The Blogs: The Stroller Test

If you believe in civil rights, ask yourself where in the Middle East you would actually want to live

I came up with the stroller test talking to my friend Kim, a law professor.

I had recently been at her daughter’s first birthday party in a public park. Kim and her wife are two moms raising a little girl they adore. There were families everywhere, gay and straight, parents and kids and babies.

And I don’t remember anyone saying the words gay or lesbian.

Why would they?

Nobody stared. Nobody needed an explanation. Nobody cared that this little girl had two moms.

It was a birthday party.

That kind of normalcy may be one of the greatest achievements of civil rights: the freedom to be completely boring.

Talking with Kim about Israel got me thinking.

Could that same birthday party happen just as naturally in Tel Aviv?

Yes.

What about Ramallah? Beirut? Cairo? Baghdad? Tehran?

And that became the stroller test.

Take the same family. Don’t change the parents, the kid, how they dress, whom they love or what they believe.

Don’t ask them to hide.

Just change the address.

Then see what happens.

Push the Stroller

Start in Tel Aviv.

Tel Aviv may be as close to a gay utopia as anywhere in the Middle East. Pride is enormous. Gay couples live openly. Same-sex couples can adopt. Same-sex marriages legally performed abroad can be registered in Israel. Same-sex couples have access to surrogacy.

Gay Israelis aren’t confined to some protected corner of Tel Aviv. They’re part of Israeli life.

That includes the IDF, one of the central institutions of Israeli society. Gay Israelis serve openly. They become officers. They command troops. They don’t have to pretend to be straight to defend their country.

The Speaker of the Knesset, Amir Ohana, is openly gay. His partner and their children are part of his public life.

In 1998, Israel sent Dana International, a transgender woman, to Eurovision.

She won.

None of this tells you what to think about Netanyahu or the war.

It tells you something about Israel.

And that something counts.

Don’t Change the Family

One of my oldest Israeli friends goes back to my teenage years. Years later, we studied law together. He was obsessed with Madonna then. Today he’s in his fifties, still annoyingly handsome, openly gay and the father of a big family.

His brother Joel founded Grindr. His brother Jonathan became a celebrated fashion designer.

Three brothers. All gay. All Israeli. All Jewish.

Now push the stroller.

Where in the Middle East can this family live openly as gay men, as fathers, as Jews and as Israelis?

Don’t change the family.

Change the address.

That’s the stroller test.

Keep Walking

The rest of the Middle East isn’t one place, and pretending otherwise would be stupid.

Ramallah isn’t Tehran. Beirut isn’t Baghdad.

But the differences in civil rights are real.

Egyptian authorities have used dating apps and social media to entrap LGBT people and prosecute them under debauchery, morality and public-indecency laws.

Iraq enacted a law in 2024 making same-sex relations punishable by 10 to 15 years in prison.

Iran criminalizes same-sex sexual activity, and certain sexual acts between men can carry the death penalty.

ISIS murdered men accused of homosexuality, including by throwing them from buildings.

That doesn’t mean every Arab or Muslim thinks alike, and it doesn’t excuse anything Israel does.

Israel should be judged for what Israel does.

So should everyone else.

Emily Crossed the Border

And then there is Emily Damari.

Emily was openly gay in Israel before Hamas kidnapped her from Kfar Aza on October 7.

She was shot. She lost two fingers. She spent 471 days as a hostage in Gaza.

And she hid that she was gay.

She later recalled asking one of her captors what he would do if his own brother were gay.

He told her he would kill him.

Emily was taken across a border to a place where her rights disappeared.

Same woman.

Same identity.

Different address.

That is my stroller test in its most brutal form.

Wear the Dress

Bill Maher recently put a different version of the same test to Ana Kasparian, a harsh and persistent critic of Israel.

Kasparian was sitting across from him in a short dress.

Maher asked where she would live if she had to choose somewhere in the Middle East.

Cairo? Amman? Beirut? Tehran? Tel Aviv?

Then he asked where she would feel comfortable dressed exactly as she was.

Kasparian resisted. She wanted to live in America.

Maher kept pressing.

If you had to choose?

She finally conceded that a woman her age, raised in the Western world, would “probably feel the most comfortable in Tel Aviv.”

That is the point.

Her answer didn’t settle the war or absolve Israel of scrutiny.

It answered a different question.

Where could she actually live as herself?

When the argument stopped being theoretical and became a question about her own life, her own body and the dress she was actually wearing, she answered Tel Aviv.

Civil Rights Have to Count

I didn’t discover gay rights because I needed an argument for Israel.

I worked on Clinton-Gore in 1992 alongside people who were HIV-positive, some of whom didn’t live to see the treatments that later transformed AIDS. I later worked for Obama, went to law school in San Francisco and spent years living in West Hollywood.

Gay friends, gay families and the fight for gay rights have simply been part of my adult life.

For decades, we fought to establish that gay rights are human rights.

Human rights don’t suddenly become irrelevant when the country protecting them is Israel.

And this isn’t only about gay people.

Can a woman dress as she chooses?

Can an openly gay soldier serve and command troops?

Can you criticize your government?

Can religious minorities worship openly?

Can citizens vote against those who govern them?

No country passes every test perfectly. Israel certainly doesn’t.

But if civil rights are central to your politics, then the enormous differences in civil rights across the Middle East have to count.