Reply With Quote
I sure Jesus meant that his teachings would be used to justify "Christian" haters.
I am not one who would ever really lay blame on the world's problems at the feet of "religion", but I would put no small burden of evil on the shoulders of many people who are the fundamentalists of their respective religions.
Gay rights in developing countries
A well-locked closet
Gays are under attack in poor countries—and not just because of “local culture”
THEIR crimes were “gross indecency” and “unnatural acts”. Their sentence was 14 years’ hard labour: one intended, said the judge, to scare others. He has succeeded. A court in Malawi last week horrified many with its treatment of Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, a gay couple engaged to be married. The two men are the latest victims of a crackdown on gay rights in much of the developing world, particularly Africa.
Some 80 countries criminalise consensual sexual sex. Over half rely on “sodomy” laws left over from British colonialism. But many are trying to make their laws even more repressive. Last year, Burundi’s president, Pierre Nkurunziza, signed a law criminalising consensual gay sex, despite the Senate’s overwhelming rejection of the bill. A draconian bill proposed in Uganda would dole out jail sentences for failing to report gay people to the police and could impose the death penalty for gay sex if one of the participants is HIV-positive. In March Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, who once described gay people as worse than dogs or pigs, ruled out cons utional changes outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation.
In many former colonies, denouncing sexuality as an “unAfrican” Western import has become an easy way for politicians to boost both their popularity and their nationalist credentials. But Peter Tatc , a veteran gay-rights campaigner, says the real import into Africa is not sexuality but politicised phobia.
This has, he argues, coincided with an influx of conservative Christians, mainly from America, who are eager to engage African clergy in their own domestic battle against sexuality. David Bahati, the Ugandan MP who proposed its horrid bill, is a member of the Fellowship, a conservative American religious and political organisation. “Africa must seem an exciting place for evangelical Christians from places like America,” says Marc Epprecht, a Canadian academic who studies sexuality in Africa. “They can make much bigger gains in their culture wars there than they can in their own countries.” Their ideas have found fertile ground. In May this year, George Kunda, Zambia’s vice-president, lambasted gay people, saying they undermined the country’s Christian values and that sadism and Satanism could be the result.
Discrimination against gays, in Africa in particular, risks undermining the fight against HIV/AIDS. In February, those suspected of being gay were targeted in Kenya in mob violence at a government health centre providing HIV/AIDS services. Bishop Joshua Banda, chairman of Zambia’s National AIDS Council, said that donor countries’ efforts to speak out against violations of gay rights were against Zambia’s “traditional values”. The increasing crackdown on gay rights in Africa will be a disaster for public health, according to Mr Epprecht, as gay people go underground and do not get treatment for HIV/AIDS.
The problem goes beyond Africa and is more than one of state-sponsored phobia. In Iraq, for example, sexuality is legal. But in 2009 Human Rights Watch described the persecution that men suspected of being gay there face, including kidnappings, rape, torture and extrajudicial killings. In the aftermath of the 2003 invasion, there has been a growing fear of the “feminisation” of Iraqi men. The Mahdi Army, a Shia militia, has played on these fears and, claiming to uphold religious values and morality, offered violent “solutions”. Members of the Iraqi security forces have also been accused of colluding in the violence.
South Africa was the first country anywhere to ban phobic discrimination in its cons ution. It is the only country in Africa to allow gay marriage. In formal legal terms, it is a beacon for gay rights, says Mr Tatc . But the growing phenomenon of “corrective rape” both there and in Zimbabwe, where women are assaulted in an attempt to “cure” them of lesbianism, suggests these laws often fail on the ground. As worrying to campaigners as the violence itself is a reluctance by the authorities to acknowledge that the attacks are motivated by phobia. In April 2008 Eudy Simelane, a South African football player who was a lesbian, was gang-raped and stabbed to death. Two men were convicted of her murder but, in his sentencing, the judge denied that Ms Simelane’s sexuality played a part in the crime.
Hopes rose a little in June 2009 when India overturned its 149-year-old sodomy law but since then the global trend seems to have been in the opposite direction. Campaigners argue the proposed laws have implications beyond gay rights. How countries treat one particularly vulnerable group is a good measure of how they will act towards the rest of their citizens.
-----------------------
Fundamentalist s being de facto embassadors for the US, just what we need.
I sure Jesus meant that his teachings would be used to justify "Christian" haters.
What I don't get most of those Foreigner dictators are some of the biggest suckers around.
Another loser thread. You can always find a way to link just about anything together if you are creative enough.
At least you aren't blaming president Bush. I thought all that goes wrong in the world was his fault... At least that's how you guys act.
Then why haven't any gay priest been fired?
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
