atheism is the answer. until we as a whole reject religion, these incidents will be recurring.
Doesn’t work. USSR murdered and prisoned both religious people and gay people alike. The answer is not being a fucking cockwomble, which is admittedly more easily done if you’re an atheist, but by no means is a guarantee.
agreed! but the path to not being a cockwomble aligns pretty well with the goals of a reason based, humanitarian, secular society.
if you don’t agree, what’s your path towards our common goal?
Don’t think you solve the problem of intolerance with bigotry towards religious people.
The article doesn’t mention anything about the group of men being religious, you’re just using this as an opportunity to attack religion because that’s something you hate.
Hatred doesn’t solve anything.
There is a really funny South Park episode about this… Bottom line is assholes will be assholes with or without religion, which is just a convenient excuse for assholery.
This sounds like something a member of the United Atheist Alliance would say.
We don’t actually know this, just because one southpark episode depicts it happening like that doesn’t mean it would. Religion has a lot of archaic beliefs that actively harm people. It would be a lot harder for someone to be motivated to hurt someone if they didn’t believe they had a reason to justify it.
There were assholes before religion. Putting an emphasis on it being the problem is naive, imo. History is full of secular assholes. I.e. nazis.
Homophobia and Atheism aren’t mutually exclusive to one another, hell I know plenty of Atheist Transphobes… some of whom used to be gay allies until they were radicalized by the Alt Right.
What makes you think this group of men were religious in the first place?
Not necessarily. Plenty of chill religious people and unchill atheists. Russian homophobia, for instance, is generally secular.
is it really, though? provide some evidence. and if it is, do you have a better solution to reduce bias?
Okay :)
The old homophobic laws of Russia, rooted in religion, were repealed under Lenin (Khoroshilova 2017). The reintroduction of crackdowns of homosexuals began during Stalin (ibid.). The Comintern began linking homosexuality to fascism and moral degeneracy under Stalinist leadership (Healey 2001, p. 183). Eventually, the USSR banned sodomy due to a conversation between Iagoda and Stalin, with Iagoda linking homosexuality to counterrevolution, degeneracy, corruption of the youth, and pedophilia (ibid., p. 184-187). This was then reinforced in propaganda by Gorky, who famously said “Destroy the homosexuals - Fascism will disappear” (ibid., p. 189-190).
I will skip over legal changes of most of the post-Stalinist era of the USSR, as they matter little in this context. What does matter is that the USSR continued to be strongly antitheistic and anticlerical. As a consequence, religiosity isn’t intense in Russia, and many aren’t religious at all (Agapeeva 2021).
Now let us look at modernity. Putin is allegedly religious, but his dislike of homosexuals is definitely secular in nature.
Analysis of his homophobic comments and the justifications of anti-gay laws reveal the same preoccupations of Stalin and Gorky. The law against being gay in public was described as preventing the propaganda of homosexuality towards children (Roberts 2013). In an interplay with nationalism, the LGBT movement is seen as an influence from the degenerate West, bent on corrupting the Russian youth. This is best seen in the designation of prominent Russian gay activists and organizations as foreign agents (Human Rights Watch 2021) or the use of the English word “gender” to describe things they despise.
Note how at no point have the protagonists of this story described homosexuality as a sin or invoked God. Indeed, the first half of this text is dedicated to Leninists.
Anecdotally, I see this in my personal life as a Russian emigre. Many people in my family hold minor homophobic views, framed typically as disgust, seen universally as Western and liberal in character. All of the Russians I have personally heard expressing a disgust or dislike of homophobia are atheists.
Now for the alternative solution:
According to Pettigrew and Tropp (2008), the three main ways of reducing prejudice against a group is through increasing understanding of that group, lessening anxiety about the group, and improving empathy towards that group, with the second two being stronger factors. Contact with the group accomplishes all three. This is supported anecdotally by tales of bigots changing their positions when they found out their own loved ones were gay.
One should note that a lack of empathy and high levels of anxiety about boogeymen are the hallmarks of a conservative worldview.
Therefore, combatting homophobia is best done through increasing visibility, which is the function of “outness” and pride parades, and through combatting conservativism and the reactionary gender roles that led to the birth of homophobic attitudes in the first place. This would in turn entail a battle against class society in general, but that is a discussion for another time.
Works Cited:
Khoroshilova, Olga. 2017. “1917 Russian Revolution: The gay community’s brief window of freedom”. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41737330
Healey, Dan. 2001. “Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent”. University of Chicago Press.
Agapeeva, Kseniya. 2021. “Religiosity During the Pandemic”. Levada.ru. https://www.levada.ru/2021/04/14/religioznost-v-period-pandemii/
Roberts, Scott. 2013. “Vladimir Putin says anti-gay Russian laws are about ‘protecting children’”. Pink News. https://www.thepinknews.com/2013/06/26/vladimir-putin-says-anti-gay-russian-laws-are-about-protecting-children/
Human Rights Watch. 2021. “Statement by Russian and International Human Rights Organizations in Support of Russian LGBT Rights Activists under Attack”. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/11/19/statement-russian-and-international-human-rights-organizations-support-russian-lgbt
Pettigrew, Thomas F., and Linda R. Tropp. 2008. “How does intergroup contact reduce prejudice? Meta-analytic tests of three mediators”. European Journal of Social Psychology 38 (6): 922-934. doi:10.1002/ejsp.504.
“cutting off people’s pinkies will reduce global warming”
“People with missing pinkies contribute just as much to global warming”
“Do they really though? Provide some evidence. And if true do you have a better solution to reduce global warming?”
People don’t need to have an alternative plan ready to go in order to point out that yours is ineffective.
Really? So why is that Krill East Orthodox Shaman announcing he hates gays every single week?
Also show me the religious Muslim who isn’t a homophobe
Up until fairly recently, Orthodoxy was not a strong influence on Russian life.
According to this Guardian article, British Muslims have no chill, but more than a few Muslims on the mainland are chill with gays, particularly in France.
You seem very centered on Abrahamic religions. Pretty much all Western neopagans are tolerant of homosexuals. Francis Cabral, a Jesuit missionary, recounts with disgust about how homosexual relations were tolerated by Japanese Buddhists. Hsing Yun, a Taiwanese Buddhist who died last year, specifically said that homosexuals must be tolerated. Haitian Voodoo has two deities associated with homosexuality. Various indigenous religions in America have similarly tolerant views, and the term “two-spirit” comes from them.
I know homophobes that are atheists. while religion being gone would decrease it, do not expect it to be gone just because of that. People will always have issues with people different than they are.
yes, but with religion out of the way, we can implement better education to reduce ‘otherism’ bias. i am convinced that the only obstacles stopping us from being better humans are all rooted in BS fairy tales.
While true they won’t have a belief system that backs it up, it won’t have the power behind it.
They will just create a different one, like the atheists that are homophobic have.
There are smart homophobes. They use science, however flawed it is, to promote their arguments. Cutting out religion would take care of the few vocal people who genuinely believe being gay is against their religion but it definitely wouldn’t take care of the larger problem which has always been xenophobia.
