Brazil’s new far-right “aspiring fascist” president, Jair Bolsonaro is a huge fan of President Donald Trump. The feeling is apparently mutual, according to Trump’s tweets.
In Bolsonaro’s inaugural address earlier this year he promised “to unite the people, rescue the family, respect religions and our Judeo-Christian tradition, combat gender ideology, conserving our values,” as Vox reported.
His campaign slogan, “Brazil before everything, and God above all,” was a little bit like Trump’s “America First,” too. Not surprising: He’s been called the “Trump of the Tropics.”
If there’s one thing dictators and dictator-wannabes love it’s each other – just look at how President Trump has literally said he “fell in love” with North Korea’s brutal dictator Kim Jong-un, for example.
Dictators also hate gay people. Trump stunned some over the weekend with a thinly-veiled homophobic attack on Fox News’ legal analyst Andrew Napolitano and Fox News’ Shep Smith.
President Bolsonaro has been far more brutal, saying “that if he had a gay son, he would be unable to love him and would ‘prefer that he die in an accident.'”
NBC News describes him as having been “openly hostile to the gay community for decades.”
Bolsonaro “has advocated that parents should beat being gay out of their children; and in 2013 proclaimed, ‘Yes, I am homophobic — and very proud of it.'”
(It is not possible to beat being gay out of children or adults.)
There is now backlash.
Bolsonaro warned recently that Brazil must not become a “gay tourism paradise,” a remark that “sparked concerns that LGBT+ people will avoid traveling to the country, fearing violence, campaigners and industry representatives said on Friday,” according to Reuters.
“During a talk with reporters on Thursday, Bolsonaro said that Brazil should avoid being known as a gay destination because ‘we have families.'”
“If you want to come here and have sex with a woman, go for [it. But] Brazil can’t be a country of the gay world, of gay tourism,” he reportedly said, according to the Financial Times.
But, in violation of his supposed “respect” for “religions and our Judeo-Christian tradition,” and promise to “combat gender ideology, conserving our values,” President Bolsonaro now says gay men are welcome to travel to Brazil as long as they “have sex with a woman.”
The Brazilian president did not specify if, according to his Judeo-Christian traditions, the gay man must be married to the woman.
Image by The White House via Flickr
Hat tip: Out