Choose Whom You Will Disrespect: Islam, LGBT, or Christianity?

On Jordan Henderson's Inclusivity Dilemma

Armbands are powerful things these days, especially if rainbow-coloured.

For those who may be unaware, Jordan Henderson is a footballer, the former Liverpool captain, who has been especially vocal in his pro-LGBT+ stance and a much celebrated “ally” of the LGBT+ community. By a strange turn of events he now finds himself playing in Saudi Arabia earning a reported £700,000 per week. Quite the quandary.

The Limits of Inclusivity

In 2021, speaking about one of the many LGBT+ activist campaigns within modern football, Henderson proclaimed his views about “how much further football in particular needs to go before the game can consider itself properly inclusive.”

As with many public figures, Henderson has been enthusiastically pro-LGBT+ at a time and place where it is socially, politically, and financially advantageous to be enthusiastically pro-LGBT+. And as you might imagine, being enthusiastically pro-LGBT+ is not quite as socially, politically, or financially advantageous in the land of Saudi Arabia.

Indeed, when Henderson’s new team, Al-Ettifaq, announced his arrival on social media, they airbrushed all photographs of him wearing the rainbow armband, colouring it grey instead.

What is an enthusiastic pro-LGBT+ ally to do? Could this be the moment for Henderson to protest, enabling football to take that Great Leap Forward on the mystical journey to become “properly inclusive”?

Apparently not. In a widely reported interview with The Athletic, Henderson has now said he would not only refrain from protesting against the airbrushing of the rainbow armband in the official photos, but that he would also not be wearing said armband in Saudi Arabia at all, unless it became possible to do so without causing offence (i.e. if Saudi Arabia stopped being Saudi Arabia…).

As expected, the LGBT+ community immediately turned its back on Jordan Henderson. (Who saw that coming?). He is no longer delighted in as an ally but immediately denounced as a defector against the regime. Despite his ongoing vocal support for LGBT+, because he is no longer showing his true colours, their inclusive smiles have morphed into disgusted scowls, as though he had never been one of them at all.

What this twin-sided absurdity highlights is just how insane the progressive inclusivity dogma is in reality. We all exclude. Some merely try to hide it more than others.

LGBT+ “Martyrdom”?

What drew the heaviest criticism from the LGBT+ crowd was Henderson’s attempt to put an optimistic spin on the move, saying it could only be “a positive thing” to have an openly pro-LGBT+ person playing within an openly anti-LGBT+ culture.

The reason the LGBT+ brigade has been so angry at Henderson’s self-silencing is that if he truly believes in raising awareness against LGBT+ discrimination in football, doing so in a place like Saudi Arabia is surely the place to do it.

It is often widely reported that homosexuality is “punishable by death” in Saudi Arabia. To the LGBT imagination this tends to conjure up the image of Gestapo-like agents hunting down and executing people for “being gay”. However, as with the much-criticised Ugandan laws, this is simply not how the law functions nor what ever actually happens.

Whenever Saudi state executions are reported in the western media, that haunting spectre of anti-homosexual law is often cited. However, as with the 81 men executed in a single day in 2022, the most common reason for executions is for things like terrorism, murder, and drug trafficking.

On the rare occasions when you actually do hear of homosexuals being executed, it is usually related to something far more grave like additional harm caused or the involvement of children.

It is, of course, possible within Sharia Law to execute someone for homosexual acts, but this does not appear to be the common reality, nor even the overall intention of Saudi Arabian capital punishment.

I have yet to find even a single example of a person being executed simply for “being gay”. Yet we talk about it here as though such a danger is imminent for all gay people at all times, and if the likes of Henderson do not toe the rainbow line they’re effectively sentencing these “martyrs” to certain death.

None of this is to defend Saudi Arabian law in general (which inevitably does discriminate against homosexuals in particular, whatever other crimes for which they might be prosecuted); it is simply to say that the western pro-LGBT+ furore over capital punishment against gay people is, in reality, misplaced, and often manipulative, let alone colonialist.

Disrespect and Disbelief

Reflecting on how his decision to forsake the rainbow armband might appear to contradict his inclusive pro-LGBT+ values, Henderson insisted he was still doing so on the grounds of inclusivity:

"So if I wear the rainbow armband, if that disrespects [Islamic] religion, then that's not right either. Everybody should be respectful of religion and culture."

I found this to be a most remarkable and accidentally profound statement. It appears that Jordan Henderson did not intend to realise that inclusivity is not actually “inclusive” all the way down. (Perhaps all it took to realise this was £700,000 a week…)

The question for us to ask is: by acting so overtly pro-LGBT+ in the West, why did it not occur to Henderson that he was already offending Christian religion and culture?