The situation of Syrian refugees has become even more critical after the terrorist attack in Paris. And the LGBT community in Syria is going through a real ordeal. News of gay men executed in horrible ways by the Islamic State have gone viral. Neil Grungras, the executive director of the Organization for Refuge, Asylum & Migration described the horrific situation of the LGBT community in Syria.
“Our people are being thrown off buildings and they’re stoned to death.”
“You couldn’t get more desperate,” Grugras concluded. “You couldn’t get a situation that’s more shouting for justice.” Being in Syria is a sentence to death for gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people, and migrating to Turkey or to countries that don’t support the LGBT community, is just going from worse to bad. They face discrimination, poverty and police brutality.
With all these going on, we would normally expect all the support the LGBT Syrians could get from gay and bisexual Democratic congress members in the U.S. House, respectively Jared Polis of Colorado, Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. But, to everyone’s shock this is not happening, on the contrary, they are unsupportive.
Polis, Maloney and Sinema voted for the SAFE act, a bill that will make Syrian and Iraqi refugee’s vetting process impossible. The vetting for Syrians and Iraqi refugees used to take up to two years, but after this billing even this process can be shut down.
Sinema justified her act: “The Islamic State is a legitimate, immediate threat to the United States. Congress and the Administration have a duty to keep our country safe from terrorism, and this legislation provides an added level of security to our robust refugee vetting process.”
Some defended them by highlighting the rough political climate, yet there is no justification for what they have done in front of those people who are thrown off the buildings, decapitated or hanged.
