The New York Observer today highlights an issue which has great importance in its own right, but which also has the potential to affect domestic patterns of political alignment: the extreme pathological hatred of homosexuality by militant Islam. The softness of the Democrats on fighting Islamism has got to be worrisome American homosexuals. While there are many conservative gays, some of them good friends of mine, the mainstream homosexual organizations decidedly lean leftward. This is something which could change. Excerpt:

...gays have become canaries in the ideological coal mine. Western liberals have tended to cut Muslim groups slack on their ideological pronouncements, in part out of sympathy with some of their causes—the insurgencies in Chechnya and the Middle East, for example—and in part out of a sense that anti—Muslim sentiment in the West is a more pressing problem than anything Muslims themselves might do.

But the rise of gay bashing on European streets has pushed the question of tolerance a step further and led some to question their reflexive defense of a put—upon minority. It has also opened up a heated debate within the gay community, and among liberals in general, over whether the proliferation of intolerant strains of Islam requires liberals in the West to take a harder line on issues like immigration and assimilation.

For some conservative intellectuals, rising anti—gay violence on the streets of Amsterdam, for example, comes as a kind of vindication.

"For liberals, the violent anti—gay hostility of their fundamentalist Muslim allies may be the first thing that really makes them realize they're not on the same page," said the conservative gay writer Bruce Bawer, who lives in Oslo, and who is writing a book entitled While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within.

Hat tip: Jack Kemp

Thomas Lifson  6 22 05