The Queer/Muslim horseshoe
rainbow flags at pro-palestine protests=cognitive dissonance?
Reactionary conservatives haven’t shut up about the “cognitive dissonance” of LGBTQ folk supporting the Palestinian cause. “Stupid libs!” they proclaim. “They think they can copy and paste the same narratives of privilege and oppression that they use to defend the gay cause to the Palestinian one?! Don’t they realize that they would be beheaded in Palestine for carrying around their rainbow flags!”
This is usually how the headlines go…
More on the gay/Muslim horseshoe shortly [also, fyi we just unlocked our Dear Alana/Conversion Therapy piece so you can read it for free]. But this question is embedded within a broader one that many boomers and Gen X-ers continue asking me: why does my generation (I’m amongst the youngest millennials and oldest zoomers) tend to sympathize with the cause of the oppressed: queers, Muslims, immigrants, Palestinians, women, colonized peoples, people of color, etc? (Surely this is a gross generalization of my generation’s attitude…but it is one that applies to a considerable amount of us.)
The alleged cognitive dissonance of progressives who embrace the members of a religion whose moral teaching are not exactly “progressive” as an oppressed minority group has been a matter of debate for quite some time. The standard post-9/11 discourse about Muslims in the US has been shaken up by Muslims fighting against gender curricula in public schools on the grounds of defending their religious freedom (more on that in Lama Abu Odeh and past pod guest Shadi Hamid’s articles).
I respond to these questions as someone who feels himself to be both very much implicated in and distanced from the “worldview” of most of his peers…both sympathetic to and quite critical of it. At the end of the day, I am a product of my culture…