Taking a Stand (or Not) on Iran

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Toppling one of the most murderously ant-gay regimes might seem a natural for progressives, but then they might be on the same side as Trump.

5 Comments for “Taking a Stand (or Not) on Iran”

  1. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    Toppling one of the most murerously ant-gay regimines might seem a natural for progressives …

    Ah, another Fox/RNC talking point.

    … but then they might be on the same side as Trump.

    Jesus, I hope he’s not planning on “[t]oppling one of the most murerously ant-gay regimines”, as you put it. I hadn’t heard that yet, but I think that President Trump is going to have is hands full not stumbling into a nuclear exchange with the North Koreans.

    The “Arab Spring” didn’t work out so well for us, and regime change didn’t work out so well for us in Iran the last time around, either.

    • posted by David Bauer on

      Public support for LGBT rights in Iran is almost nonexistent. Yes, part of that is because the current regime won’t allow support, but the Iranian public is generally hostile to LGBT rights, outside of some Iranian leftist (.I.e. Greens and Socialists) .

  2. posted by David Bauer on

    I’m not sure how a foreign military regime change in Iran would make things better for LGBT Iranians. But, then again, some homocons would rather be snake oil salesmen, who think that they will never get bitten by the snake.

    Also, if President Trump-KGB Inc really cared about LGBT rights, he would be making different policy decisions.

  3. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    Has anyone else noticed that Republican-aligned “libertarians” are becoming more shrill and frenetic as the Trump admininstration spins increasingly out of control? I see it of late, and I don’t think that I’m imagining it.

    I have no idea how to explain it, but when I see one-sentence posts tossed out into the public arena without spell-checking or proofreading (“murerously ant-gay regimines“) and raws appeal to emotion (e.g. @RichardGrenell “The side throwing gays off buildings is the side to be against.“), I suspect that something is afoot.

    Having been once burned by the “Arab Spring”, it seems to me that we should be twice cautious about jumping into Iranian regime change without analysis.

    Who are the protesters? What is their ideology? What is the likelihood of regime change? Is a more Western-style democracy the likely outcome, or are a military dictatorship or an even more radical Islamic regime the more likely outcome? What are the chances that regime change will make things better for gays and lesbians in Iran?

    The US and the UK overturned the democratically-elected Mosaddegh government in 1953, replacing it with the Phalavi monarchy, a repressive and tyranical regime, and the Phalavi regime was in turn overthrown by the equally repressive and tyrannical Khomeini regime. What are the chances that the next regime won’t be equally repressive and tyranical?

    I don’t know the answers to those questions, and I don’t see them being considered as the hyped-up Fox/RNC/homocon bandwagon rolls down the road.

    I look at the bandwagon and I can’t help but think of Mrs. McB, a lady from the small town in which I grew up.

    Mrs. McB was the matriarch of a wildly dysfunctional family, and every time things spun completely out of control at home, Mrs. McB would launch a crusade against the school system, claiming that the administrators and teachers were mistreating/abusing her children.

    Mrs. McB’s behavior was a classical example of anxiety-driven deflection, and I can’t help but wonder if that is what we have been seeing lately from Republican-aligned “libertarians” as the Trump administration spins out of control.

  4. posted by David Bauer on

    Not for nothing, but the Muslim Ban (and the general anti-immigrant climate) made it that much harder for LGBT Muslims to seek asylum in the united states.

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