\"Ninety percent of men have the desire to commit this sin,\" the mullah says. \"But most are right with God and exercise control. Only 20 to 50% of those who want to do this actually do it.\"<\/p>\n
Following the mullah's math, this suggests that between 18% and 45% of men here engage in homosexual sex--significantly higher than the 3% to 7% of American men who, according to studies, identify themselves as homosexual.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(This despite the fact that the traditional penalties for homosexuality in Islam are \"being burned at the stake, pushed over the edge of a cliff or crushed by a toppled wall.\" The Taliban killed two men accused of homosexuality in '98 by toppling a wall onto them.)<\/p>\n
(K. makes a good point, though: these stats aren't really comparable, because there are a great many men in the US who engage in homosexual sex but don't identify as homosexual.)<\/p>\n
One local man interviewed claims that Afghan men who have sex with other men are not actually homosexual; they're just short on options. Then he adds:<\/p>\n
\"I like boys, but I like girls better. [. . .] It's just that we can't see the women to see if they are beautiful. But we can see the boys, and so we can tell which of them is beautiful.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Nope, no homosexuality here, nosir. Yet another case where introducing the concept of bisexuality and reducing the stigma associated with homosexuality might lead to more honest definitions and self-descriptions. . . .<\/p>\n
And then there's the fact that the new governor of Kandahar has recently \"issued an order banning boys under 18 from living with troops.\"<\/p>\n
The article, oddly, refers to American homosexuality in terms of \"gender identity\" -- but I think that was just a misuse of a phrase, rather than a misunderstanding of the concept.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Forgot to post this the other day. The number of entries that I plan and\/or begin to write but don’t…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}