At Religion Dispatches, Michelle Goldberg contends that homosexuals have replaced Jews as the stock figure to be hated by fundamentalists of all stripes:
Pressure from the developed world lets anti-gay leaders cloak themselves in anti-imperialist righteousness, in which gay rights become a decadent Western imposition that poor countries must be protected from. The Vatican justified its opposition to the [UN] declaration [decriminalizing homosexuality] by saying that it would “pillory” countries that ban homosexuality, creating “new and implacable acts of discrimination”—i.e., discrimination against countries that persecute and imprison gay people.
Beneath the globalization of the culture wars, though, lies something deeper—something that has led religious figures worldwide to project a torrent of fears and anxieties onto a small and often powerless minority. European Jews, once attacked as rootless cosmopolitans, have frequently been viewed as symbols of modernity. Today, homosexuality has displaced Jews as symbol and placeholder; as synecdoche for Modernism.
…Some cultures, particularly fundamentalist Muslim ones, lash out at modernity by enacting a system of gender apartheid, struggling to keep a brittle and obsolete order in place by force, and by railing against the hated and hatefully powerful phantasm of international Jewry. The kind of homophobia that has taken hold globally among conservative Christians combines elements of both prejudices. It blames the awful vertiginous flux of change on a group of insidious outsiders seen to combine occult worldwide power and profound sexual threat. Thus, even as gay rights and gay acceptance make huge advances in the developed world, homosexuality has become a scapegoat for the anxiety and terror wrought by the upheavals of globalization and urbanization worldwide.
Read the full post here.