No surprise to hear this from Turkey’s Islamist PM. Via Gay Star News:
Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called homosexuality a ‘sexual preference’ saying it conflicted with the ‘culture of Islam’.
Erdoğan made these statements during a visit to the Netherlands, where he objected to a lesbian couple adopting a nine-year-old Turkish boy named Yunus.
Quoted by the Turkish daily Hürriyet, he said late last week: ‘We should hand over Yunus to secure hands. If we say “a six-month child cannot make such a decision so it is the judiciary who decides”, then this could lead to us to a big mistake’, he warned during meeting the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte.
Erdoğan said non-governmental organizations in the Netherlands should get involved to ‘ensure that children are placed within a situation they have been used to before’, i.e. a heterosexual Islamic background.
This has not gone down well in the Netherlands:
Rutte objected to the suggestion saying: ‘The placing of Dutch foster children is the sole responsibility of the Dutch government, of nobody else.
‘For this reason I’m against having the issue taken up at a ministerial level.
‘Ultimately no distinction is made based on sexual orientation or religion’.
…
Dutch deputy premier Lodewijk Asscher on Friday (22 March) called any interference by a ‘foreign power’ based on religion or sexual orientation ‘presumptuous’.
This is why the child was taken into care:
Turkish authorities placed Yunus, who is now a Dutch citizen, as well as his two older brothers in the care of the same lesbian couple as the biological family was deemed ‘abusive’ and ‘unfit’ to raise children.
The mother nevertheless managed to kidnap Yanus’s two older brothers taking them to her parents’ home in Turkey.
The mother then went on to appear on Turkey’s main TV channel, which is run by Erdoğan’s stepson, accusing the Netherlands of ‘child abuse’ by placing Yanus with a lesbian couple.
Because abusing a child is better than exposing him to lesbians.
Worse:
The Turkish human rights commission has even alleged that Yunus is being ‘forcibly assimilated’ by the Netherlands, igniting a diplomatic dispute between the two countries.
Meanwhile Yunus’s lesbian parents were forced into hiding after a crew from the Turkish TV channel began stalking them.
The Turkish LGBT group Kaos GL is unimpressed:
Speaking with Gay Star News, Ali Erol, chair and founder of Turkish LGBT rights group, Kaos GL, said: ‘Erdoğan’s hypocritically aggress the Netherlands to increase the capacity of trade but does not accept a child’s rights regarding his needs of love and security.
‘For that reason he uses Islam as an excuse for sexist and homophobic hypocrisy, of which we’ve seen examples a thousand times.
‘A head of state that does not take any step to protect his own country’s LGBT citizens has no right to preach to another.
‘Even in Turkey, let alone other countris, Islamic culture is not “mono bloc”, it’s a diverse and multifaceted.
Yet Erdoğan seems to believes that it is ‘one nation, one religion, one language and one gender’, rather than accepting that freedom is universal and transcends cultures and religions.
‘What’s even more dramatic is that he represents his approach as democracy and freedom’.
The Netherlands has taken the right approach.
However, it has been crystal clear for a very long time that Erdogan is essentially the Islamic equivalent of the US religious Right. He’s not far off Westboro Baptist Church territory at times. However, it appears to be impolitic to mention this. He’s certainly not a target of progressive politics in the UK.
If we applied the same standards, across the board, he would be.
