The wildly homophobic right-wing would love nothing more than to criminalize homosexuality. In 2005, 45% of Mainers voted against giving people equal rights simply for being gay. This was after three attempts where a majority voted to deny people rights. It’s astounding that so many people can be, frankly, so stupid. A moment’s pause: nearly half of Maine would prefer to have the right to fire people from their jobs at Home Depot, the fire department, Wal-Mart, the grocery store, etc simply for being gay. It’s absurd. This will be a hard one to explain to the grandchildren.
As late as 2003, there was laws on the books banning sodomy. Some applied to all sodomy, some to sodomy between unmarried people, and others specifically to male sodomy. At any rate, the vast majority of these laws were designed to criminalize homosexuality. In 1998, Houston police actually arrested two men (which then led to the 2003 Supreme Court case) for having anal sex. Oh, the horrors of consensual, adult sex! Of course, some conservatives actually maintained that the government had a right to invade the privacy of one’s home in this way. Antonin Scalia, the worst legal mind in the nation, actually wrote his dissent on the basis that it would be inconvenient for other law. That’s right: sodomy should remain illegal because other case law has already been built upon that notion. It’s a terrible legal argument, but it’s a worse lie. He’s just another known homophobe.
Scalia’s dissent represents the epitome of what the right-wing social movement wants (and really, Scalia makes almost all his decisions based upon his social views, not anything remotely related to law). It wants to make homosexuality illegal. Since there are constitutional protections in the United States, however, they’ve had to move on to 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.
Rick Warren has also been involved in telling Ugandans evil lies about homosexuals, comparing them to pedophiles and other things more fitting for systematically sexually repressed priests. But it gets worse. Much, much worse.
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.
This is about one step further than what they want. They do want homosexuals to be viewed as far, far – far – less than human. I doubt most homophobes want death, but they do want to see homosexuals stripped of all rights, of all personal liberty. There is obviously no concern for rights among these monsters. The Ugandans pushing for this bill are just the next logical step in the systematic abuse of rights as they pertain to homosexuals: They aren’t human and they do harmful things. Kill them to stop them.
The three Americans who spoke at the conference — Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads “healing seminars”; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality” — are now trying to distance themselves from the bill.
Lively, Brundidge, and Schmierer are scum. Pure scum. And, Christ, they are paranoid. Look at the Amazon description for Lively’s book.
A concise, practical guidebook for parents who wish to protect their children from pro-homoesxual indoctrination and the possibility of recruitment into the homosexual lifestyle.
He thinks there is some actual agenda to make more people gay. Despite what the fucked up right-wingers think, one does not just become gay, just as one does not just become straight. It doesn’t work like that. If religion didn’t offer such a childish view of sexuality, that would be a bit more clear to these people.
Human rights advocates in Uganda say the visit by the three Americans helped set in motion what could be a very dangerous cycle. Gay Ugandans already describe a world of beatings, blackmail, death threats like “Die Sodomite!” scrawled on their homes, constant harassment and even so-called correctional rape.
“Now we really have to go undercover,” said Stosh Mugisha, a gay rights activist who said she was pinned down in a guava orchard and raped by a farmhand who wanted to cure her of her attraction to girls. She said that she was impregnated and infected with H.I.V., but that her grandmother’s reaction was simply, “ ‘You are too stubborn.’ ”
When a nation starts treating part of its citizenry as somehow intrinsically less worthy, you get thousands of these Ugandan grandmothers.
Filed under: News, Politics and Social | Tagged: Antonin Scalia, Caleb Less Brundidge, Don Schmierer, Lawrence v Texas, Rick Warren, Scott Lively, Sodomy Laws, Stosh Mugisha, Uganda | 34 Comments »
For the Sake of Science 