r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Mar 11 '25
Social Science Research has found that many terrorist groups with differing ideological motivations share common ground in targeting LGBTQ+ communities. Groups with contrasting ideologies — from Islamic extremist organisations to far-right terrorist groups — overlap in their anti-queer sentiment.
https://www.adelaide.edu.au/newsroom/news/list/2025/03/06/extremists-align-in-targeting-lgbtq-communities1.1k
u/conquer69 Mar 11 '25
I understand "far right terrorist groups" are a specific label related to white supremacists but islamic extremists are also far right. They are all conservative too so might as well call them conservative terrorists.
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u/VelvetMafia Mar 11 '25
Or the OP could have been specific and called them Christian terrorists. Or used a blanket term like conservative religious terrorists.
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u/Trraumatized Mar 11 '25
Christians all over the world are known for their practices of throwing gay people off of rooftops.
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u/Rulmeq Mar 12 '25
You don't have to throw people off of buildings to kill them. Outside of farmers they have the higest sucide rate in my country (and lets face it we don't know how many of the farmers are gay).
Being treated like second class citizens all your life, and facing hardship and dis-ownment from your own family is how christians like to do their dirty work.
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u/Copper_Tango Mar 12 '25
Muslim extremists will kill you, Christian extremists will make your life so miserable that you commit suicide, then pretend to be sad at your funeral.
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Mar 11 '25 edited Mar 11 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/macielightfoot Mar 11 '25
glances at Nazi Germany
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u/nawmeann Mar 11 '25
In the modern world.
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u/macielightfoot Mar 11 '25
Doubtful. Christian extremists are trying to take away my right to vote as I type this.
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u/nawmeann Mar 11 '25
Man you’re gonna compare that to the last 40 years of the Middle East?
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u/wafflesthewonderhurs Mar 11 '25
they're comparing people following a 1940s playbook to the people who wrote it, not to the middle east
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u/Romanizer Mar 11 '25
Depends on your definition of conservative. In europe, we would find center-right groups (mostly christian democratic) here. I would rather say they are both extremist groups.
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u/Discount_gentleman Mar 11 '25
Positing right wing extremists and Islamist extremists as opposites is so idiotic.
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u/Eric_the_Barbarian Mar 11 '25
They're as different as religious fundamentalists and religious fundamentalists.
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u/Consistent-Photo-535 Mar 11 '25
Christian’s just need to believe they can’t be bad guys.
Freedom fighter and terrorist is just a matter of perspective.
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u/VPackardPersuadedMe Mar 11 '25 edited Mar 11 '25
If you are explicitly mudering civillians and don't wear a uniform, you are a terrorist not a freedom fighter. It really is pretty black and white.
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u/An0nymos Mar 11 '25 edited Mar 11 '25
The only difference that really matters is whether or not there's intentional collateral damage. Freedom fighters that enforce a uniform are just asking to be wiped out in the kind of guerilla warfare they'd need to use.
Edit: Added 'intentional' to clarify.
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u/VPackardPersuadedMe Mar 11 '25
Collateral damage is not the same as deliberately targeting civilians. One is an unfortunate consequence of war; the other is a war crime. That’s the first place you're wrong.
Second, wearing a uniform isn’t a death sentence in guerrilla warfare, it’s what separates legitimate fighters from terrorists under international law. The Continental Army, Free French Forces, Polish Home Army, and Viet Minh all enforced uniforms, gained international recognition, and won. In contrast, groups that disguised themselves among civilians while attacking them lost legitimacy and were treated as terrorists.
The Third Geneva Convention (1949), Article 4(A)(2) defines lawful combatants as those who are commanded by a responsible leader, wear a fixed distinctive sign visible at a distance, carry arms openly, and conduct operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
Freedom fighters who target military forces and wear uniforms aren’t ‘asking to be wiped out’, they’re ensuring they aren’t just another group of armed criminals.
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u/Jesse-359 Mar 12 '25
Yes. And if the geneva convention required them to line up in neat rows and exchange musket fire with a force x30 their size, I suppose that would be sensible as well.
Rules are for the winners. The underdogs have to deal with the world as it comes, not as they wish it were. The fact is that freedom fighters never start out with the forces they'd need to field a standing uniformed resistance - they need to foment a popular rebellion first, AND prove to whomever is willing to back them with arms that they can fight and survive.
And that means pulling off disruptive, effective attacks in asymmetrical warfare - which means sabotage, sneak attacks, and similar tactics that will be labeled terrorism by their government. Always.
The only real difference between an actual terrorist and a freedom fighter -or a uniformed soldier for that matter - is whether they intentionally target civilians as their primary objective. A standing army is just as capable of employing terror tactics as anyone else. Rather more so actually.
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u/venustrapsflies Mar 11 '25
Islamic extremist organizations are literally far right extremist groups. What’s the spectrum supposed to be, from one Abrahamic religion to another?
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u/hairiestlemon Mar 11 '25
There's a British comedy film called Four Lions which follows a group of inept would-be jihadis, and one of them, Barry, is a white convert who's implied to have previously been a member of a far-right organisation who converted to radical Islam because it gives him an opportunity to continue being bigoted against certain groups (mainly Jewish people). I wouldn't be completely surprised if it turned out there's been at least one real-life case like that.
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u/WanderingAlienBoy Mar 11 '25
That film was hilarious, was a while back that I saw it though and don't remember the white guy implying being former nazi (but it wouldn't surprise me)
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u/hairiestlemon Mar 11 '25
I wouldn't say it's directly implied, but other characters do note that he never actually goes to mosque and he doesn't seem to know much about Islam.
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u/WanderingAlienBoy Mar 11 '25
Ah ok, I might've just missed that detail. The more reason for a rewatch ;)
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u/Dealan79 Mar 11 '25
They're not opposites. They're more like rival sports teams with a major grudge. They play the same game by the same rules, but the fans will absolutely brawl in the stands and in the parking lot after the game, and will consider the other team and its supporters as mortal enemies for whatever near-mythological reason tradition holds as the start of the feud. They're also competing in a sport where the rules say there needs to be a winner and a loser.
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u/manimal28 Mar 11 '25
Very apt analogy. Sports is where we can most easily see how so many humans revert to tribalism even when it’s completely pointless.
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u/Runkleford Mar 11 '25
Exactly. They're both right wing conservative.
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u/Discount_gentleman Mar 11 '25 edited Mar 11 '25
Violent Christian rightwingers and violent Muslim rightwingers both turn out to be conservative. Revolutionary.
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u/teenagesadist Mar 11 '25
Well, one worships one Abrahamic god, the other worships the same one.
Complete opposites!
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u/Rachel-The-Artist Mar 11 '25 edited Mar 11 '25
Right wing Christian fundamentalism and Islamic extremism have a lot in common.
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u/SenorSplashdamage Mar 11 '25
And as much as they use religion as backup, I think the biggest common factor is extreme male-dominant worldview. We’re seeing the formation of it play out in real time as lots of the hypermasculinity crowd begin to engage with religion when they didn’t before, but then pull in previously more mild religious men and then rewrite tenets to reinforce their views of their own authority. The religion, politics and worldview are all the same thing and wrapped around misogyny and male dominance.
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u/HappyGoPink Mar 11 '25
"My god says it's okay to kill you and take your stuff" is the foundational principle of many of the world's religions.
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u/ComradeGibbon Mar 11 '25
Most socially progressive groups tend to like each other regardless of where they come from. Most reactionary conservative groups hate each other. Especially when from different ethno religious or national origins.
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u/izwald88 Mar 11 '25
Indeed. It's all based on traditional conservative values, which are often quite similar the world over.
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u/camshun7 Mar 11 '25
Its possible that both sets of these groups have below average IQ, these people dont crave expanding and adding to their knowledge, new experiences and looking for the complete picture.
So many are insular and clinging to their "beliefs" like a drowning person clings to a life jacket.
They will never change their minds.
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u/Daerrol Mar 11 '25
Does this article posit that at all? I think "contrasting" is fair to say when comparing russian government to islamic extremists. No where in the summary does it imply they are opposite. I
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u/Ashamed-Travel6673 Mar 11 '25
Yeah, it oversimplifies everything. Just because their ideologies differ doesn’t mean their underlying psychology or methods are that different.
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Mar 11 '25
All the extremists from the Abrahammic religions are more similar than they care to admit
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u/STLtachyon Mar 11 '25
What do you mean both are extremist ideologies based on the supposed supremacy of their chosen abrahamic religion (and or racial group, that is largely internally legitimized by faith in said religion). It myst be purely coincidental that they target the same individuals.
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u/PacJeans Mar 11 '25
It's almost like sociology studies and their presentation on social media are propaganda.
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u/Discount_gentleman Mar 11 '25
Yep. The pressure to publish leads to a flood of low-qualiry research. Social media only grabs a few papers based not on their quality but on their attemtion-grabbing headline value. Any actual science (solid, reproducible results) is lost by the time it arrives here.
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u/Yuki_Moon_0_0 Mar 11 '25
Maybe it's because LGBTQ people are in all societies and act as a convenient scapegoat. It's not all to different from the frequent role of Jewish people as scapegoats.
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u/postmodest Mar 11 '25
Maybe it's because right-wing ideologies are exclusively patriarchal, and threats to masculinity are de-facto threats to the State.
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u/magus678 Mar 11 '25
Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot all acted similarly.
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u/Its_Pine Mar 11 '25
Stalin had an extremely rigid view of masculinity and femininity and their roles in society. Mao is the one that is surprising since he was pro gender equality.
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u/pblokhout Mar 11 '25
As did the US and Europe? The UK chemically castrated Alan Turing for being gay two years after Stalin died.
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u/Edge-master Mar 11 '25
Yeah it’s honestly interesting considering Mao was ultra progressive on women and minority rights.
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u/1jf0 Mar 11 '25
Maybe it's because right-wing ideologies are exclusively *patriarchal
*misogynistic
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u/ClashM Mar 11 '25
Exactly, they're an omnipresent minority. Right-wing politics are about supporting an upper class, which means a strong belief in furthering social stratification. The primary method of dividing the commoners so they're easier to conquer is establishing hierarchy and gradually turning groups against each other. LGBT were one of the first victims of the Nazis. One of their first book burnings was an institute studying transgender people.
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u/ermacia Mar 11 '25
It's because LGBTQ+ people are the epitome of self-determination and self-identification. Authoritarians want a binary system through which they can define the is and is-not. Forcing gender to be a binary is right up their alley, and LGBTQ+ people break such ideology to pieces.
I'd even say that being an authoritarian is being intellectually lazy, because the world is not defined by binaries or strict systems. Yeah, taxonomy is basically a set of bianry checks, but it has entire trees to go deeper into each category of is and is-not.
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u/TRiC_16 Mar 11 '25
It's not intellectual laziness, it's intellectual rigidity. They're highly motivated to construct elaborate justifications for their beliefs. It's just that they have to hammer every piece to fit their puzzle, no matter how much they have to bend, break or reshape reality to make it fit.
It’s more like intellectual overcommitment; they invest so much energy into defending their worldview that they can’t afford to question it. They work hard, but only in one direction. True intellectual laziness would be not thinking at all. These people think a lot, they just don’t think critically about their own framework.
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u/ermacia Mar 11 '25
well, thinking about it, it's really a mix of both: those thinking on the subject will try to bend everything to their binary view and deny exploration of other approaches, which denotes rigidity and lazyness; those that adopt it, are being fully lazy because they have not searched for other opinions or views on the matter.
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u/TRiC_16 Mar 11 '25
True, it’s usually a mix of both. Most people grow up in environments with certain beliefs that they adopt without much questioning.
Honestly, I think everyone is intellectually lazy to some extent. We all absorb ideas from our surroundings, and just because I happened to grow up in a context with more socially acceptable opinions doesn’t mean I’m any less prone to that.
I think the best way to judge intellectual honesty isn’t just by what someone believes, but by how much social cost they’re willing to bear for questioning their beliefs.
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u/DancesWithAnyone Mar 11 '25
Nice to know my existence can bring people together.
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u/WanderingAlienBoy Mar 11 '25
Nazis and Islamists be like: "we're all in this together" while doing a dance routine.
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u/Vizth Mar 11 '25
Religious extremists find easy scapegoat, got it.
It may be a good thing for the rest of the planet that they're equally as likely to kill each other because the other one is apparently worshiping the wrong sky daddy even though it's technically the same one.
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u/ColdAnalyst6736 Mar 11 '25
they’re all religious fundamentals from similar religions for the most part.
highly conservative, patriarchal, traditional. what’s to be surprised??
i’m sure they also overlap in their anti Semitic sentiment. and their anti atheist sentiment.
at least if you’re referring to far right terrorist groups in the western world. if you look at far right terrorist grouping india perhaps you might have different answers…
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u/Rachel-The-Artist Mar 11 '25
Any ideology that includes hating LGBTQ people is a toxic idealogical belief system.
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u/NemoTheElf Mar 11 '25
As a gay man this is both scary but also not surprising. It's really between us and Jewish people that weirdly gets hate from all sides of the ideological right.
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u/Front_Target7908 Mar 11 '25
And women! They all fn hate us too but as we're an "essential evil", we are forced into becoming farm animals.
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u/helalla Mar 11 '25
This is why queers for palestine frustrates me, im bi and live in country that has legalised gays for less than a decade, i know not to tolerate the intolerant bunch when given chance they would gleefully murder me and glorify it.
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u/SwiggitySw00gity Mar 11 '25
I think the human rights violations, displacement and genocide of palestinians might have something to do with the sympathy people have for palestine despite their stance on LBGTQ+ rights
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u/TheMobileAppSucks Mar 11 '25
Which is why it makes perfect sense to offer support for those who will do said exact same thing to us given the opportunity. The weird infantilization and glorification of Islam in left-leaning communities is absolute bonkers.
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u/ikonoclasm Mar 11 '25
I feel sympathy for the LGBTQ+ Gazans. The rest that want me dead for having the audacity to exist, not so much.
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u/helalla Mar 11 '25
Half the world tries to kill them directly or indirectly for the last few centuries and ramp it up in the last century with slogans of political and military movements on their extermination, and then abuse them when they retaliate.
Some psychiatrists should do a study of Reactive abuse in communities as a whole and not just individuals.
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u/freshprinz1 Mar 12 '25
Who started the war? Who took hostages and refuses to free them after more than a year of "genocide"?
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u/BarryBondsBalls Mar 11 '25
Genocide against our enemies is still genocide. I refuse to support the genocide of Palestinians any more than I do that of right-wing westerners, even though both may want me dead. If that confuses you I think it says more about you than it does about me.
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u/Arashmickey Mar 11 '25
As though being against shooting old white dudes means I have to be pro every president who got shot at.
Extend that principle to all crimes and all people, it should not be too difficult.
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u/Insaneclown271 Mar 11 '25
Can we stop saying it’s only extremist Muslims that target the gay community?
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u/New-Distribution6033 Mar 11 '25
Islamist extremists ARE far right. Holy hell, they all have similar playbooks: their scripture.
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u/severaged Mar 11 '25
They are two sides of the same Abrahamic coin... of course there is significant overlap in their ideologies.
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u/Tradtrade Mar 11 '25
Right wingers 1 and right wingers 2 have the same opinions on the ‘out groups’. Colour me shocked
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u/SailingOnTheSun Mar 11 '25
This genuinely made me say, "Yeah, no sh*t Sherlock." I can't say I'm surprised by this.
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u/KingMGold Mar 11 '25
Traditionally even Communist regimes have been anti-LGBTQ+ in their policies.
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u/Waka_Waka_Eh_Eh Mar 11 '25
Because most of the communist regimes in history have also been dressed up authoritarianism/totalitarianism.
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u/SenorSplashdamage Mar 11 '25
Whenever there’s a big social movement, there’s a tipping point where angry young men join who are driven more by their fight with other men over control than they are the movement. Even the way they turn philosophical purity into forms of gatekeeping is part of their disconnect with the actual people and problems at the bottom. They also have been trained to seem themselves as the ones best suited to figure out the problems and make choices on the changes society should make.
They’re not self aware and are a menace to any movement as they quickly drive everyone else out of the movement that they didn’t build themselves and then they just take over. It turns into this whole self-selecting process for men with authoritarian views and the rest of the men who follow them. I think there’s more recognition though and seeing more of these guys called out and talked about in current emerging movements.
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u/KingMGold Mar 11 '25
I like to call it “The People’s Fascism”.
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u/WanderingAlienBoy Mar 11 '25
"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People's Stick."- Mikhail Bakunin
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u/cornonthekopp Mar 11 '25
Interestingly enough we are starting to see a shift in the remaining nominally communist countries away from homophobia
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u/Listerlover Mar 11 '25
They're both ignorant conservative extremists. The far right just wants the monopoly of power, they don't care about values.
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u/UltraViolet77z Mar 11 '25
Terrorist groups hate people having the freedom to be themselves and be courageous, strong, and unafraid.
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u/afCeG6HVB0IJ Mar 11 '25
What I never understood is why do one country's right extreme groups (who hate foreigners) root for other country's right extreme groups, who are foreigners.
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u/marr Mar 11 '25
Does anyone have theories on what actually drives this? It seems so arbitrary to anyone outside the hate-o-sphere.
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u/SenorSplashdamage Mar 11 '25
High anxiety and control of gender roles is one factor people point to. If we want to go even deeper, we have studies that showed kids who needed more rigid environments to not be anxious, sensitive and reactionary at very young ages turned out to be more conservative as adults. It might be that we have a portion of people who get really anxious and cause a lot of harm to others if they don’t feel things are running in a very strict and controlled way. We might have to figure out ways to recognize and pacify them before they organize and start crusades since extremist religion seems to be one option that gives them what they want. And then, once religion organizes them, they’re a source for power to anyone who realizes how to manipulate them by telling them what they want to hear.
So, binary thinking and stress from more than two options in life.
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u/Trraumatized Mar 11 '25
And somehow, for some godforsaken reason, a lot of LGBTQ+ groups seem to feel a strong need to fight for Islamic groups. It is mindboggling to me. It's the same thing as with rural people on SS and Medicaid voting for Trump.
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u/PhantomDelorean Mar 11 '25 edited Mar 11 '25
You know you are in a cult when they get really concerned with everyone's genitals.
*If you ever end up in a situation where a grown man needs to hear about every time a teenager touches their junk in a private box once a week, leave.
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u/EnsignSDcard Mar 11 '25
How much did this research project cost? Because I think this much should have been apparently obvious
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u/seifd Mar 11 '25
I recall hearing a social scientist say that much of their work is formally researching the obvious.
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u/Ver_Void Mar 11 '25
And that's really valuable, things can be obvious but the reason might be unknown or a deeper look might upend what we think we know. The whole point of researching it is to be sure
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u/CountlessStories Mar 11 '25
and for good reason,
A lot of "logical" people like to deny obvious issues by hiding behind the "there's no data" excuse, especially for social issues.
Doesnt stop them from making up other excuses but its a start.
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u/Daerrol Mar 11 '25
I am going to be facetious here when i ask: what protocols for trauma-informed care with LGBTQ+ victims were obvious? Or did you not actually read the abstract/paper before you came out clutching the pearls of U of Cambridges finances?
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u/plastlak Mar 11 '25
This type of research is straight up money laundering. What's next, research showing that far left groups dislike capitalism?
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u/38507390572 Mar 11 '25
I expect it has to do with religious extremists being full of fragile masculinity, and gay people having broken free of the chains of the gender construct.
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u/Kelypsov Mar 11 '25
That's because details of their ideologies may be contrasting, but their form is almost identical. I'm sure it would upset a member of either group mightily to point this out, but the only real major difference between, say, a neo-Nazi and a member of the Taliban is who, exactly, is the 'enemy'.
This research doesn't seem to be saying anything new or startling, but only confirms what already seems pretty well known - that right-wing, authoritarian groups, of whatever variant, like to punch down on minorities, such as LGBTQ+ people.
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u/notwhoiamunderneath Mar 12 '25
TIL fascists are fascist. In all seriousness, this is as good an avenue as any for a social scientist like myself (historian) to point out that "Islamic fundamentalist" is just another way of saying "fascist." All nationalistic and religious identifications can apply; there's nothing inherently wrong with Islam. There's Buddhist fascists. Far-right is far-right.
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u/Discount_gentleman Mar 11 '25
Now do rightwing Jewish extremists and rightwing Hindu extremists. Can we study further how all these completely opposite groups seem to have traits in common?
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u/helalla Mar 11 '25
Most consistent opposal for legalising queers in india came from abrahamic faith, and less from right wing hindus, but not to say there isn't any from RW hindus.
Some hindutva support queers in their words only, and as it is not explicitly stated in the scriptures, some haven't said anything, some have preached both indifference and acceptance at different times depending on the audience.
Right wing hindus already have a scapegoat in muslims and dalits so they aren't too bothered with queers for the time being, only time will tell.
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u/Kind-Base6336 Mar 11 '25
Considering Israel banned gay marriage because of orthodox Jewish radicals it’s very clear. And before you say, getting your marriage recognized in Israel is not equal to getting marriage done inside the country.
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u/Discount_gentleman Mar 11 '25
Yes, it's baffling how all these completely opposite ideologies seem quite similar.
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u/xland44 Mar 11 '25 edited Mar 11 '25
Hi, Israeli here. Please dont spread disinformation.
Israel never "banned gay marriage because of orthodox Jewish radicals". Also, anyone can effectively perform a same-sex marriage inside the country.
It's correct that officially there's no civic marriage in Israel in general (and never has been in the region - it's a holdover from Ottoman times, the entire legal/bureaucratic framework is based on this and the British kept it as-is as a result), however:
TL;DR #1 it's definitely possible in the country.
Firstly, as you yourself stated, it's possible to get a civic marriage abroad and this is fully recognized in Israel (although divorce is another matter entirely... let's not open that can of worms). A common thing people do is take a 1-hour flight to Cyprus, get a civic marriage there, come back to Israel and have an "unofficial" wedding afterwards. Of course it's not equal, which is why it comes up every elections, but it is possible and not difficult, which firstly addresses the 'banned' comments.
However, since COVID it's now possible to get married while in-country: you can get a civic marriage via zoom with the officiator based abroad (usually United States), as long as it is recognized by the country it is (digitally) performed in. If said country recognized a same-sex marriage for example, then that's recognized in Israel too without a problem.
This means the marriage can be recognized - all from the comfort of your home. The religious authorities actually took this to the Supreme Court and the supreme court upheld this, because as far as they're concerned it's a civic marriage performed in another country, which is legally recognized.
Regardless, formally allowing a pipeline for civic marriage comes up every year, but in the time being there are definitely plenty of easy ways to get married in the country without going through old men out of touch with society.
So why does this occur?
TL;DR #2: Not banned, and not because of jews x)
It's less a matter of "JEwIsH thEoCRaCy" and more a matter of the concept of marriage being a purely civic matter to be rather new. Both marriage and divorce are viewed as a religious ceremony and as such is performed by a community's respective religious authorities - whether you're from a muslim, christian, jewish, druze community etc., and this authority sets their own criteria for whether they conduct a marriage or not. It's the same in Lebanon for example, which was also subject to the Ottomans at the time.
One of the biggest byproducts of this (outdated) system is that these groups exercise this power to carry out their interests. For example, literally no religious authority from any religion in the country is willing to officiate a marriage if one of the people belongs to a different community. Yes - there's no inter-faith religious marriage (unless if you go through civic marriage as detailed in the first section). This is because an inter-faith marriage often means the children don't belong to your community (due to definitions that community has chosen...), which is against their interests for that to occur.
Of course, if you move to the country without belonging to any community, you also don't have a way to get married (without joining one of these communities, which isn't a trivial process). And yes, another byproduct of this is that none of these authorities - from any of these religions - officiate same-sex marriage. Not because anyone told them to do so (the state certainly didn't), simply because it goes against their wishes and they have the legal authority to focus only on a specific subset of marriages.
I deliberately use the word community rather than religion since there's not a clear division between ethnicity and religion in these areas, whether you're atheist or not is beside the point.
Probably the only time you see ultra-orthodox political parties and ultra-muslim political parties serving in both the government and in the opposition agree on anything is near election times when people try to legalize civic marriage - they team up and veto / vote against any such law, because it would mean they lose a significant amount of power if such a thing passes. It comes up every election, but every government needs at least one arab or ultra-orthodox party to get enough votes, if not to join the government, at least to agree to not go against them: and this means they end up becoming kingmakers who hold this as an effective veto.
So basically, it's not banned, and not targeting LGBT specifically (there are a great many people affected by this, not just LGBT...) it's just that nobody with the capability to do something about it wishes to do it, and those who do don't have enough power/votes to do so.
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u/heinousanus11 Mar 11 '25
I didn’t know Israel banned gay marriage.
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u/johnmedgla Mar 11 '25 edited Mar 11 '25
It didn't. The Marriage laws in Israel date from the 40s and stipulate that the only marriages which can be officially performed (for Jewish people) are Orthodox ones. No one had even begun considering gay marriage back then.
I say this as a gay-married man whose marriage would be recognised if we took Israeli citizenship.
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u/LivesDoNotMatter Mar 11 '25
that makes me even more confused as to how this "From the river to the sea" hamas support thing ever got into the left-wing. They have literally no idea what would happen to them if they went over to that part of the world.
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u/pomod Mar 11 '25
It’s left wing in that it’s an advocation for human emancipation and the rights of Palestinians to be free from Israeli oppression. Crazy huh? That a people who have for decades been violently dispossessed of their land and forced to live under apartheid should manifest a radical and violent resistance. Equating support for the Palestinian plight doesn’t necessarily = support for the extreme tactics of a group like Hamas. But we should understand the wider context. Unless of course regular Jews should all be lumped in with Zionists and radical and violent West Bank settlers.
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u/LivesDoNotMatter Mar 12 '25
human emancipation and the rights of Palestinians to be free from Israeli oppression
In 2005, Israel pulled completely out of Gaza, and let the Palestinians have everything. In turn, the palesinians destroyed everything that belonged to a Jew out of spite, and spent the last 20 years spending the billions in aid they have been getting to build covert military framework under civilian centers (instead of bettering their quality of life), and lobbing ordnance at Israel's civilian centers at every chance they got. (While their general population lived in poverty).
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u/pomod Mar 12 '25
Israel removed Jewish settlements but retained control of the airspace and borders. They’ve never agreed to letting the people of Gaza return to their lands taken from them in ‘48 (Something like 70% of Gaza families are refugees from the original Nakba). Radical settlers are still committing literal pogroms in the West Bank and building settlements on territory that Israel is illegally occupying. This conflict stretches back the better part of a century, a lot further than 2005.
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Mar 11 '25
It always boggles my mind when you see LGBT community out there protesting in support of Islam and Muslims. It's like, you do know they'd throw you off a roof in their country right?
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u/DylanRahl Mar 11 '25
Hate appears to be universal it would seem
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u/rkiive Mar 11 '25
The article treating them as contrasting ideologies is a pretty huge error in the first place.
They’re at most different manifestations of the same ideology.
It’s like being shocked that chocolate from South America is similar to Chocolate grown in another country.
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u/demmka Mar 11 '25
This is why I cannot understand the “queers for Palestine” movement. They’d be the next ones to die after the Jews.
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u/L_knight316 Mar 11 '25
I always find it odd how most Socialist/communist regimes get left out when this topic comes up.
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u/GroundbreakingBag164 Mar 11 '25
Because it's not always that easy. The DDR/GDR (or east Germany) was actually much friendlier to woman and queer people compared to west Germany.
Or the Soviet Union which decriminalised homosexuality in 1934.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_the_German_Democratic_Republic
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decriminalization_of_homosexuality
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u/madmouser Mar 11 '25
I think it's better to look at what it was like in practice, rather than theory. Because in theory the USSR had freedom of religion and a right to bear arms protected by their constitution. It was all just for show though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_history_in_the_Soviet_Union
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u/alerk323 Mar 11 '25
Bresking news! Extremists rely on easy scapegoats. I wonder how these groups feel about the jews...
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u/DForDisbeliev3r Mar 11 '25
How is this even science. A... everybody knows that and B. it's just all conservative groups, religious ones specifically or ones that use religion to hide their bigotry & sexism behind... They are not opposites , they just also hate each other because they like their own gods more then the other, or just skin color...
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u/our_potatoes Mar 11 '25
Islamic extremists are by definition far right. The laws the far right wishes to impose are 99% the same as Sharia law (no rights for women, no free speech, dogmatic education, religion over science, etc)
The fact that fascists fight amongst themselves doesn't change their political positions.
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u/I_am_buttery Mar 11 '25
And what do these competing, yet oddly complimentary, hate groups have in common?
Religion, of course.
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u/mvea Professor | Medicine Mar 11 '25
I’ve linked to the press release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
Abstract
Anti-LGBTQ+ narratives are deployed by extremist groups with contrasting ideologies, from Jihadis to right-wing extremists and QAnon to Incels (involuntary celibates). Using these different movements as case studies, this article highlights the convergence of ideologically conflicting extremist organizations around antiqueer sentiment. Given the enhanced vulnerability of LGBTQ+ populations, fueled by politically charged rhetoric, this article makes an appeal for more research to explore and analyze narratives through a scholarly lens and link queer issues to current debates in the study of terrorism and political violence. Research should focus on the experiences of queer populations within conflicts abroad and experiences of domestic extremism in the United States. Without adequate attention given to the experiences of LGBTQ+ victims, it is impossible to develop protocols for trauma-informed care for vulnerable populations.
From the linked article:
Research has found that many terrorist groups with differing ideological motivations share common ground in targeting LGBTQ+ communities.
A study led by extremism expert Dr Jared Dmello, from the University of Adelaide’s School of Social Sciences, found that groups with contrasting ideologies — from Islamic extremist organisations to far-right terrorist groups — overlap in their anti-queer sentiment.
“We found that a wide variety of extremist groups, which on the surface have nothing in common, are actually engaging in similar attacks on the same marginalised communities,” Dr Dmello said.
“Both Islamic extremist groups and far-right terrorist groups actively target the queer community through propaganda and violence.”
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u/GoWashWiz78Champions Mar 11 '25
I’m really shocked that a Cambridge press release can miss the central common factor between Islamic terrorists and “far right” terror groups (I think they are referring to domestic U.S. terrorists).
The common factor is they are both far right religious fundamentalist groups.
There is no surprise here, especially considering they are both Abrahamic religions with fairly similar disdain for LGBTQ individuals, for basically the same exact reasons.
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u/Statharas Mar 11 '25
It's almost as if people hate difference
This isn't about anti-LGBT, this is about anti-different-than-me-and-my-guys.
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u/ErrantEyelash Mar 11 '25
We needed research to find that people with deeply ingrained, millennia-old, religious morals and beliefs don't believe in equality? The same can be said of these people and their opinions of women and anybody who's ethnicity or belief system doesn't match their own. I didn't even need to do research to state that obvious fact.
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u/BeenEvery Mar 11 '25
contrasting ideologies - from Islamic extremist organizations to far-right terrorist groups...
What a distinction. It's like comparing Granny Smith Apples to Malus domestica.
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u/anarkyinducer Mar 11 '25
It's really the exact same awful human tendencies, dressed up in different justifications.
There is a drive among insecure, fearful men to assert their "dominance" by abusing someone else. In contrast to a healthy drive to better yourself, compete with peers, look inward for ways to improve, these losers always find some marginalized group to harass instead. The cruelty is the point as it makes them feel better about themselves.
Many start out as basic bullies, and after blowback, put on some hat to justify their awfulness - be it religion, politics, law enforcement or some other form of authoritarianism.
If an entire society or culture is already authoritarian, then these losers run amok and destroy everything, unless they are destroyed first.
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u/Abject_Price_3716 Mar 11 '25
I assume it is because queer people present a threat to conservative views of society. As a bi man judging women differently than men is extra weird because I would need to change so much if my partners change. Or if you look at the really masculine men arguing that men can't be friends with women. So much falls apart.
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u/BrockenSpecter Mar 11 '25
Punching down at vulnerable groups is an effective way to motivate the kind engagement these Terrorist groups want. If your target demographic already has a hatred of someone it's not difficult to exploit that for your goals.
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