The greatest threat to LGBT rights in the West is not the far right, as some claim, but rather Islamism and insufficient emphasis on shared values, argues columnist Adam Zivo. Yet many progressives, including queer activists, refuse to acknowledge this reality and are inadvertently undermining gender and sexual minorities.
It should be intuitively obvious that when large numbers of immigrants arrive from largely homophobic countries without being pressured to adopt Canadian values, they often retain their homeland's backward prejudices. This is especially true if they live within ethnic ghettos that allow them to maintain parallel societies and resist integration.
There is ample data substantiating this hypothesis throughout the West, with Canadian research going as far back as the mid-2000s. However, studies into immigrant and Muslim homophobia largely dried up after 2020, when it became increasingly taboo to raise these kinds of social critiques.
Data on Homophobia Among Immigrants and Muslims
A pioneering 2006 study published by Citizenship and Immigration Canada found that recent Canadian immigrants were 2.5 times more likely than native-born citizens to object to having homosexuals as neighbours (33.9 per cent versus 13.3 per cent, respectively). Another 2019 poll conducted by Research Co. similarly found that while 71 per cent of European-Canadians supported same-sex marriage, approval was much lower among East Asians and South Asians (44 per cent and 42 per cent, respectively).
Meanwhile, a 2013 study published in Comparative Migration Studies, which analyzed polling data gathered two years earlier, found that compared to the overall population, Muslim Canadians were three times less likely to support same-sex marriage (21 per cent versus 63 per cent) and roughly four times more likely to oppose any recognition of same-sex relationships (47 per cent versus 12 per cent).
Another 2016 poll conducted by the Environics Institute for Survey Research found that only 36 per cent of Canadian Muslims believed that homosexuality should be accepted by society, while 43 per cent did not. For context, a 2013 poll by the same institute found that 80 per cent of all Canadians believed society should accept homosexuality, with only 14 per cent opposed.
More recently, Canada's 2025 Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces found that support for gender nonconformity was noticeably lower among citizens who were foreign born, Arab, Black or Chinese.
Similar Trends in Europe and the United States
European and American researchers have discovered similar trends in their own regions. A 2016 poll by ICM Research infamously found that within Britain, 52 per cent of Muslims believed that homosexuality should be illegal in the country — a shocking number, especially considering that only five per cent of the general population felt the same way.
Another 2022 study published in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations examined data gathered from 18,058 students in four European countries (Germany, England, Sweden and the Netherlands) between 2010 and 2013. They concluded that ethnic minorities were more homophobic than general society, especially if they were Muslim.
