Christians 'Cleanse the Streets' After Gay Pride March

The Freethinker - The voice of atheism since 1881 » In Belgrade, priests ‘cleanse’ the streets after Pride event

In an orgy of gratuitous anti-gay hate and abuse, Serbian Orthodox Christians, incensed at a gay pride parade in the Serbian capita, Belgrade, held a rally and march to ritually cleanse the streets of 'homosexual contamination'. The parade had been heavily protected by police preventing Orthodox and far-right nationalist extremists violently breaking it up as earlier years.

Amongst the expressions of Christian 'love' was a banner showing a homosexual being pushed into Hellfire by a Christian with a cross. The love of Jesus was depicted as a force beam radiating out of the cross. Hell was cleverly depicted as a burning European Union star symbol in a pit, betraying the far-right nationalist credentials of the marching bigots.

However, the display of hate was not universally approved of, not so much because of the hate and bigotry expressed but because it wasn't anti-foreigner enough, as this far-right blog post by 'A Monk of the Serbian Orthodox Church' expressed:

In recent days, two processions have taken place in Belgrade, the capital of Orthodox Serbia. One parade decried the so-called injustices of homophobia, while the following day's parade decried the evils of homosexuality and sought to erase the defilement of the previous day’s parade. While in all honesty both sides have a point, my initial reaction was that both misplace their gaze, both identify really quite fringe elements as being the menaces of Serbian society.

The visible gay community in Serbia is tiny, and most of the people in it are foreign, of only partial Serb ancestry, or otherwise just kind of elite/foreign-minded—definitely not average Serbs by any stretch of the imagination. It is largely due to this that Serbs feel pressured into accepting something they don't want. The parade almost certainly came about due to foreign influences and not from a request from Serbs themselves. Serbs are generally not interested in and not tempted by this particular aspect of Western influence.

And of course it's all to do with 'abortions' (read female choice).

Given that, I would like to see Serbia (and other Orthodox nations) take a more serious stance against their very serious abortion rates, which really is our huge glaring moral failure, as I see it. Few Serbs are actively politically gay, and so, how is that our national problem? It seems like finger pointing to distract from our true national sins. Homosexuality is not a problem in Serbia, there are hardly any gay people, and society wouldn't permit them to organize or have the kind of public expression of their abominations, and so, how is that a huge problem that we must get upset about and exert our energies on? We have quelled this particular problem.

In Serbia I have met exactly two openly gay people. I have met about as many who at least openly state that homosexual acts are acceptable. The general culture is very openly against homosexuality. So how can anyone say with a straight face, as has this nun in the recent article, that the troubles which have befallen Serbia are due to punishment from God for allowing gay pride parades, when every day in Serbia thousands of children are murdered through abortion, and no one really cares? Isn't the murder of a child infinitely worse? Serbia is a country where most women have had several abortions, but there is almost nothing in the way of any pro-life movement to counter that. I have been told by many people that up to a third of Serbian women are barren, due to having so many abortions. Serbia has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, on the same level as Japan. While other factors, especially poor economy, are certainly contributing to this, the lack of societal value for the lives of the unborn is certainly also a major factor. There can be no Orthodox Serbia, no future for us as a nation, if there are no children. As long as we so easily and readily abort the children God has entrusted to us, there is no need for homosexual activists to threaten our country, our people, our Church—we do it all ourselves.

He even managed to find something anti-Muslim to include in his rambling polemic:

In fact, abortion is an old "tradition" in Serbia. Older Serbs will quietly tell stories of how, in Ottoman times, women were forced to sleep with the local Ottoman officials on their wedding night, and so even right up until the end of Ottoman rule (from the 1830's right up until 1912, depending on which part of Serbia you are in), it was a very common practice for the firstborn child, the one that in the Old Testament was offered to God, to be murdered upon birth for fear it was really a Turk—a child offered to the god of senseless nationalism. Today, the child is offered to the god of selfish individualism, and is it not this murderous idolatry for which the Lord might be punishing us?

I imagine they would be very old Serbs if they can remember events from before 1912!

As for the gay pride parade that gave rise to this far-right, homophobic, Orthodox Christian hysteria, it went off peacefully, unlike one in 2001 which was violently attacked and broken up by far-right nationalists.

A parades planned in 2009 was banned and a march in 2010 was again violently broken up with 250 arrests, and 130 police and 25 civilians injured in the ensuing street fighting. A blanket ban was imposed from 2011 to 2013 but the ban was lifted in 2014. Since then, parades have been held annually without incident.

This year the parade was supported by a number of Serbian politicians including Ana Brnabic, Minister for Administration and Local Government and Serbia's first openly gay government minister.

Although these are signs of an encouraging change in Serbian society as LGBT right are increasingly being recognised, the parade's organiser, Boban Stojanovic was quoted as saying that violence against LGBT people remains a big problem, while attacks are rarely registered as hate crimes. He claimed that around three-quarters of the LGBT population in Serbia has faced some kind of violence because of their gender or sexual orientation at some point in their lives.

But maybe things have improved in modern Serbia where, in the 1992-95 war following the breakup of former Yugoslavia, a Serbian Orthodox Christian militia led by Radovan Karadžić and including Greek Orthodox volunteers recruited by Orthodox priests, murdered every man and boy from the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, in what has been described as the worst European act of genocide since the Holocaust. At least they now seem to confine themselves to marching, chanting hate messages and casting spells to cast out evil demons. Of course the forces of hate and bigotry and the need to victimise minorities, particularly minorities who are biologically unable to be anything else.

'via Blog this'

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