The latest wisdom on the webs eternal trans gossip line is that the real obscenity of the persecution of the couple in Malawi that dared to love is that they are not gay but heterosexual based on the identity of one of the people involved or perhaps based on the identities of both.
No the real obscenity is that two adult people in a bigoted hell hole of a place where total ignorance of such ideas is maintained by religious dogma and illiteracy are being persecuted for having the luck to find each other.
Rather than debating the intricate nature of the social construct called gender theory and how it might be used as a defense for these poor people perhaps we should be pushing the UN’s Bill of Universal Human Rights.
One basic fundamental right is the right of adult people to love.
The freedom to love.
Emma Goldman said, “Free love? as if love is anything but free. Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love.”
The worst dictators in the world claim the right to decide who may or may not love one another.
In the 1960s we proclaimed the power of love and freedom to love.
In the face of free love, given freely the religious dogmatists preach abstinence.
No gods, No Masters
05/22/2010 at 11:49 pm
With due respect, to me the greatest obscenity is that, across a wide area in Africa, many countries in the British Commonwealth with a parliamentary and legal tradition identical to some of the largest and oldest democracies, and not dissimilar to that of the USA, all members of the UN, and mostly signatories of the 1948 Convention against Genocide, people are being anathematized in ways that are clearly illegal under that convention, and the governments and law enforcers are doing nothing about it. Indeed sometimes they are themselves involved. And other countries who are supposed to be the second line of defense for victims under the convention are doing little effective either.
The 1948 convention was written in the light of the atrocities of previous years, including those in Europe in the 1930s and 40s. It is designed not so much to punish mass killings as to stop the creation of situations in which people get persecuted or killed for as supposedly members of hated groups. The process of creating that hatred is called anathematization, which is an old religious term meaning to make out that someone is outside the church. Demonization, hate-mongering, and similar phrases are synonyms.
The convention recognizes that writers, preachers, journalists, and politicians can be involved in it.
After the Rwanda genocide the UN recognized that it had done almost nothing to enforce the convention there and the secretary general set up an office specifically to watch out for such behavior, in order to act early and prevent future genocides. The current office holder is from the Sudan, where genocide is not unknown.
Unfortunately, when the convention was written the major nations were most mindful of racial and religious persecution, and apparently ignored the fact that sexual minorities had also been frequent victims. Perhaps this might have been because sexual minorities were commonly being persecuted in their own countries at the time, just not in concentration camps. Or maybe the major groups in the camps themselves despised the sexual minorities. Denial of human rights, imprisonment, and even lobotomies were considered quite acceptable. And thus sexual minorities were not specifically mentioned in the convention, but its clear from the description of banned behavior that, in the modern context, it should apply to, and protect any minority from anyone trying to create a climate in which a targeted group would lose their rights, and perhaps be killed. Not least by claims of being “ungodly”, immoral, or evil.
And that is what is happening in those countries (and to a lesser extent elsewhere, including in the USA), at the hands of certain religious groups who are competing to seek political power, usually with the assistance of money, hate resources, and technology directly, or indirectly from the USA, Rome, or Saudi Arabia.
Tax-free money from certain US churches, and methods and resources created to stoke hatred against sexual minorities in the USA are very much appreciated by associates in Africa. And perhaps it is the everyday nature of that activity in the USA that blinds lawyers and activists, and even the New York-based UN office on genocides, to the far greater effect it can have in much poorer countries where there is far less protection for lives and human rights laws haven’t been updated since colonial times.
The preacher with a television station who claims we are demon-infested and televises the driving out of such “demons”; those who claim we can be “cured” and thus are not entitled to protection on grounds of birth and are to blame for choosing to remain as we are; the campaigns that claim a “gathering storm” around same-sex marriage; those who claim we are seeking to recruit children; or the televangelist who blames major disasters, like the Haiti earthquake, on our human rights, or even our existence, are all doing major anathematizing, and in some places where people watch or listen to their shows the reaction is to pick up the machete and kill the neighbors.
Its not some theoretical “culture war”.
So why is no one enforcing the law?
05/23/2010 at 5:46 am
The funny thing about theists pushing the idea that LGBT/T etc can be cured and therefore does not merit legal protections is that of all possible grounds for legal protections based on the immutability idea religion is the most feeble.
Therefore there should be no legal protections based on religion since anyone can change their religion and many, many people do.
I did. I was raised Catholic, became an atheist as a teenager looked at other religions and decided they were all con jobs, frauds based on superstition and stayed atheist.
I was cured of religion.