Media Suddenly Interested in Muslim Opinion of Gays

After years of ignoring survey data and news reports that weren’t conducive to boosting Islam’s image, so-called new media is leaping on a Pew survey showing American Muslims to be more LGBTQ-tolerant than white evangelicals. Yes, just that particular strain of Christianity, adjusted for race:

U.S. Muslims are as tolerant as Protestantism in general, and slightly less tolerant than the average for all the subsets of Protestantism listed (white evangelical, white mainline, black Protestant) as well as Catholicism, but acknowledging this undercuts the alliance-building aspect to disseminating this news. And as the game of telephone and the dynamics of meme-spreading dictate, this will distill into “Muslims are more queer-friendly than Christians” when it’s being triumphantly told at the bar tonight. The same survey shows that less than half of foreigners support homosexuality, but that’s information likewise not congenial to progressivism, so don’t expect any headlines.

U.S. Muslims have changed their opinion on LGBTQ matters more rapidly than other groups (likely due to their being relatively upper-income, urban, and college-bound, and thus prone to getting the cultural memo) so you get the sense that a Most Improved Award is being treated as a Gold Star. It also speaks to the idea that seemingly contradictory alliances that are more hypothetical than real have a way of becoming real over time.

Of course simple surveys like this don’t capture the intensity of anti-gay sentiment, a rather crucial point. Sure, Huffpo, make Kim Davis the face of evil all you want, but it wasn’t an evangelical who murdered 49 people at a gay Orlando nightclub last year.