Kuwait May Use 'Gaydar' to Ban Gays From Country

Kuwait health officials announced this week that the country may use technology that apparently can "detect" sexual orientation in order to block gays from entering the country, the International Business Times reports.

Yousouf Mindkar, director of public health at the Kuwaiti health ministry, said that the routine clinical screenings will be given to expatriates coming into the Gulf Cooperate Countries, which will include tests to identify LGBT people. If they identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, they will be banned.

"Health centres conduct the routine medical check to assess the health of the expatriates when they come into the GCC countries," Mindkar said, according to Gulf News. "However, we will take stricter measures that will help us detect gays who will be then barred from entering Kuwait or any of the GCC member states."

Mindkar did not specifically say how measures will detect homosexuality or how they will technically work.

The GCC is a political and economic union of Arab states, including coutnries Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Emirates, Oman and Bahrain. The GCC has outlawed all homosexual activities, the IBT reports. In Kuwait specifically, homosexual acts are criminalized and those who are under 21 and violate the anti-gay law can be jailed for up to 10 years.

As the Atlantic Wire reports, Minkar's anti-gay plan will be debated on Nov. 11 when the GCC committee convenes.

"How is this even going to work? Is it purely visual (this is very confusing in certain cases)?" the Atlantic Wire's Alexander Abad-Santos writes. "Doesn't Kuwait know that plenty of LGBT people have spent years living in closets and pretending to be people they're not? Is there a lie detector test? And we wouldn't want to be the ones to break it to Mindkar that gay people come from the loins of straight people, meaning any attempt to keep your country gay-free is all but impossible."