Thursday, January 27, 2011

Uganda's Homophobia - How to Cross the Line

Warning: I am about to release my opinions very candidly and bluntly, and it might offend you. Sorry. Actually, no...I'm not sorry at all.

I need to say before you read this that I love Uganda. The cultures, the people, and the beauty. But sometimes, I really dislike certain parts of the population, whom you will read about below. All of my comments are directed towards the ones that insist on carrying on with extreme homophobia that results in disgusting violence.

I haven't thought about this topic in a while... mainly because it really infuriates me and it challenges my anthropological instincts to stay neutral.

But this is ridiculous. CNN just reported that a Ugandan gay rights activist was bludgeoned to death in his own home. Watching this video fills me with sorrow and anger to know that this man is dead because of ignorance and intolerance. With such a close connection to Uganda and such a belief in the tolerance and appreciation for diversity, I have to say that this story is the last straw. I am truly embarrassed and ashamed for the people that committed this atrocious act and for their supporters.

While it may not seem like much, I am shocked at the courage of this man to speak to a Western news outlet about his sexuality and his fears for his safety. The Ugandan gay rights community has truly lost someone very special. If you've never read anything about gay rights in Uganda, there basically are none. Gayness is viewed as an abomination in what is a predominantly born-again Christian nation. Recently, laws inspired by right wing American groups have been tabled in the Ugandan Parliament. These laws call for the execution of "repeat" offenders, meaning anyone who has been accused of being homosexual on more than one occasion or even someone who fails to tattle on their possibly homosexual neighbor or friend. I should mention that a homosexual could face imprisonment for up to 14 years under the current anti-homosexuality law.

Here's a link to an article from Human Rights Watch in 2009 when the bill was making the news quite frequently.

From my experience in Uganda, I know that even those who feel that executing homosexuals is extreme have little tolerance for what they deem to be unnecessary differentiation from other Ugandans. If you read the comments below the article I linked to above, you'll see that some people said it was his fault because he managed to land himself on the "top homosexuals" list, which obviously means he wasn't being discrete enough about his sexuality. Why should he have to be? I've been able to observe that, for the most part, Uganda can be a place of conformity and keeping your opinions to yourself, especially where politics are concerned. But when it comes to homosexuality, there is no holding back when it comes to spewing pure hatred.

Some Ugandans stand by this policy as an assertion of their cultural rights and as a middle finger to Western intervention, which is ironic because Uganda has long been in the back pocket of the United States. What really baffles me, is that this man was killed in the name of Christianity and the belief that homosexuality is an offense to to God. Is cold-blooded murder not offensive? Do these people think God will reward them for so violently killing a man who did them no harm? Also ironic is that the Uganda Christian identity formed from colonization by the British. Additionally, the British established the original anti-homosexuality law in Uganda a long time ago, presumably because homosexuality was already present. This history tells us that homosexuality has always been in Uganda, and that the law against it came with Western intervention. This is the exact opposite of everything that the bill's supporters currently claim. They say that homosexuality was introduced (and is still being introduced) by Westerners and that the law needs to be tougher in order to rid the nation of this "embarrassing" portion of the population.

All I can say is that to the rest of the world, this plays out like ignorance, misguided education, and dangerous Christian fundamentalism that takes us back to Old Testament times.

If these people are attempting to assert their "Ugandanness", I think it is a hugely misplaced topic with which to establish an identity, not to mention a false identity. For my Ugandan friends who might read this, I implore you to open your heart and your mind and allow people to live as they wish to live. Whether you agree with it or not, homosexuality has absolutely no affect on how you conduct your life unless you want it to, and this can be positive or negative. Please choose to accept your homosexual friends with kindness and openness because they will need the support if popular opinion in Uganda continues in this direction.

9 comments:

  1. A couple things: I don't think that execution for repeat offenders is actually a law at this point. Also, it should be noted that the homosexuality bill was spearheaded by "The Family", a right wing evangelica Christian organization in the States. It includes high powered Americans and politicians including the adulterous Mark Sanford.

    I'm with you though. News like this is just shameful.

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  2. I didn't say it was a law yet, I said it had been tabled. Unless I misunderstood, "tabled" means "being discussed" right?

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  3. I for one refuse the premise that so many moderate Christians present, which is that the bible doesn't support such heinous behavior. The bible, the founding document of Christianity, in all English translations, absolutely says in Leviticus 18:22 that homosexuals are to be put to death.

    Moderate Christians condemning this heinous murder are to be commended, but I do not credit their religion but rather modern civil secular society and a western philosophical mind set that has allowed them to abandon the immorality found in the bible.

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  4. Cmurphy, this is perhaps biased in my understanding/interpretation of the Bible which is more about the overall pictures like love thy neighbor and all that than some of the highly specific rules, like putting homosexuals to death or women covering their hair. It seems to me that there are a lot of things in the Bible that have been more or less abandoned for modern day common sense. This viewpoint, however, could be attributed to my "western philosophical mindset."

    I see what you're saying, though. I, perhaps ineffectively, was trying to point out that most of the anti-homosexuality movement in Uganda has come from Western influence, like religion, and that there are a lot of contradictions in their argument.

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  5. Any thinking person who actually reads the bible cover to cover would get a distinctly negative impression: confusion, contradiction, terrible stories of violence, a deity that commands man to rape and commit genocide. It's a fairly good book to read if you're considering atheism, that a deity could possibly be so vindictive and capricious, and drag humanity down with him.

    The bible is a transitory document in that before its proposed morality, human morality was in an even darker place, if that's possible to imagine. So there is some credit that the bible gets for setting humanity out on a more moral path. But by today's standards of human decency, it's a backwards document. Love they neighbor makes up but a very small part of the bible - very important, truth be told, I wish there were more emphasis on this.

    But it's deplorable that in math, science, chemistry, history, we learn new things and REMOVE incorrect information when we update our books. This is not the way of religion which demands that the truths and reality of the world were revealed long ago and are true to this day, and are immutable. We do not get to do better, and we certainly don't change the bible no matter how perverted its demands are.

    This is a philosophy all of its own, and has shaped America's very foreign policy with a manifest destiny that we can do no wrong. Just like the god of the bible can do no wrong.

    Well, all you have to do is witness the effect of American foreign policy to prove we can and have done wrong. And witness how millions of American believers hold their deity to a lower standard of decency and behavior than human fathers. If a human father were to watch their child die, get raped, blueoned to death and do NOTHING about it, fellow humans correctly would have nothing good to say about this person. But somehow the father in heaven can allow all kinds of atrocities to occur and say and do nothing about it and somehow that's perfectly OK behavior for a supposedly interventionist deity.

    I think it's ridiculous. I'm fine with being tolerant of such ridiculousness, but I'm definitely not OK being respectful about it. These beliefs and their corresponding behaviors deserve disrespect and complete and total repudiation.

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  6. Sorry :-) NOT deplorable that we update our understanding of the world when we recognize we got something wrong. It is deplorable that Christianity doesn't disavow acts of violence in the bible with a rewrite, removing the supreme deity's demand for violence, murder, genocide, rape, torture, and racism.

    Not doing so while also insisting it is a moral guide is sophistry.

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  7. cmurphy, Do you mind if I ask how you stumbled upon my blog and why do you know so much about this subject?

    Maybe I need to clarify that I am not a Christian, but I know quite a few people who are who certainly are not horrible people.

    Honestly, your opinions on Christianity make perfect sense to me. I particularly agree with your points that a supposedly interventionist god is, in reality,very non-interventionist, if we believe he exists at all. In fact, a turning point for me was when I visited a genocide memorial in Rwanda. It was a place where people had sought refuge in a church, and obviously they were butchered anyway. Before this experience, I would've identified myself as a Christian, but after this I couldn't understand how the god that I had been taught about could allow that to happen, in a church of all places, and that it was these peoples' fate to die this way. It made no sense. Perhaps some of them would have lived had they not sought protection in that church.

    I admit beyond that moment I haven't given it much thought, and it is obvious that you have looked into this much more than I have.

    I still maintain that the point of this post, however, was about the insanity of bludgeoning an innocent man to death in the name of a god whom most of these people DO believe to be . I get the sense that you feel I should be more critical of Christianity and less willing to let people believe what they will?

    Thanks for commenting.

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  8. Well my longer reply appears to post successfully, but then when reloading the page it's gone, so I'm not sure what the deal is. Anyway, short version. I found your blog the day of the murder while researching for a past article on the Christian group that was pushing the government to increase punishments for homosexuals.

    As for why I know a little bit about this subject: raised Catholic, gay and in the course of reconciliation I was compelled to better understand how humans have invented tens of thousands of deities and then dispensed with them. I guess I'm in the dispensing with deities mode.

    I do not think you should be more critical of Christianity or less tolerant of what people believe. My position is that humans have a propensity to make up stupid bullcrap, which if it catches on can be dangerous for the minority. And I feel that thinking people have an obligation to point out logical fallacies and dangerous and useless beliefs. I consider it tolerance in that people should not be sanctioned for their beliefs, but I do feel disrespect for stupid bullcrap is appropriate. If we simply let fellow humans invent ridiciulousness and never challenge it, sometimes vociferously, well here we are. We get a pleasant country and people, like Uganda, indoctrinated about 50/50 with Protestant and Catholic stupid bullcrap beliefs, and it has not helped the country one single bit with their problems. It has only hurt them, and specific individuals as well.

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  9. Well, I just stumbled upon this blog as I may be going to Uganda for the first time this summer. I'm a student nurse and always like to dig a little deeper when I travel. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Erin.
    Blessings from Oregon,
    Fij.

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