Week 9 Response

Upon reading Puar's piece, I immediately thought of something I saw on T.V. a couple weeks ago, during the ABC show "What Would You Do?" If you're not familiar with the show, here's a quick summary: the producers fake a morally-iffy scenario in public and film how random people react to it. A while back, they created a scene where some actors were portraying a family that had dropped their son (who they perceived to be gay) off at a local restaurant to meet with their parish's pastor so that they could discuss pray-away-the-gay options. The son actor was mortified and yelling at the pastor that it was none of his business. Pretty much all of the random families that got filmed took the boy's side and insisted that the pastor was rude and discriminatory, but the last family interviewed was a Muslim one. The parents in the Muslim family expressed their opinion that homosexuality was immoral and a choice, while the Muslim boy in the family seemed to be extremely embarrassed by his parents and held opposite views.

The reason I brought this T.V. episode up was for its blatant pitting of Islam against homosexuality. It goes along with everything that Puar suggested in her article. The double standards of the United States, as evidenced by the T.V. episode I described, are absolutely atrocious. Islam is described as "unyielding and less amenable to homosexuality than Christianity and Judaism," even though Christianity and Judaism, for the most part, are extremely intolerant of homosexuality as well (Puar 13). Those making strides for gay rights in the world are very rarely from religious groups, whether Muslim or Christian. The United States hides its homophobia by allowing gays some rights and widely publicizing gay rights issues, but it manipulates gays by using them in the "'Islam versus homosexuality' tug of populations war" with a very rare genuine attention to gay rights (Puar 19). The most ironic part of the T.V. episode, which I think Puar would agree with, is that the pastor the boy spoke to was just as anti-gay as the Muslim parents, but somehow at the end of the episode, all the hate was directed towards the Muslims, and not the pastor. Moreover, the show seemed to be praising the Muslim boy for assimilating into American culture, in direct opposition to his Muslim parents.

This manipulation of gays exactly reflects what many previous authors, including this week's Enloe article, have said about the treatment of women to achieve political goals.