Posts
The Lesbian Said What? has an excellent point. I don't know if she coined the term, sexual cleansing, but it is an excellent descriptor for what is happening in the world.
Here is how she defines sexual cleansing.
Sexual Cleansing is using extreme measures to suppress gays and lesbians. Hitler did it. During World War II he rounded up gays and put a pink triangle on them and sent them to concentration camps.
Sexual Cleansing is occurring today in Iraq and other countries. In Iraq there are death squads that shoot, hang, and torture people they suspect of being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered. Some Islamic clerics sanction these death squads. The fatwa, available on Sistani’s official Web site, puts it this way, “The people involved [in homosexuality] should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.”
In Nepal the police have beaten people who are transgendered. It is because they have deemed being transgendered immoral. The transgendered are called metis in Nepal. The police arrest them, beat them, make them strip off all their cloths and mock them while holding their genitals.
In South Africa a lesbian football (soccer) player was gang raped and murdered. In another incident a mob of men chased down and murdered a lesbian.
The example of the largest magnitude in my lifetime of sexual cleansing is how the Christian Right, Reagan, the Bushes, and Bill Clinton have used their AIDS policies to maximize the number of deaths of gay and bisexual men to their politically acceptable limits.
She also keeps us from letting our country off the hook.
It goes on all over the world. Lets not be so naïve that it doesn’t happen here in the United States in some form. Brandon Tina, Matthew Shepard, Paul Broussard, Lawrence King, Julianne M. Williams and Laura S. “Louie” Winans are some of the names of people who have been murdered in the Untied States for being gay, transgendred, or lesbian.
Some other countries should could have mentioned are Iran, Russia, India, and Saudi Arabia where sexual cleansing is all too common.
thanks, libhom for listing those people together this way. when I hear about them individually it's easier to lose site of the fact that it's such a pervasive [and growing] set of problems.
all put together this way helps me wake up to the war that is being waged against the glbt community.
I didn't coin the term 'sexual cleansing'. I was doing research for another post and came across an article that used that term.
C.
It's really sad. Though, I'm not new to the idea, it leaves me speechless every time.
On a more uplifting note: Great blog!