"Reaching Out Winnipeg, a group that helps LGBTTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer) refugees and asylum seekers get settled in the city, is preparing for the arrival of Syrian refugees. That is big-hearted of them, given Canada's Syrian refugees are limited to women, children and families, clearly excluding gay men and women, but they are not happy, and want a reversal of the no-male policy to allow for self-proclaimed gay men (presumably lesbians are at least partly covered by the 'single women' category). They are okay about banning straight Syrians. But please, don't discriminate against gentle gay guys. Only the straight ones....Interfering with other countries' internal affairs ends up doing more harm to those who face discrimination in those countries. Whatever their intent, international gay activists paradoxically end up replicating and even strengthening in other cultures the very situation of repression they set out to challenge in their own countries, as Joseph Massad argues in Desiring Arabs (2007).
Today the civilising mission of the "Gay International" (as Massad provocatively puts it) is to pluck individuals out of their social setting, forcing them to define their very essence according to certain acts, and then endow them with universal personal rights to perform these acts and encourage others to perform these acts wherever they like, be it in Teheran, Mecca or New York. Or Damascus. In pursuing this invasive policy, it continues the work of Christian missionaries, paving the way for the economic system that imperialism seeks to spread across the world, giving western forces more room to incorporate other societies into its domain, and in the process, rewriting history."
