Clearly, in times of chaos and anarchy, the vulnerable and powerless are always attacked. It's a short step from there during a fragile peace to judgments like: "Who is causing the decay in society? Who is upsetting the social order?" The master narrative is, "If we can just get rid of those people, we can go back to achieve our ideal existence."
In 2001, while insurgent gay voices were speaking out across the continent, Liberia's then President Charles Taylor threatened heightened surveillance to flush out homosexuals. The deviant sodomite archetype served Taylor's psychological drama, but he was inciting an internal conflict that hadn't existed. Gay and lesbian Liberians generally did not disclose their identities in public. And though penal law forbids any act between individuals considered "deviant" by definition, overt discrimination in relation to sexual orientation wasn't practiced. But Taylor the warlord could not invent himself as a moral leader, a statesman, without targeting an opposite. If you need to reconstruct yourself like Taylor had to, after so much killing, it serves you well to use a buffer. There's always an absolute positive and negative extreme in identity politics. The gender binary -- the idea of a split (you're either this or that)--supported Taylor's grandiose self-perception.
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