Stories of the Islamic State throwing gay men off of rooftops headfirst and of Muslim hate preachers calling for the death of gays have been plentiful. Now comes another story of suffering, this time of the “terror-filled double lives that lesbians are forced to live in mainly Muslim Chechnya, where homosexuality is publicly condemned.”
The Sharia condemns homosexuality and renders it punishable by death.
“‘A Lot Of Girls Would Probably Rather Die’: In Russia’s Chechnya, Lesbians Tell Of Suffocating Existence”, Radio Free Europe (Thanks to The Religion of Peace), September 20, 2017:
The young woman was riding in a taxi to the airport when she decided to make the call. She had just left her home in Russia’s southern Chechnya region — for good, she thought, first on a flight to Moscow to pick up emigration documents and then on a plane out of the country.
But the taxi driver was eavesdropping. And when the woman told her friend she had run away, he locked the car doors and drove her back home, fearing potential consequences for his role in her planned escape.
The 22-year-old woman was a lesbian who claimed that her relatives had beaten and threatened her with death after learning of her sexual orientation. Within a week of the fateful taxi ride, she was dead. Her family says she succumbed to kidney failure. Some who knew her believe she was poisoned; but a close friend rejects that claim, telling RFE/RL that she had indeed suffered from kidney problems.
The woman’s case, first made public in a July report by a Russian rights group, highlights the often terror-filled double lives that lesbians are forced to live in mainly Muslim Chechnya, where homosexuality is publicly condemned and rights groups accuse authorities of carrying out a campaign of torture and murder targeting gay men.
There are no indications that such a campaign has been undertaken against lesbians in the region, which Kremlin-backed strongman Ramzan Kadyrov has ruled for a decade. Instead, lesbian and bisexual women often lead personal lives in complete secrecy — if at all — communicating with girlfriends via pseudonymous social-media accounts and dedicated SIM cards, and limiting their real-life contacts to a tiny circle of verified people.
Hovering over them is the pervasive fear of being outed and ostracized in a society where a woman’s reputation is considered a linchpin of family honor — or of falling victim to an “honor killing” in a putative bid to protect the family’s name.
The young woman who died in July after trying to flee, whom RFE/RL is not identifying due to the stigma and reported abuses lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people face in Chechnya, assiduously hid her sexual orientation. But somehow screenshots of her online conversations with her girlfriend and other friends ended up in the hands of her relatives, who became enraged.
The Russian LGBT Network, the St. Petersburg-based group that recounted her story in a recent report, quoted her as saying before her death that her brother had given her a gun and begged her to kill herself to save the family’s honor — and that her relatives would say it was an accident, not suicide.
“Kill me yourself if you want,” the woman recalled telling her brother, according to the report. “I’m not going to kill myself.”
Like ‘Coming Across A Unicorn’
The plight of LGBT people in Chechnya triggered international condemnation following an April report by the respected Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which alleged that gay men in the region were being detained, tortured, and in some cases killed in a coordinated campaign.
After that report, gay Chechens told RFE/RL and other media outlets of the abuses they had fled. Both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron raised the issue directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, the Canadian government secretly worked with rights activist to exfiltrate more than 20 LGBT people from Chechnya.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) says that when police in Chechnya returned most of the gay men allegedly targeted, they outed them to their families and indirectly suggested relatives carry out an honor killing……
mortimer says
Chechnya has special prison camps for lesbians and gay men. And no Western gay organizations seem to care about these abuses.
RCCA says
I think it’s fair to say their sexual orientation isn’t a “lifestyle choice.”
gravenimage says
Chechnya: “A lot of girls would probably rather die” — Lesbians live in “terror”
…………………………
God, I hate Islam.
Sarah says
Look, I get that this is victim blaming on my behalf and I do, sincerely, feel bad for the gays and lesbians of Chechnya – there is nothing wrong with being sexually attracted to someone of the same gender, in my view.
But come on people! You live in an Islamic hellhole, festering with sharia law rules! Its not rocket science to keep quiet about it. Yes, you shouldn’t have to be in fear of your lives and your safety – all over a SEXUAL PREFERENCE. I certainly agree wholeheartedly with that.
But its JUST a sexual preference. That’s about it. You can’t help it, its nothing shameful. But its nothing more than, what kind of person you like to bonk in the bedroom. That’s it. I wish the LGBTQ crowd would stop exaggerating their sexual preferences into an entire way of being.
Use your bloody brains! Don’t leave a record anywhere, whether online, or letters, or texting on your phones etc where you are discussing your SEX LIVES, in a nation that prescribes to an ideology that is more than happy to kill you.
While I do not equate pedophilia with the LGBTQ community whatsoever, it is a useful analogy in this respect in that, a ‘smart’ pedophile (may they burn for eternity for acting on their filthy desires) doesn’t leave a goddamn paper trail lying around wherein they chat away with their buddies about which kids they want to rape this week.
Unfortunately, pedophilia is far less of a crime than being gay or lesbian, according to Muslims. Hell, its not really a crime at all, to them. And when you live in an Islamic country, ‘them’s the breaks, folks’. Either deal with that accordingly, be smart and don’t leave a damn paper trail behind you – OR buggar off from there and go somewhere else to live your lives safe from being thrown off the side of a tall building.
So God help me, if I’m ever faced with a gay or lesbian Muslim who bitches about this treatment. Are these women, at risk in Chechnya, practicing Muslims? Because I just cannot think of anything more absurdly DUMB than a woman, wrapped in a spare bedsheet, praying away her days to Allah, whilst complaining about how her fellow worshipers want to murder her for breaking a cardinal rule of her faith – wherein the whole reason for the massive risks to her life and her safety all boil down to, she prefers the female touch in bed.
There really is, more to life, than sex and intimacy and having a partner. When it comes to this particular scenario, I’d think being celibate and single is a pretty good alternative, given the consequences.
I am straight – and I have very specific sexual preferences that I prefer in bed and insist on being a featured part of my sex life. But they don’t define me as a woman, or as a human being. They’re just sexual preferences.They’re things I like to do that get me off. Nothing more.
I do have empathy and pity for them, I truly do. But the cold, hard, brutal truth of the matter is – being gay or lesbian in an Islamic country is a terribly dangerous life. There is no point whinging about your rights – you don’t have any in an Islamic nation. That’s the reality. Keep your bloody sex life to YOURSELF and maybe, just maybe, there’s a chance you’ll skate through.
gravenimage says
Sarah, the idea that being prevented from loving another person is no big deal is *very* questionable.
Are you then also OK with Muslim forced marriage and “Honor Killing” for falling in love–since it doesn’t much matter, anyway?
I know that my husband is *very* important to me, and someone who told me my life would not be much different if I was married off to a Muslim rapist would be mistaken or lying outright.
Of all our rights, the right to choose who to love is a major one.
James says
Being gay is not a choice. Prosecuting (a neutral choice of word, BTW) people for being gay is as odious and tyrannical as prosecuting them for having red hair or green eyes would be. That some gay ppl in the West behave appallingly themselves does not change this.
Rev Donald Spitz says
About the only thing Muslims have right.
Homosexuality should be criminalized. Homosexuality is a crime against God, against the Holy Bible and against nature.
Leviticus 20:13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.
Eur says
you are a despicable person. Homosexual people have the same rights as the rest. It sucks to read comments like yours.
Carolyne says
Not very Christian of you, Rev. I think you are an abomination. It’s really no one’s business if a person is gay despite you Bible thumpers.
I
James says
Quoting Leviticus 20.13 is not a good idea for a Christian, for several reasons.
1. It is part of a body of law that was given to the People of Israel as a nation – not to the Church of Christ. The laws in the Torah have never bound anyone but Jews and priselytes, and the changes in Israel’s conditiion over the last 2500 years mean they cannot possibly be applied as they were. It is simply unreal for a Christian in the West today to treat them as though they were given to Western Christians today. They were not.
2, There is no Biblical basis for treating the penal law of OT Israel as having any force for the Christian Church, which unlike OT Israel is not a poilitically- defined nation. So it has no penal code, unlike OT Israel.
3, The the law gjven to Israel is a single body of laws, so it is incoherent to accept the laws that prescribe death for homosexual practiice, but not those that prescribe the law of Jubilee, of holy war, or the prohibition against mixing fabrics in clothing.
4. Nor does the person bound by the law of Moses get to say which parts he will obey, and which he will ignore. Those who want Leviticus 20.13 to be in force today, are following their own wills, not what Moses was given, for they ignore othet parts of the same Law that come with exactly the same authority. They cannot use the NT to cancel out one part of the OT while they accept another, because the NT is a completely different set of texts, which has no intrinsic connection with either the Torah in general or with that law in particular.
5. Christ did not re-promulgate the Law of Moses, and He certainly did not re-promulgate Lev. 20.13. What He did do, was summarise “the whole Law and the Prophets” in the 2 “great commandments”, of love for God and love for neighbour.
6. The Bible is not supreme for Christians – Christ is. And the NT simply ignores parts of the OT at times, and other times goes beyond it. For Christians tio stick with the OT, is to miss the “newness” of what God has done in Christ; it amounts to treating Christ as an irrelevance, or else as just another Jewish teacher.
7. Why should either homosexuality, or sodomy for that matter, be criminalised ? If being same-sex attracted is a choice, as so many Christians claim, then the answer is for those Christians not to choose it. Criminalising such things will certainly do nothing to lead people to love and value chastity.
8. Lev, 20.13 cannot be used against same-sex attraction, or against having a same-sex orientation, but only against same-sex copulation. Punishing the outward act leaves the attraction and the orientation unaffected. One would think that a Christian would be unsaisfied by such a superficial method of dealing with gay people.
Valkyrie Ziege says
; I don’t trust this, because this is another way to get Muhammadans into the country. All someone has to do is claim to be a homosexual, and they’re in the country as a misunderstood “refugee”, and they’ll do another “Pulse” night-club massacre.
We all know that Muhammadans manipulate decent people’s compassion mode, and decent people need an over-ride button on that compassion mode when dealing with Muhammadans, and their manipulative/controlling tricks.
Musalmaanmasala says
Homosexuals and Lesbians are rampant in Islamic society. Segregation of the sexes has led to this. It is brushed under the carpet as this hypocritical cult does not want to face facts. This happens in other religions where segregation is practiced like Jainism and Buddhism.
But the media being enamored with the West turn a blind eye and wink at this and do not report the same.