It’s one I’ve heard more than a few times before from liberal “allies” who love to talk down to any queer people that don’t debase themselves to whatever local liberal party that pretends to care about us and our rights while doing nothing to actually help us or even fight those trying to actively destroy us.
Like, I don’t know what gay or trans people had to go through under Stalin and it probably wasn’t good given this was the early 20th century and communist movements weren’t very good on queer rights back then but even if Stalin was personally ordering the execution of gay & trans people what does that even matter? How is that some kind of stunning rebuke of communism? One communist does some bad stuff and somehow all of communism is responsible as if Karl Marx himself wrote “kill them removed lmao” in the Manifesto or something?
Why is Stalin and Stalin alone the arbitrator of what is and isn’t communism? Do these people think he’s the only communist to have ever existed? What about all the gay & trans communists that were contemporaries of him? Do they just not matter? I don’t know, maybe this belongs more in the “Shit Reactionaries Say” community.
Stalin could’ve been the most queerphobic person in history for all I care. That doesn’t have any impact on whether or not queer people belong in the communist movement. It’s just an intellectually lazy argument. Like, I don’t care? Why would I care what Stalin would’ve done to me? I don’t live under Stalin. Stalin is dead. Stalin isn’t the only communist to exist, much less to lead a country. I don’t worship Stalin the way liberals worship Obama.
Castro had gay people tortured, later realized & admitted he was wrong to do so, and worked to expand queer rights in Cuba. Perfect? Not at all, but at least he was willing to grow and change things for the better even in old age.
Obama ran on a campaign of anti-gay marriage until Biden told him it was popular and he changed his stance so he could win, let the Supreme Court do all the work for him, then promptly did fuck all to improve the conditions of gays in the US. His party has since abandoned trans people and is now trying to abandon gays too.
It’s almost like communists have actual moral compasses and can change their views when presented with new information while liberals are self-serving ghouls that only care about what’s popular or financially beneficial to them.
Yet you point out that queer rights are only being taken seriously by Left-wing movements these days and libs cry about how it’s just commies trying to manipulate or deceive people. Pure fucking projection.
Sorry for the rant this ended up being longer than I intended.
There is zero chance that someone who tries using this as an argument against communism is engaging in good faith. We’re talking about a person who was born in 1878 for fuck’s sake!
And let’s not pretend like the state of LGBT rights in western countries was any better in the 1940s than it was in the USSR. In many ways it was significantly worse.
It was socialist states that have historically always been at the forefront of social progress. The USSR pioneered women’s rights and women’s equality. The GDR (East Germany) during its time was one of the most progressive countries on the planet with respect to LGBT rights and sexual education.
Just because today’s liberals have superficially co-opted some of these movements in order to pinkwash capitalism (and there is a massive difference between actually materially improving the lives of LGBT people and pretending to be on their side to score electoral points) does not invalidate any of the historical achievements of communism, or the need for communism in order to actually materially liberate all working class people, including those of the LGBT community.
Not only are Stalin’s views on this issue entirely irrelevant to the correctness of communist ideas, but it is also utterly ridiculous to demand that a communist who was literally born in the 19th century and raised in a religiously conservative feudal-agrarian society should have conformed to the social views of 21st century Western societies, especially when your own country is far from perfect on this issue and when millions of your own compatriots still hold far less progressive views.
That’s why the most worthwhile response is to deliberately confuse and manipulate them. Most anticommies aren’t interested in having a meaningful conversation anyway, so you may as well have some fun with them.
In case any anticommunist is reading this: no, nobody in this thread is being serious. Literally every school teaches and every historian from rightists like Robert Service to leftists like Domenico Losurdo has acknowledged, on record, that the Soviet Union prescribed the death penalty cisgender heterosexuality. We’re all perfectly well aware; this fact is so universally known that it’s a given. Nobody—and I mean nobody—is gullible enough to seriously believe a very obvious joke like ‘Stalin recriminalised homosexuality’. We weren’t born yesterday. Ugh.