Donald Trump proposed an ideological test that would limit immigrants seeking admission to the U.S. to “those who share our values and respect our people,” saying: “Those who do not believe in our Constitution, or who support bigotry and hatred, will not be admitted for immigration into the country.”
Trump noted that such a test has been used during the Cold War as a basis for allowing immigrants to come to our shores, further inciting those who believe we were on the wrong side of that struggle.
LGBT activists immediately responded with condemnation and mockery.
Russell Roybal, deputy executive director for National LGBTQ Task Force Action Fund, told The Advocate that Trump’s proposal is a form of “thought-policing.” And, of course, progressives are never in favor of limiting expression and discussion.
The Human Rights Campaign issued a statement claiming that “What’s craziest about this ignorant, incomprehensible plan is that Donald Trump and Mike Pence would fail their own test,” because they met with evangelical Christian leaders who oppose same-sex marriage and favor allowing small business owners with religious objections to abstain from providing expressive services for same-sex marriages.
Whatever the merits of the Trump suggestion, the response highlights what many choose not to see: that a great number of immigrants from Muslim countries are intensely anti-gay (and hostile to Jews, and to women’s equality).
In the U.K., an ICM poll revealed that more than half of Muslims disagree with homosexuality being legal in Britain.
If a political party proposed allowing hundreds of thousands of anti-gay conservative Christians to immigrate to the U.S. from abroad, I suspect the response from LGBT progressives would be far different.
Bruce Bawer observed:
Here in Oslo, a gay couple who were holding hands in the largely Muslim neighborhood of Grønland were physically assaulted by a man who told them: “This is a Muslim neighborhood.” In a follow-up story, Dagbladet interviewed a local man, born in Pakistan but resident in Norway for ten years, who argues that “Grønland is a multicultural environment where there are many people who don’t like homosexuals, so they shouldn’t hold hands.” He says such things are OK in west Oslo, where there are few Muslims, “but here in Grønland they shouldn’t do it. Ideally, it should be forbidden to practice homosexuality in this area.”
There are those who have been quick to dismiss this as an isolated incident. On the contrary, it’s simply an indication that Norway is headed the same way as the rest of Western Europe.
He added, elsewhere:
One familiar response is: “Well, non-Muslims beat up gays, too!” Yep – indeed they do. Yet for a while there, in much of Western Europe, homosexuality was on its way to being a non-issue. In Amsterdam in the late 1990s, I was delightfully surprised to discover that when groups of straight teenage boys passed gay couples in the streets, they just walked past without any reaction whatsoever. The sight of gay people didn’t upset, threaten, amuse, or confuse them; the familiar, insecure urge to respond to open homosexuality with some kind of distancing, disdainful word or gesture – and thereby affirm to one another, and to themselves, their own heterosexual credentials – was simply not part of those kids’ makeup. For me, it was a remarkable experience. Amsterdam then seemed to me the leading edge of a new wave in the progress of human civilization.
Alas, it is now very clearly the opposite. The number of reported gay-bashings in Amsterdam now climbs steadily year by year. Nearly half Muslim, the city is a front in the struggle between democracy and sharia, under which, lest it be forgotten, homosexuality can be a capital offense. Things have gotten so bad there that even on the part of the exceedingly politically correct, there has been a degree of acknowledgment that something has changed, and is still changing.
As Douglas Murray wrote before this latest controversy, The gay community is in denial about Islamism. Or LGBT activists leaders are, at least.
More. An observation from Mallard Fillmore.