The founder of Minority Azerbaijan spoke about "Homosexuality and propaganda"

In a video posted on Akinchi's YouTube channel on March 3, Minority Azerbaijan founder Samad Ismayilov spoke about "homosexuality and propaganda."

According to Akinchi, Samad Ismayilov gave explanations to questions such as “Are pride marches aimed at propaganda? Is it possible to change people's sexual orientation through propaganda?”

Samad Ismayilov says that there are 7 billion people in the world, and everyone differs from others in different characteristics - faith, language, gender, sexual orientation, and even the level of education and political views.

"Although these differences actually make our world more colourful and interesting, in some cases, unfortunately, these differences are used as a tool or as a basis for violence and discrimination," Ismayilov added.

According to him, "the most used expression when talking about LGBT topics is the promotion of homosexuality," and said that the most emphasised example of propaganda is the Pride Parades. "Our people have a perception that gay parades are the product of the past 5-10 years and moreover, they are a Western product. And due to this the number of homosexuals, LGBT in general increases every year," - he mentioned.

Ismayilov claims that the promotion of homosexuality does not create grounds for homosexuality. In other words, it does not change people's orientation. He suggested looking at the promotion of heterosexuality and heteronormativity in the example of Azerbaijan.

In Azerbaijani society, "almost every person goes to hundreds of weddings from childhood to adulthood and of course, those weddings are marriages between women and men. And these kids grow up with the idea of marriage being possible only between men and women, and try to fit themselves into this notion" - he said.

In addition, along with marriages, fairytales we read, national films we watch, music we listen to, even TV commercials always demonstrate this image of a heteronormative family and talks about love between men and women.

"Thus, if it was really possible to impact one’s sexual orientation through propaganda, then everyone would probably be heterosexual in Azerbaijan," added the founder of Minority Azerbaijan.

"Average statistics show that every country has 5-10% of LGBT population and these figures are more or less the same in Azerbaijan," said Ismayilov.

Akinchi is a media platform that covers topics that need to be discussed, but are not discussed enough.