The South Africa Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (SA GLAAD) has drafted a protest e-mail regarding Malawi’s arrest, remand, conviction, sentencing and incarceration of Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza, Amnesty International’s prisoners of conscience.

Please consider writing your own messages to the following officials, using the following bullet points to craft a brief message in your own words.

To: justice@malawi.gov.mw, sg-justice@sdnp.org.mw, lawcom@lawcom.mw, lawcom@sdnp.org.mw, highcommalai@telkomsa.net, distms@malawi.gov.mw, infopol@africa-online.net, chadzapg@malawi.gov.mw,

cc: InfoDesk@ohchr.org, nationalinstitutions@ohchr.org, gmagazzeni@ohchr.org, civilsocietyunit@ohchr.org, dexrel@ohchr.org

Subject: Free Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza now

• Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza were disingenuously convicted of a supposed indecent act: Daring to hold a symbolic marriage ceremony.
• The law under which they were convicted is a remnant from the Western colonial era.
• The pair has been adopted as “prisoners of conscience” by Amnesty International. The governments of Great Britain and the United States of America, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, have vocally opposed the conviction. The UNHCR said that protection against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is a fundamental human right that cannot be overruled on cultural grounds.
• The sentence is inhumane. The refusal of bail and the remand of Steven and Tiwonge are abhorrent.
• It is time for Malawi to rid itself from the defunct colonial codified discriminations and human rights oppressions.

On these bases, Malawi has no ethical or cultural justification for continuing to incarcerate these men and others like them.

Capetown Archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu is an amazing person who stands for what is good in the world. Here is an excerpt from an op-ed he penned in today’s Washington Post:

Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity — or because of their sexual orientation….It is time to stand up against another wrong. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people are part of so many families. They are part of the human family. They are part of God’s family….Uganda’s parliament is debating legislation that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment, and more discriminatory legislation has been debated in Rwanda and Burundi.

These are terrible backward steps for human rights in Africa.

It is wonderful to hear these words. They are a great contrast to bloodthirsty hate preachers like Uganda’s Martin Ssempa, who is using Christianity as a cover to commit potential mass murder. We could use more inclusive, inspiring voices like Tutu’s in Africa and throughout the world.

This is so typical. Let’s get out our Right Wing Smear paint-by-numbers kit and see if this one fits:

1. Find honest statement by liberal.

2. Twist the meaning of the statement.

3. Repurpose the statement to make it look like an attack. Bonus points if you can add dogwhistles!

4. Raise a bunch of whining hell over nothing and try to draw blood. Bonus points for directly misquoting the liberal!

Yep, this fits! John Boehner, Brent Bozell, and some other minor figures are having a public sad over the fact that Harry Knox correctly stated that the Pope is hurting people in the name of Jesus by actively working against honest sex and contraception education in sub-Saharan Africa, and is thus contributing to the spread of HIV/AIDS on that continent: (Read More)

This morning I lost my virginity… my TV interview virginity, that is.

Those who know me, know me as a fairly quiet person, so the last place they would expect to see me is on a live TV broadcast on ETV morning news, talking about international matters. Come to think of it, that’s the last place I would expect to see me. Never the less, I found myself there this morning, a bundle of nerves, like a lamb being led to the slaughter. (Read More)

The “culture war“, now more than 30 years old – today is far from the obscure reference cloaked and made fun of by the little quotation marks which try to create the impression that the culture war is a euphemism and not really a war at all. The truth is very different, because when people’s lives are destroyed through the actions of other people – even people on the other side of the planet, even without the use of conventional weapons – and when people die - it is a war in every real sense of the word.

Far from fading out over time, it is a war that has escalated if anything – and now employs advanced weapons such as the internet, science, medicine, psychology and multimedia – along with more traditional hardware like covert operations, surveillance, intelligence, counter-intelligence, propaganda, politics, dirty tricks, entrapment, investigative journalism, expose’s, espionage, infiltration – and denial. (Read More)

The brewing human-rights disaster in Uganda has thus far been blamed squarely on those who launched the current campaign of violence and brutal punishment: Exodus International board member Don Schmierer, Massachusetts ex-gay activist and Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, the ex-gay International Healing Foundation led by Richard Cohen, Uganda ex-gay activist Stephen Langa, and Martin Ssempa, a longtime leader of Uganda’s religious war against its LGBT citizenry who is funded by U.S. evangelicals.

But as the crisis grows, so does U.S. foreign aid to Uganda: The State Department just promised Uganda $246 million with few if any human-rights strings attached. And so responsibility must now be shared not just by the masterminds of the campaign, but also by U.S. taxpayers. Let’s take a look back at how U.S. taxpayers like me — and many of you — became implicated in a violent evangelical war against Ugandan sexual minorities.

(Read More)

With the continued support of Exodus International for his recent pro-vigilantism conference, Uganda ex-gay activist Stephen Langa on March 15 followed through on threats to renew a campaign of antigay vigilantism across the African nation, according to Box Turtle Bulletin.

Then, on March 19, U.S. writer Richard Rosendall noted that Uganda’s antigay vigilante campaigns may be subsidized by U.S. taxpayers through evangelical groups’ misuse of former President Bush’s abstinence-only AIDS funding in Africa.

And on March 22, Langa put self-proclaimed child molester and “ex-gay” George Oundo on the soapbox before Ugandan pro-government (antigay) media, to declare that all gay Ugandans are “targeting mostly children ‘because they are easy to initiate and they like easy things.’ ” Oundo projected his own sickness onto gay people, and accused Ugandan anti-violence and pro-equality groups of enabling his alleged past acts of child molestation. Oundo, who was arrested and possibly tortured by the Ugandan government in 2008, now works for antigay pastor Martin Ssempa, who has coordinated past Ugandan vigilante campaigns that were monitored by Human Rights Watch:

Campaigns with access to millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars that were intended for AIDS prevention, but which increased the spread of AIDS through vigilantism, prejudice, miseducation, and denial of access to condoms.

The new campaign by Langa, aided without apology by Exodus, may enjoy ongoing support from U.S. taxpayers unless action is taken to stop the funding.

Extensive previous coverage by Truth Wins Out. Details after the jump. (Read More)

A prominent board member of the “ex-gay” group Exodus International spoke at a conference in Uganda last week, where activists vowed to “wipe out” homosexuality through police action, forced re-education, life imprisonment, and vigilantism.

Exodus President Alan Chambers (pictured) enabled the hate by doing nothing to stop the conference. The following is a timeline of the call for human rights abuses that took place on Chambers’ watch.
(Read More)

Botswana’s Sunday Standard published a Dec. 13 story which begins by promoting the notion that heterosexual people can change their orientation to gay and then recruit other people into homosexuality.

The article cites only a single example: an unidentified woman who was “fed up” with abusive men and claims now to be lesbian even though she has only dated men in the past and she offers no indication of any previous attraction to women. “I can easily introduce one to the gay life and they will be hooked,” the woman says. The article adds, “She, however, is cagey and does not reveal whether she was introduced and trained in the homosexual world” — as if homosexuals lived in a different world than heterosexuals.

Caine Youngman, board president of Lesbians, Gays and Bisexual People of Botswana, tries to set the record straight.

He says there is a difference between heterosexual sex and being heterosexual, citing that homosexual people can indulge in heterosexual sex and heterosexual people can also practice homosexual sex but that’ not changing their sexual orientation. Youngman avows that his opinions are based on his personal experience, experiences of those around him, available literature and the confessions from different people.

“No, I do not believe that one can turn just like that. There are some institutions who call themselves “Ex-gay”. They believe they can turn gay people into heterosexuals. The results are questionable since some people say they just choose to ignore their emotions. I have a friend who was a member of such an institution who had to go under shock therapy as part of his transformation. He is still a gay man,” says Youngman.

Homosexuality and gay-rights groups are illegal in Botswana, and the media seem to be pressured by the government to apply an antigay spin to their articles. Besides spotlighting a confused, anonymous, and possibly fictitious woman, the article fails to ask a very basic and obvious question:

Is the Exodus Global Alliance aware of — and supporting — shock therapy in Botswana?

In a way, you have to feel for Old Spice.

A recent effort meant to reinforce the Procter and Gamble men’s product line’s ruggedly macho image backfired in a big way. Old Spice sponsored the Art of Manliness‘ 2008 Man of the Year poll, which existed to crown a paragon of masculinity, a regular guy who, among other traits, “is loyal to his friends and family… does the right thing, even when it’ not convenient… serves and gives back to his community… [and] sacrifices for the good of others.”

Nominations were submitted by the public and P&G whittled the list down to 10 finalists. Voting in the unscientific poll took place between Oct. 20 and Nov. 9, and roughly 10,000 votes were cast.

The winner announced Dec. 15 was: Matthew L. Chancey, a sharp-dressed Christian missionary and lawyer who works to save lives and souls in Africa. Chancey received roughly 30 percent of readers’ votes, largely on the back of a loving testimonial from his wife Jennie.

Mrs. Chancey’s nominating essay on her man’s manliness is truly touching. It speaks of his kindness and strength, lauds his perilous work in Darfur, and describes him as a churchgoing John Wayne-style Rennaisance man who can “read G.A. Henty’ historical fiction aloud to our [eight] children at the dinner table and fix the brakes on a 1964 Ford pickup.” And never, never let you forget he’s the man. “He’d never sing his own praises, but, as his wife, I never tire of doing so,” she writes.

Her words are very moving and obviously persuasive to many. What’s more compelling, however, is what Mrs. Chancey did not share. Her reference to the writer G.A. Henty hints that there is more to the story: Henty was a writer in Victorian England who specialized in youth-focused adventure tales that supported his racist, classist, imperialist worldview and who is beloved by many archconservative Christian evangelicals.

Turns out Old Spice’s 2008 Art of Manliness Man of the Year is deeply involved with Vision Forum, a ministry so reputedly racist and radically right-wing it couldn’t support Sarah Palin for vice-president. On his Web site, Chancey praises pastor Doug Phillips as his “patriarch par excellence.” Check out what Vision Forum thinks of LGBT people:

Homosexuality is not a victimless crime. It is a cruel moral perversion that wreaks moral, physical and spiritual havoc on men, women, children, families and institutions. The Bible makes no distinction between homosexuals, pedophiles, bestials and rapists. All are criminals, the toleration of which brings judgment on the land and devastation to children.

… It is the mission of the Christian, and is no contradiction, that we lovingly preach repentance to sodomites, even as we seek to drive from the land every manifestation of homosexuality. Furthermore, Sodomy was a punishable crime at common law and should remain such. Any politician who supports same sex marriage or civil marriage for sodomites is complicit in a moral crime against God and should be actively opposed.

He’s a state leader of the Family Policy Network, a right-wing political group that works the same turf as Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council. He’s also a politician — Chancey recently lost a bid to become Alabama’s public service commissioner. and though he ran as a Republican, he was endorsed by the ultra-right Alabama Constitution Party. He even gained some notoriety in 2005 when the Washington Post discovered communications specialist Chancey — apparently no bastion of manly ethics — playing fast and loose with Gov. Tim Kaine’s (D-VA) Internet domain name. And he’s earned quite the reputation for ruthlessness in evangelical Christian circles.

His Biblically inspired views on marriage, gender roles, and family are ultra-traditional. Men are meant to be in the world and to serve as heads of households. Women, from birth, are groomed for service in the home, as the following photo from the Vision Forum Father-Daughter Discipleship Retreat shows.

Vision Forum girls compete to see who can do the best job at grooming, shaving, and tying a tie on their dads.

Matt Chancey’s daughters don’t get to go to college — they don’t even get a Rumspringa. And Chancey — his wife also doesn’t divulge that she runs the Ladies Against Feminism Web site — believes women should not vote.

That’s right. He’s a real man’s man, a regular guy.

Art of Manliness and Old Spice say their hands are clean and that the vote is a win for diversity:

It was not possible, or even desirable to quiz each candidate about their political, religious, and social views. While we selected the finalists, the winner will be determined by you, the reader. If you don’t support a particular candidate’ message, you should vote for those you do believe in and spread the word about that candidate. The contest is not about who AoM or Old Spice believes should be the winner, but who the public determines should be the 2008 Man of the Year.

Matt will be receiving the $2,000 cash prize sponsored by Old Spice along with a manly assortment of Old Spice products. Congratulations, Matt. Right now Matt’ in Africa working for his non-profit. … His $2,000 prize will be going to Darfur to help refugees from the genocide.

Chancey works for the Persecution Project Foundation, which is run by Vision Forum leader Doug Phillips’ brother Brad. The group’s mission is to “take the gospel message of Jesus Christ to the people of Africa, simultaneously bringing them physical supplies and food.”

Whatever one’s views of its captive-audience evangelizing, PPF helps people in desperate need That, of course is an admirable thing, no question. But if P&G knew the whole story, would it be so blithely accepting of having Chancey serve as the epitome of “good, clean, wholesome manliness?” Is this the role model they were seeking? And now that the announcement is out there and the boycott-threatening complaints by outraged customers are coming in, can you imagine how P&G execs must feel about the whole once-avoidable mess? Chances are, they are praying this controversy just goes away — and fast.