Monday, January 4, 2010

You Can't Make This Shit Up

The first Monday of the new year and we're already faced with more incredible crap than you can imagine. A visit over to Holte's place informed me that Ireland, of all places, has passed a law criminalizing blasphemy. That's right, crack a joke about the Virgin Mary and your ass is in jail! I couldn't believe that an otherwise advanced civilization could step so far backwards.
Then I saw this in today's NY Times:
After U.S. Visit, Uganda Weighs Death For Gays
KAMPALA, Uganda — Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks.

The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior.

Isn't it strange that the countries and cultures of this world who condone the use of rape and sodomy as a punishment and weapon of war are the ones who have the most savage laws against homosexuality and the highest rates of HIV?

Don't think it can't happen here. The division of the Episcopal Church over a gay bishop is proof enough of how backward thinking a lot of people in this country are.

Gay rights is a civil rights issue and we must never give up the fight.

15 comments:

  1. Methinks Ugandans doth protest too much...

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  2. Seriously, that makes me angry. And that is coming from an evangelical...I mean it. Serious? Blasphemy is not something I condone, but it was commented by Peter, the rock of the church for goodness sake. Where's the grace in that ruling?!?!?!?!??!

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  3. Kill a gay for Christ...seriously why do you find this so amazing? The evangelical rabidicals in America would pass the same law here if they thought they could. For some going to a dead soldiers funeral using it as a opportunity to protest homosexuality just isn't far enough.

    So they go to a third world country to get the old kill 'em all movement started.

    This is not a Civil Rights issue it is a HUMAN rights issue.

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  4. As the mother of a lesbian, this break my heart.

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  5. I don't live in fear because of my identity, but there are times, after reading an article such as the one you present, when I begin to question my wisdom. Why am I so secure in my belief that other people are free to their own opinions regarding my lifestyle? Will there perhaps be a time when I might fear for my civil liberties, perhaps fear for my very life because I have chosen to spend it with a female partner?

    So odd, I do not condone promiscuious behavior either and the fact that I am gay does not automatically make me instantaneously transform into a person with promiscuous tendencies.

    Golly gee, Mr. C, what's a gay girl to do?

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  6. Uganda of all places, one of the poorest and badly educated places on Earth. They have yet to recover from Idi Amin's brutality.

    The "Let's Cure Homosexuality" evangelicals are among the most misguided, ignorant people in the country. They have started a fire in Uganda they can't douse.

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  7. Mr Charleston,
    The other day while I was listening to NPR, I heard about this from a representative of the "christians" and he made it sound that the media is taking their mission "the wrong way" and etc.
    What's being taken the "wrong way" in my humble and relatively useless opinion, is that human rights are for all humans, whatever your passion or preference or anything that makes me different from you and you different from your neighbor. We're all the damn same. Dammit.

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  8. I'd better not say this in Ireland. Jesus had 12 fellows he traveled with, ate with, slept with, etc. ???????
    the catholic church has done everything it could to discredit Mary Magdalene as nothing more than a whore. she could have lent something to Jesus' image of hetero sexuality.

    nothing worse than holier-than-thou chistians.

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  9. Hear, hear to all of you! What great responses. A martini to you and one for Jesus!

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  10. I couldn't believe that an otherwise advanced civilization could step so far backwards.

    Hang on. We’re talking about the Republic of ‘Buggering a child is okay if you’re a priest’ Ireland here. There are traditional values to be upheld.

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  11. Punch... Eloquent

    Simon... I thought child-buggering was a world-wide Catholic sport.

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  12. You can bet your sweet bippie it could happen here. This mindset is germinated and is still stuck in the middle ages. Much like radical Muslims, they would return us to that time and there would be a terrible blood letting.

    BTW-was it the Ugandans that I read about recently who think it is magical to eat the body parts of albinos? Albinos are actually hiding out to dodge these cretins. Someone correct me on this point...I'm in too big of a hurry to look it up.

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