Since replacing the late Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s interim president Nicolas Maduro has taken to the airwaves to deny being anti-gay—despite a series a series of public speeches in which he smeared his opposition with homophobic slurs.
“When you live in a town you have to be respectful of the private lives of all human beings,” Maduro said in a interview last week. “And in terms of sexuality—what today is known as the concept of the sexually diverse — they are the same friends we have known all of our lives, male and female, from the time we were kids. Because we have always respected them.”
That’s a far cry from the language he used the other week, when he referred to opposition leader Henrique Capriles as a “little princess” and suggested Capriles was visiting New York to be with a gay lover: “I don’t want to get involved in his personal life, but he’s in Manhattan with a [male] friend of confidence,” Maduro told followers at a rally.
It wasn’t his first anti-gay dig: Last April Maduro appeared at a rally in Caracas, where he called opponents of Chavez mariconzones (“big faggots”).
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Even in this recent address denouncing homophobia, Maduro took another dig at Capriles’ sexuality:
The worst homophobe is one who is gay and discriminates against his own. It’s similar to a foreman in a slave-owner’s farm. A black traitor who whips an African man’s back. That’s the worst homophobe: He who denies his identity and discriminates against his equals.
Capriles has been clear in his distaste for Maduro’s tactics, for maligning both him and the LGBT community: “I believe in a society without exclusion and that’s the way I express it to the country,” said the 40-year-old center-right politician. “A society where no one feels excluded based on the way they think, their race, their creed, their sexual orientation. ”
It seems that now that Maduro is trying to be an official head of state, the former firebrand is trying to rewrite history. When asked what he’d do if he was gay, Maduro exclaimed: “I’d take ownership of it with pride and shout it to the four winds—I would have no problem loving whoever I had to love with my heart.”
Riiiight.
h/t: Blabbeando
2eo
Cue the posters who think because Chavez was Anti-Capitalist that he was a perfect ruler of a left wing utopia.
When actually he was a mass murdering lunatic who like all despots loathed the actual left, my personal friend was interred for most of the last 3 years, he was in there with most of the left wing intellectuals sadly.
There’s a genuine chance to capitalise on his death to create a better, fairer, less iron fisted nation, Venezuela is no better than Romania was under Nicolae Ceau?escu so I hope for my friend they can have some freedom, the world needs a proper established actual left in government.
Merv
“Yo amo los maricones.”
Freddie27
Anyone who knows the history of Venezuela knows that no-one has done more to advance gay rights in Venezuela than Hugo Chavez. Chavez repealed the laws against sodomy within a year of being elected President and quickly allowed open service in the military, made it illegal to fire someone because they’re gay and equalised the age of consent at 16. Three times, in 1999, 2001 and 2007, Chavez made attempts to include in the Constitution of Venezuela a complete ban on discrimination against gays, but every time he was defeated, either by Church pressure or by popular vote. Indeed Chavez called it one of his greatest regrets that he couldn’t get gay rights in the Constitution. Under his orders, since 2000 Venezuela officially marked the International Day Against Homophobia and Chavez sent government delegations to march in the Gay Pride Parade. The history of the Right in Venezuela has been alliance with the Catholic Church and fascists and opposing all movement toward LGBT rights. I could forgive “maricon” being used, because unfortunately it’s so ubiquitous in Latin America as to have transcended almost its homophobic origins. But Maduro’s disgusting insinuations are clearly planned to do maximum damage to Capriles’ reputation. I won’t associate with someone who uses homophobic insinuation and implications to gain political advantage. It seems with Capriles that the Right in Venezuela has decisively broken with the homophobic Catholic Church and fascists in Venezuela, and is now a liberal alternative to the authoritarianism, corruption and homophobic guttersniping of Maduro.
kabyr
Yes, Chavez was the first president of Venezuela who tried including gay rights to the constitution, on his constitutional reform back in 2007, he lost that time but was the only time he tried to do something about this matter; my opinion, he only was looking for the gay community approval so he would get his reform, reform that would give him the right to be reelected president as many times as he wanted,and if you ask me why? simply, he didn’t include these gay rights when he decided to go for a constitutional amendment next year on 2008, when he knew he could perfectly win once he removed all the tricky articles everyone knew would only give him more power over Vebezuelans (i.e. control over private property, control over children, and you can look up for many more ridiculous laws). Everybody in Venezuela knows that as a fact. Now, Maduro is another story, and he’s the example of how fools most of chavez’s followers are, voting for him just because Chavez named him his heir. Bullsh*t!. I’m venezuelan by the way.