The website Box Turtle Bulletin has just learned that the Rwandan Parliament is scheduled to take up consideration of a change to Rwanda’ penal code which would criminalize homosexuality with a punishment of five to ten years. It would also ban counselling and advocacy that could be interpreted as “encouraging or sensitizing” people to enter into same-sex relationships.
Two words come to mind: “bullies” and “cowards”
In the case or Rwanda and Uganda, these tough guys (probably closeted homosexuals fighting inner ‘demons’) are picking on a defenseless minority for political gain. How easy it must be to build a political career by destroying others.
I guess now that Hutus are not killing Tutsis, Rwanda needs GLBT people to fill the violence vacuum. Has this nation learned nothing of its past attempts to “cleanse” society?
I alwayz oppose the policies of Kagame’s regime, but this time around, i believe that the decision to punish gays is right. Gay people have no morals & values, therefore have no place in africa. To me the punishment of 5 to 10 years is nothing but promoting sodomy, to me these devils deserve life sentences. God punished people of Sodom & Gomora, why not us human punishing them big time, i think it is the right thing to do.
The problem with the other comment is that God did NOT destroy Sodom and Gomorrah due to homosexuality. If one bothers to read the Bible, before parroting justification for homophobia, one can see that nowhere in Scripture where the sins of Sodom are listed does it mention being gay. Thus, if this is the reason one is using to murder, then that person needs to go back and look at the 10 commandments. It’s very clear: Thou Shalt Not Murder. Murder, like homophobia, are both sins.
Monte, its immoral to punish someone who isn’t harming anyone. You are an evil person.
Is it time for us to institute our OWN “Gay Panic Defense” yet? Do we really wait until our own population here in the usa is hopelessly & outrageously aggressive against gay people, before we prepare for real defense? Look at Uganda and now Rwanda. THAT POINT in time is TOO LATE! These two governments are NOT fighting homosexuality – they are fighting people! SameGenderLoving PEOPLE, and they have the automatic weapons, the money and time and now the leaders and directions. So be courageous and SPEAK at the first hint of anti-gay attitudes: at home, at church, at work. That is where their evil killing-cults begin.
michael
I think you had better read the bible again
yes sodom was guilty of homosexual sin, the
men of sodom wanted to have sex with the
angels they thought were men. that they were
homosexual is irrefutable due to the fact that
they turned down lot’s offer of his virgin
daughter. Also Jude 7 makes clear that the
men of sodom were after unatural(homosexual)
sex. the greek for strange (heteros) literally
means that witch is contrary to the natural order.
witch by the way shows that using the term hetero-
sexual to describe someone who has sex with
someone of the opposite sex is a misnomer in
that having sex with someone of the opposite sex
is the natural intended order.
No, Brad, if you bother to read Leviticus, you will find that the people of Sodom were men and women — it was not a male-only city.
Which is beside the point, because Leviticus treats Lot the incestuous father and negligent husband as a hero. And it condemns people for countless innocuous activities that you take for granted today.
Leviticus itself is the work of someone of pitifully immoral repute. And people like you who cherry-pick from Leviticus are even more pitiful in your immorality.
It’s also useful to note that Sodom is referenced about 15 other times throughout the Hebrew prophets, and they all explain that the sin of Sodom was inhospitality.
As in, they say it explicitly: “The sin of Sodom was this:…”
The only place where sex is even brought up in relation to Sodom is, yes, in Jude, but that references the violent aspects of it.
You have to be damn near biblically illiterate to actually believe that Sodom had anything to do with homosexuality.
Brad said “that they were
homosexual is irrefutable due to the fact that
they turned down lot’ offer of his virgin
daughter.”
No, it is entirely refutable. Many times heterosexual men seek to rape other men to demean them, to subjugate them as women. They turned down the women because they already knew them and raping them wouldn’t subjugate them as women, they already were women. In this case rape was about establishing dominance, a dominance that they were already assumed to have over women.
Brad, it is you who need to read the Bible again. If the intention of the men of Sodom was a sexual one, and it seems that it almost certainly was, that intention was mass homosexual rape. As the late Dominican priest and scholar, Fr Gareth Moore, put it:
“It is clear that what the citizens of Sodom have in mind is rape; that is their projected evil deed. They do not want to share sexual activity with the visitors, but to subject them to sexual domination. They do not knock politely at the door to ask whether the visitors would care to partake in some sex play with them. They demand that Lot bring them out to them that they may “know’ them. The visitors themselves are to be reduced to a state of passivity. They are not asked to come out; Lot is to bring them out.”
Furthermore, we are told that Lot, who offered his virgin daughters to be raped instead, was a “righteous man”. Is that an example of righteous behaviour? I’m amazed that anyone can suppose that this story — even if it’ historical, which is extremely doubtful — can provide us with any guide to sexual ethics.
You’re right that Jude 7 describes the men of Sodom as going after “strange flesh”. The Greek expression translated in the KJV as “strange flesh” is “hetera sarx” which means literally “other flesh” or “different flesh”. The word “hetera” does NOT mean “unnatural” or “homosexual”. That is why the word “heterosexual” is not, as you wrongly assert, a misnomer. On the contrary, although purists might object to it as a linguistic hybrid, its Greek/Latin formation makes it a perfectly accurate term to refer to attraction to the OTHER sex, just as “homosexual”, another Greek/Latin hybrid, accurately describes attraction to the SAME sex, the meaning of the “homo-” prefix being “same”.
The previous verse in Jude refers to the “Watchers”, the fallen angels who left their proper sphere and had sexual intercourse with mortals, a story told in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, although it is also briefly referred to in Genesis 6:1-2. Jude compares the men of Sodom to the Watchers, showing that he is referring here, too, to attempted sex between mortals and angels. If he had intended to refer to homosexual sex here, then he should have accused the men of Sodom, not of going after “OTHER flesh”, but of going after “the SAME flesh” or “SIMILAR flesh”.
Genesis 19:30-36 depicts Lot getting drunk with his daughters, raping them, making them pregnant, and finally scapegoating the daughters by claiming with a straight face that the daughters made him get drunk and do the deed.
It’s pathetic that people like Brad — and the rest of the Christian Right — look to Lot and other wicked heroes of Genesis as paragons of homophobic and sex-obsessed moral virtue.
Yes, Michael, you’re right. The Old Testament is full of immoral stories.
Take King David, for instance, who is described as “a man after God’ own heart”. He was a polygamist who had least ten wives, and the means by which he came by some of them would raise the eyebrows, to say the least, even of most people who approve of polygamy. It was only when he got to Bath-Sheba, with whom he had an adulterous affair while her husband was still alive, and whom he obtained as a wife by sending her husband to be slaughtered in battle, that the Lord turned stroppy with him. And how are we told that he punished David? By making Bath-Sheba’ baby boy, whom David had sired, sick so that he died. (See II Samuel 12)
When fundamentalists start chuntering about “traditional, biblical, sexual morality”, I can only laugh them to scorn, to use a biblical phrase.
sorry william the greek words are heteros sarx
which when taken together do indeed indicate
sexual activity that is contrary to that wich
is natural, and as far as the men of sodom
having sex with angels, they did not know that
they were angels, as they were in the guise of
men, the fact remains that the men of sodom
were indeed homosexual as they only desired
sex with men the sins of sodom (including
homosexuality) had been offending God for
a long time, now seeing that most of the
men of sodom were homosexually inclined,
it is perfectly reasonable to conclude that
there was consentual homosexual sex going
on as well witch was part of the abomination
mentioned in Ez 16:50
Brad is fluent in Greek, you see.
Speaks it all the time, sometimes doesn’t even realize he’s speaking it, it comes so naturally to him…
And in the lead-up to Sodom, it doesn’t mention homosexuality. And it’s not reasonable to conclude that consensual homosexual sex was part of the “sins of Sodom,” unless you desperately need to believe that to prop up your flimsy version of reality.
Brad said “the men of sodom
were indeed homosexual as they only desired
sex with men”.
No, that’s not the case. You’ve already been informed of the truth, now you are lying. Heterosexual men often seek to subjugate other men by raping them. This is what happens in prison. They turned down sex with women because their goal was to establish dominance over the male strangers, a dominance they were naturally assumed to have over women by their status as men. By forcing men to take on a sexual role as women they feel this establishes their superiority. This has nothing to do with gayness, its all about subjugation – you are a liar Brad.
Further, the attempted rape of the angels had nothing to do with sexual desire – it was all about power.
Sorry, Brad, you’re wrong again. My knowledge of Greek has never been more than elementary, I haven’t touched it since my university days, and I’ve forgotten how to decline and conjugate, but I can still remember enough to be able to look up a reference in the Greek New Testament, which is before me as write.
The actual expression used is “sark??s het?©ras”. Whether or not the writer of Jude regarded the kind of sex that the men of Sodom were seeking as unnatural, the words “sark??s het?©ras” do not MEAN “sexual activity that is contrary to that wich [sic] is natural”; they mean “other flesh” or “different flesh”. Whether or not the men of Sodom in the Genesis account were supposed to have been aware that Lot’ visitors were angels, the writer of Jude undoubtedly looks at the event in that light, as the previous verse makes clear.
“the fact remains that the men of Sodom were indeed homosexual as they only desired sex with men”
This is never stated anywhere in the Bible. All we are told in Genesis is that when Lot, “a righteous man”, offered his virgin daughters to be raped instead of the angels, the men got angry with him and said “Here is the one who came as a foreigner, and would set himself up as a judge. Now we will treat you worse than them.” To quote the late Fr Gareth Moore, O.P., again:
“Lot’ gesture in offering the crowd his daughters is not, then, an effort to get them to commit a relatively acceptable heterosexual sin as opposed to an abominable homosexual sin; it shows the lengths to which he is prepared to go, what he is prepared to sacrifice, in order to protect the honour of his guests.”
You say;
“seeing that most of the men of sodom were homosexually inclined”
Again, nowhere in the Bible is this either stated or implied. It is purely your invention. But let us go along with it for the sake of argument. If indeed “most of the men of sodom were homosexually inclined” — and there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that such a concept was part of the biblical writers’ way of thinking — then it would surely have been patently obvious to Lot that the men who were demanding that he bring out the visitors to be raped were among that majority who “were homosexually inclined” and who, as you have put it, “only desired sex with men”. So why the hell did he offer them his virgin daughters to be raped instead? It just doesn’t make any sense. For heaven’ sake, I know what it’ like to be “homosexually inclined” and “only desire sex with men”, as you express it. I’ve never raped anyone in my life and wouldn’t dream of doing so, but if, instead of sex with another guy, I was offered someone’ daughter (virgin or otherwise) to have sex with, it would be as if I asked the barman in my local for a pint of beer and he suggested a nice, refreshing glass of water as a substitute.
“consentual [sic] homosexual sex going on as well witch [sic] was part of the abomination mentioned in Ez 16:50″
Once again, a pure invention of your own, which you have imported into the text.
Sorry, Brad. Even for a biblical fundamentalist, you’re doing a pretty abysmal job.
I missed this idiocy by Brad – he said “most of the
men of sodom were homosexually inclined”.
Obviously that can’t have been true or the city would have died out. Even in modern times there’s no such thing as a city where most of the men are gay – it simply never happens. The story of sodom is clearly one where most of the inhabitants were heterosexual and given that all were punished it obviously wasn’t for gayness, it must have been for inhospitality, or if Brad wants to make that case, they were punished for heterosexuality.
Brad has not even addressed the topic of this page: Rwanda.
How cowardly of him.