speech from its platforms.
Google isn’t alone. More and more people are defending discrimination and bigotry as religious “freedom” or “liberty.”