Double Jeopardy: Queer and Muslim in America After coming out three times, you'd think it would get easier. The first time was in 2. U. S.'s post–9- 1. My brown skin worked as camouflage; on my mother's advice I'd allowed people to assume I was from some more palatable latitude. For six months I was from Mexico or Brazil, a rude fiction that I nonetheless let continue because I believed it was a matter of survival. But eventually the lying became too much to bear, and at twelve years old I began quietly correcting people: I'm Saudi Arabian and Muslim (. The first installment was in 2. I whispered to my friend Amy in the library during tenth- grade study hall that I was gay, or maybe . Part two was on Thanksgiving break from college in 2. Amy was cool; my parents were cool. After all, my sister said, this was a new millennium, and . A few months earlier, said his father in the aftermath, the man had seen two men kissing in Miami; he believed his son's anger at the sight might have led to the shooting, now the deadliest in American history. Double Jeopardy protections in the U.S. Constitution keep criminal defendants from facing prosecution more than once for the same offense (with a few exceptions). Are MacLeod and the police seeing a ghost when evidence in a diamond theft and poison gas murder points to evil, but dead, Xavier St. A second prosecution for the same offense after acquittal or conviction or multiple punishments for same offense. The evil sought to be avoided by prohibiting dou. By mid- morning Sunday, we knew the man's name: Omar Mateen. The narrative had its requisite Muslim. But the narrative couldn't find room for me. The day after the shooting, already sick of the ooga- booga headlines, I saw a tweet from Chicago- based shock jock Joe Walsh — . If you are gay, Islam wants you dead. Goodly liberals and conservative usual suspects united in smugness, horrified that I would defend and identify with a religion that so clearly wants to kill me. There were also visitations from Muslims whose homophobia didn't seem murderous but was nevertheless putrid. Change your ways before it's too late. On the one hand, there is a very real homophobia problem inside Islamic countries. A 2. 01. 3 Pew Research Center poll on attitudes toward homosexuality found that even in Egypt and Jordan — the only two Muslim countries where gay sex is legal — 9. But those figures are about on par with the rest of the developing world, and anyone who's ever seen a Super Bowl commercial knows homophobia is rampant in this country, too.
Not to mention, Christian and Islamic scripture both justify the persecution of queer people with the story of Lot (. Muslim religious leaders have roundly disavowed Daesh's atrocities, and yet they've been laid at all Muslims' doors. ISIS claimed responsibility for the Orlando attack, despite there being no evidence yet that the murders were the plot of anybody but this lone loser. The American LGBTQ community seems not to have figured out that we've been conscripted into the country's Middle Eastern wars, thanks to the liberation narrative that's clotted LGBTQ political narratives in the wake of marriage equality. It did get better — thanks to Uncle Sam — and now, it seems, we owe him. So when he asks for support for drone strikes in Syria, or a blithe military alliance with Israel (one of whose expansion stratagems is to pitch Tel Aviv as a gay mecca reclaimed from the gay- murdering Palestinians), he's also sure to remind us of the . While it is true I could be whipped or even beheaded for being gay in my mother's native country, it was not always so. Islam's golden medieval age generated tomes full of homoerotic literature, and the Ottoman Empire, at one point one of the most powerful of the British Empire's competitors, decriminalized gay sex in 1. U. S. As imperial European powers metastasized across the region in the nineteenth century, they spread laws that recriminalized homosexuality; that legal regime is still apparent in many Arab countries' penal codes and social mores. Perversely, over time it was homosexuality, rather than homophobia, that came to be seen in some parts of the region as an unwelcome import from the West — a decadence, a corruption to be isolated or just flat- out ignored. The prosecution of a person a second time for the same offense, prohibited by the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution. Risk of loss or injury arising from two sources at the same time. Double jeopardy is a procedural defense that forbids an individual from being prosecuted twice for a given crime or offense. In the United States, defendants are legally (and constitutionally) protected by the double jeopardy. Rent Double Jeopardy (1999) and other Movies & TV Shows on Blu-ray & DVD. None of which excuses individual acts of homophobic violence — far from it. Rather, the Twitter interrogation by @Beer. Stix and others had less to do with Islam in the abstract than it did with the version they apparently were raised with. What results from this noxious brew of misread history and flawed assumptions — liberal self- congratulation, LGBTQ political complacency, past and present colonial statecraft — is Orlando: People like me were massacred for who they were, and people like me get blamed for it because of who they are. Neither side realizes it's being played against the other. There was a third group of people who found me amid the social- media fracas. Other gay Muslims filled my inbox with all sorts of feeling: thanks, profound sadness, gratitude for the . But mostly, they felt stuck. How does one mourn dozens killed for their sexuality while asserting the fundamental humanity of the man who killed them? But barzakh, purgatory, doesn't last forever. In the hours just after the shooting, the D. C.- based activist group Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity released the following statement: . We ask our straight Muslim allies, many of whom have stood in solidarity with us, to build support for LGBTQ people and in opposing homophobia and transphobia in whatever guise it presents itself. We ask our non- Muslim allies, especially within the LGBTQ community, to stand with us against Islamophobia and anti- Muslim bigotry, while we work to end homophobia and transphobia. And to all peace- loving people everywhere, we ask for your compassion and your support at this very difficult time for our communities. Hope we catch some fish soon. Matty - Age 4: Me, too. Matty - Age 4: Wind back? Libby Parsons: Can we turn this one? Slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly. Matty - Age 4: I am doing it slowly.
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