“Never again“, the world says – and yet genocide has occurred numerous times since 1945. The most infamous recent example is in Rwanda, but Saddam Hussein also dabbled in genocide against the Kurds in Iraq back in the 1980s. And it still goes on today – with the state-sponsored murders of gay people in Iran, the religious fundamentalist militias in Iraq, the mob violence and murders of gay people in Jamaica and Uganda. The laws being passed in numerous countries which turn ordinary people into criminals and fugitives based solely on their sexuality or gender identity are a precursor to genocide. They put it in people’s minds that such people are a threat and are in fact criminals.

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Box Turtle Bulletin has just thrown down the gauntlet with their debut of three videos which expose Scott Lively’s talks in Uganda. Lively, of course, is one of the primary American Evangelicals responsible for encouraging the “Kill the Gays” genocide bill in that country. As you will see in these videos, he is a very sick man. He has been spreading a malevolent lie for over a decade, straight out of his fever dreams, that gays were an integral agressor in the Holocaust, but the video I’m posting finds Lively telling a new lie, one so sinister, considering his audience, that even I am stunned: that gays were responsible for the Rwandan genocide. If you’re not that familiar with African geography, please click here to realize that Uganda and Rwanda share a border. That Scott Lively would play on the fears and tortured memories of people who lived through and next to the famous Rwandan genocide in his life-wasting jihad against gay people should turn the stomach of any rational human being.

It comes as no surprise that Lively apparently referred to this series of talks as a “nuclear bomb” against the “gay agenda.” Anyone who would strike first with a “nuclear bomb” is a demented individual, indeed.

That’s all I’ve got to say. Carl Jung would have a lot more to say, but I digress.

Watch this video here, and then click over to BTB for the rest, and for more detailed commentary from Jim.

Rwanda

South Africa as yet, has remained completely silent on the issue of pink human rights in Africa, specifically Uganda - presumably on the “head-in-the-sand” principle employed by the ostrich – if you ignore it long enough, it will probably go away. Perhaps they are right, but then who am I to criticize? I live in a country which seems increasingly desperate to imitate that other bastion of third-world lunacy, Zimbabwe. (Read More)

Uganda

I have great respect for GLBTI pastors and ministers – and straight clerics, who support their faith’s central ethos of love, peace and tolerance – surely they have to bite their tongues a lot! I doubt I could manage it, but then as an activist I am not expected to. (Read More)

This post can also be read at:

The Huffington Post

The Falls Church News Press

WayneBesen.com

Sometimes, words can kill.

A vocabulary carefully crafted into lethal lies almost always foreshadows fatalities.

In the case of Nazi Germany, the evidence of Hitler’s wicked intentions — from Mein Kampf to the Brown Shirts – was vividly clear. People may have ignored the alarm bells, but no one can say that there were not warnings of the brutality to come.

In 1994, Hutu radio broadcasts that called Tutsis cockroaches helped lead to genocide in Rwanda. Prior to the infamous broadcasts, a newspaper published the Hutu Ten Commandments, which smeared the rival ethnic tribe and included the eerily prescient eighth commandment: “Hutus must stop having mercy on the Tutsis.”

Earlier this month, in Gojra, Pakistan, more than 20,000 rioters torched 100 houses that belonged to Christian families and murdered seven people after a false rumor spread that the town’s Christians had defiled the Koran. Local mullahs enthusiastically furthered this big lie and used it to spark violence.

“We were afraid because the clerics had been railing against us in the mosques,” Riaz Masih, a Christian and retired math teacher whose house was gutted told the New York Times. “They said, ‘Let’s teach them a lesson.’”

The circumstances of these tragedies are vastly disparate in terms of geography, time period and circumstances. However, they illustrate three points:

1) Inflammatory and defamatory words, especially if spoken by religious or political authority figures, can and do lead to violence.

2) There is no shortage of mentally unbalanced people who will sometimes carry out shocking acts, and we should be very careful not to incite them with rhetoric that stokes their paranoia. Like stacks of firewood, these angry individuals go unnoticed until the gasoline is poured and the match is lit.

3) Americans are human beings, just like everyone else. So, the notion that what we say does not matter “because it could never happen here” is jingoistic foolishness.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Dr. Michael Brown, an anti-gay ideologue in Charlotte who brought hundreds of red shirted fundamentalists to that town’s gay pride event. Brown’s mission is to “raise up a holy army of uncompromising spirit-filled radicals who will shake an entire generation with the gospel of Jesus by life or death.”

If you haven’t noticed, the extreme right is getting dangerously delirious. A black president, a Latina on the Supreme Court and gay people gearing up to marry in Iowa has exacerbated this crowd’s feelings of marginalization. (Read More)