Box Turtle Bulletin has helped to identify some of leading U.S. Anglican churches — dropouts from the Episcopal Church — that now take orders from the human-rights opponents who lead the churches of Uganda and Nigeria.

An article in the LA Times from 2004 identified three of the charter members of this network:

St. David’s Episcopal Church in North Hollywood, Calif.
All Saints’ in Long Beach, Calif.
St. James in Newport Beach, Calif.

However, since 2004, many many more churches have joined what is now the Anglican Church in America.

Whether they stop to think about it or not, these churches implicitly affirm their African leaders’ efforts to imprison and torture homosexual persons and their families and friends. The churches’ African leaders also affirm extralegal tolerance for vigilantism and corrective rape.

Please find a church near you. Then politely ask the church to state publicly its detailed position regarding Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, regarding the criminalization of homosexuality in the United States and Canada, and regarding freedom of expression and freedom of religion for persons who affirm sexual honesty and individual freedom. Remind them that their African leaders’ positions will be assumed to be their own, unless they say otherwise. Please let us know what you hear from them.

The LGBT people of Uganda will thank you.

This little nugget was reported in today’s New York Times:

Worshipers at two Malaysian mosques found the severed heads of pigs when they arrived for morning prayers on Wednesday, according to the police. Pigs are considered unclean by Muslims. The incident followed vandalism and arson at 11 Christian churches this month and appeared to be part of a continuing dispute over the use of the word Allah by Christians to designate God in the Malay-language Bible.

I’m overwhelmed by the morality and love demonstrated by these two groups. No doubt that the Muslims setting fires and the Christians lopping off pig heads were fundamentalists believing they were doing God’s work. Surely, these criminals are patting themselves on the back believing God/Allah/Jesus/Mohammad are condoning their psychotic actions. This is the pathological delusion that unchecked fundamentalism can bring certain followers.

Given such extreme behavior by religious fanatics, I wonder how some nations, such as Nigeria or Malaysia, where Christianity and Islam co-exist in tension, can make it without turning into sectarian deathtraps.

By the way, have you ever noticed how gay or mainstream churches never burn down the worship houses of others or mutilate animals for the Lord?

Maybe the conservative crazies could learn a little something about their own religions from the liberals and moderates they so despise.

Britain’s Church Times explains that U.S. Christian Rightists are using African clergy as proxies to fight a U.S. domestic culture war against American religious and sexual minorities.

RIGHT-WING organisations in the United States are cultivating African religious leaders as part of a strategy to undermine the social witness of US mainline Churches and promote homophobia in Africa, says an in­vesti­gative report by an Anglican priest and scholar, the Revd Kapya Kaoma.

The report, Globalizing the Culture Wars: US Conservatives, African Churches, & Homophobia, was com­missioned by the progressive think tank Political Research Associates. It argues that African bishops and other leaders are being used as proxies in an internal US conflict.

Organizations that seek to divide and destroy mainline Christian churches — specifically, the notorious right-wing Institute on Religion and Democracy — have recast human rights as “an imperialistic attempt to manipulate Africans into accepting homosexuality,” according to the Church Times.

The [PRA] report lists the tactics used, including the use of money and the ghost-writing by US conservatives of key speeches by African religious leaders. US religious conservatives have successfully presented themselves as representatives of mainstream US Evangelicalism.

The report suggests: “Many Afri­cans do not distinguish, for example, between the Christian Right, Evan­gelicals, the neo-conservative IRD, mainline renewal movements, [the] Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, and [the] right-wing megachurch leader Rick Warren.”

The conservative “renewal” [schism] groups are generally small, says the report, but their relationship with wealthy US donors and powerful African bishops has made them key players in the fight for the future of the Anglican Communion.

African Churches are being persuaded to separate from their international partnerships and to realign with conservative replacements. These tactics have been most successful in countries such as Nigeria and Uganda, which the report characterises as those where political leadership is dictatorial and civil society weak.

(Weekly Column)

The latest  anti-gay terrorism in Iraq — is gluing shut the anuses of homosexuals, while forcing the victims to ingest a form of Ex-Lax. The special glue can only be removed by surgery — thus often leading to a painful death.

It is always a challenge to know if such information is accurate. But, confirming (I have) the latest form of torture is beside the point, really. What we do know is that the news from overseas is rarely encouraging.

For example, in March “tens of thousands” of people from Burundi demonstrated to outlaw homosexuality. This destitute nation is the kind of place that you may have seen in late night infomercials where flies buzz around the lips of starving children. Eighty percent of Burundi’s population lives in poverty. Famines and food shortages have occurred and the World Food Program reports that 56.8-percent of children under age five suffer from chronic malnutrition. Yet, the good citizens of Burundi have time to chant and hold signs demanding the imprisonment of homosexuals.

Back to Iraq — our tax dollars are now overseeing the wanton murder of gay Iraqis. The New York Times reported this month that “the bodies of 25 boys and men suspected of being gay have turned up in the huge Shiite enclave of Sadr City…”

In Nigeria, lawmakers are debating a bill that would imprison gay people who live together and jail anyone who doesn’t rat out the gay couples. In July 2008, London’s Independent wrote a story about a 26-year-old gay man in Turkey, Ahmet Yildiz, saying that his own family may have killed him. “They wanted him to see a doctor who could cure him, and get married,” a friend explained.

Box Turtle Bulletin reported that a Ugandan newspaper this week published an article under the banner headline, “Top Homos In Uganda Named.” This outrage — that jeopardizes the lives of gay people – follows a recent anti-gay conference in Uganda featuring a board member from the American “ex-gay” organization Exodus International.

In Moscow, mayor Yuri Luzhkov has rejected calls for a gay pride march to be held during an upcoming European music festival. He has called pride parades, “gay propaganda” and “satanic acts”, according to the New York Times.

What we are seeing in front of our eyes is the globalization of gay bashing. The United States has exported marketing techniques and church structures to culturally homophobic countries. The sexual minorities caught in these nations’ do not have the same freedoms that we enjoy in the west, so they can’t fight back. They are essentially voiceless and fearful — allowing insidious myths and stereotypes to go unchallenged. With gay people effectively demonized and hatred promoted by civic and religious leaders, hysteria on gay issues ensues. (Read More)

George W. Bush longed to escape his daddy’s shadow, while Barack Obama has turned to shadowy preachers in his long search for a father figure. His filial approach to faith began with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and has now taken a sharp turn right.

The New York Times reports that the president has surrounded himself with a cadre of clerical crackpots known as the “Circle of Five.” These holy men are: Rev. Joel Hunter, former head of the Christian Coalition; anti-gay Bishop T.D. Jakes; the ex-gay loving Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell; and Jim “waffling” Wallis, a protean progressive. The only Obama shaman who isn’t shameless is the civil rights era preacher Rev. Otis Moss Jr.

Rev. Jakes refers to homosexuality as “brokenness” and has claimed that he wouldn’t hire a sexually active gay person. But it seems T.D. can’t even keep his own son off the D.L. (down low). His “sexually broken” heir was arrested earlier this year for cruising a Dallas Park in search of gay men.
(Read More)

The Exodus Global Alliance continues to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to defamation and human rights violations committed against Africans who are same-sex-attracted.

Yesterday, Queerty reported that Ugandan media are spreading the myth that gay people perform sexual recruitment of new homosexuals, primarily in secondary schools and prisons. A week earlier, Bishop Eria Paul Luzinda muttered the smear that same-sex-attracted persons are, without apparent exception, motivated by greed.

Two weeks ago, PinkNews.co.uk reported:

The Anglican Bishop of Uyo, Rt. Rev. Isaac Orama, last year condemned the activities of homosexuals and lesbians in language that typifies Nigerian Anglican leaders’ hostility to gays.

“Homosexuality and lesbianism are inhuman,” he said.

“Those who practice them are insane, satanic and are not fit to live because they are rebels to God’s purpose for man.”

Nigerian law states that anyone who has “carnal knowledge of any person against order of nature or permits a male to have carnal knowledge of him” can be imprisoned for 14 years.

Exodus’ response: Silence.

In the past year, African bigots have used Christian churches and other moral platforms to promote the “corrective rape” of lesbians, and to demand long prison sentences or death for persons who are honest about their same-sex attraction.

Anglicans in Africa are waging cultural warfare against their own family and church members who dare to be honest about their same-sex attraction. Worse, they seem to be dressing their bigotry in the trappings of conservative Christian language and exploiting similar bigotries among conservative Episcopal congregations — all for political gain within the Anglican Communion.

Exodus has responded to these instances of antigay hostility and dehumanization with a mix of support and apathy. Its singular political statement in recent times regarding the global human rights of gay people was an expression of support for criminalization of same-sex attraction and expression in Barbados, where ex-gay activist Donnie McClurkin is currently spreading antigay hostility, misunderstanding, misdirected hope, and division among families and communities in which some people are same-sex-attracted.