Wednesday, January 27, 2010

selective silence

I meant to blog about this when I first heard about it, but for various reasons didn't.

When I went back to find the info now, it was strangely absent from most of the Internet world, except in the corners belonging to two unlikely comrades: gay rights groups and conservative blogs. Google/news turned up just about NOTHING.

So, here's the scoop.

After becoming President of the U.N. General Assembly last June, Dr. Ali Abdussalam Treki was asked his opinion on a proposed U.N. resolution decriminalizing homosexuality.

Here is his reply (which unfortunately can't be embedded):

YouTube video of Dr. Treki's comments:
homosexuality "not acceptable"

So, think about this for a minute.

In California, we all know (and if we don't know, we can look as far as the marathon Prop. 8 trial still happening in SF) that the GLBT community is a media pet. This is true, if not in the center of the country, at least up and down our coast and on the opposite one (on which coasts all the major media outlets make their homes).

The U.N. is another media pet, but I'm pretty sure that, had Dr. Treki's comments been made by a Christian counterpart (also note that Dr. Treki does not mention Christianity in his list of religions that might disapprove of homosexual practice -- even though the U.S. was notably NOT one of the 66 signatories to a Dec., 2008 UN resolution to decriminalize homosexuality), we would've heard about it.

If Prop. 8's David Boies and Ted Olson are right, Dr. Treki's words are backwards, discriminatory, hateful, offensive to fundamental "individual liberty."

Heavy charges for the human emblem of the world's largest international assembly.

So why haven't we heard about this? What kind of media trump card can counteract a hateful, discriminatory, anti-liberty attack on the West's favorite minority group?

Maybe this one: Dr. Treki is Muslim.

3 comments:

kenji said...

Yeah, there should have been some considerable media flak about that. Thanks for the notice.

kenji said...

One more comment though: Back when the Taliban was in power, I used to get all kinds of emails from various liberal lists trying organize letter-writing campaigns both to the Taliban and to our members of Congress to protest the Taliban's oppressive policies. So Muslims don't always get a free pass.

Emily said...

Good to know. Although I'm not sure about the efficacy of letter-writing campaigns. The military action over there would probably count as "protest."