Yay, they’ve convinced 40,127 starving, homeless people to pray a special prayer!
Now, um, how about their actual needs?
And no, this is not about religious belief, this is about priorities. However much time it took to give 40,127 starving, homeless people the religion spiel and close the deal so that they’d utter the magic words for salvation, could have been spent better with a hammer and a freakin’ nail.
Influential Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker wrote an excellent column today, calling on Rick Warren and other evangelicals to do more to stop Uganda’s heinous Anti-Homosexuality Bill. According to Parker:
The proposed law is a case study in the unintended consequences of moral colonialism….If we (Rick Warren) decide that genocide is too political for interference, then what good is moral leadership?…
….Other evangelical Christians operating in Uganda are less easily excused from responsibility in the country’s increasingly hostile attitudes toward gays. Often cited as having stirred the pot are pastors Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge and Don Schmierer, who last March worked with Ugandan faith leaders and politicians to help stop the “homosexualization” of the country….
…In a “Meet the Press” interview last November, Warren said he never takes sides, but one wishes he would. To borrow his own words, it is in certain cases extreme, unjust and un-Christian not to.
Parker is correct to say that Warren and other evangelicals have not done enough, considering their deep involvement in Uganda. At Truth Wins Out, we warmly welcomed Warren’s denunciation of the hate bill, however, that was merely covering his behind.
If Warren and others (Alan Chambers, James Inhofe, and Doug Coe – I mean you) are serious about stopping the persecution, imprisonment and murder of innocent people, they will board planes to Kampala this week and speak directly to the people and lawmakers of Uganda. They helped cause this horrific mess, so it is their duty to clean it up.
I just checked Orbitz and confirmed that flights still fly to Kampala. Will any evangelical butts fill the seats? Or, do they only light fires in places like Uganda and then butt out when there is too much heat in the kitchen?
The world is watching….and these “moral leaders” will be judged by their action — or inaction.
An Open Letter from Soulforce to Jan and Paul Crouch, founders of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, and the Evangelical Christian broadcasters who are featured on Lighthouse Television, TBN’s affiliate in Uganda, including: Matthew Crouch, Joyce Meyer, Andrew Wommack, Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland, Joel Osteen, T.D. Jakes, and Franklin Graham:
By now you are well aware of the anti-homosexual bill pending before the Parliament of Uganda. We urge you to denounce this bill. Use your personal friendships with President and Mrs. Museveni, with MP David Bahati (your Christian colleague who proposed this bill) and with Stephen Langa, (the Ugandan Christian organizer behind the bill) to take a public and passionate stand against it.
The media are blaming the visit to Uganda by three of your colleagues for this despicable and truly un-Christian law. In fact, for years you have used your Lighthouse Television programs, your radio broadcasts and your massive public meetings to warn Ugandans of the so called “threat homosexuals pose to Bible-based values and the traditional African Family.”
In no small part, you are already responsible for the current call by Ugandan leaders to enforce the old law condemning lesbian and gay Ugandans to up to 14 years in prison. This new law increases that sentence to life imprisonment and even death by hanging. Denounce this new bill or the blood of lesbian and gay Ugandans will be on your hands.
It isn’t just the “liberal media” who are condemning the bill. (Read More)
Jamie Kilstein is one of my very favorite comedians. He and his wife Allison Kilkenny (who I link here from time to time) run Citizen Radio, and they’re one of the few duos I’ve seen who truly bridge the gap between politics and comedy, without either side suffering. Jamie’s insanely funny, but he actually knows his stuff. And if he doesn’t, he can always ask Allison, because she’s scary smart.
ANYWAY.
The other night, Jamie performed in Chicago, and he just cold went off on Rick Warren, Ted Haggard, anti-gay fundamentalist bigots, and made one of the boldest, most raw arguments for LGBT equality I’ve ever seen.
So! You should watch it. But not at work. Unless you have headphones. Because it’s, as Jamie just said on his Facebook wall, “beyond offensive.”
So here’s your warning, in red, in case you missed the last paragraph:
DIRTY LANGUAGE IS AHEAD!!!
Okay, that all clear? Oh, and handling the objection before I get it, in the parts where Jamie’s talking about God, we should all remember that the construction is “IF God is like they say, THEN we should…”
At The Daily Beast, Max Blumenthal calls the Obama administration on the carpet for affirming Rick Warren and allies’ efforts to deny access to condoms and prevent Africa’s heterosexual and LGBT people from protecting themselves against HIV/AIDS.
Blumenthal notes that Warren has never been required to prove the efficacy of his anti-condom program. Instead, independent investigation into Warren’s involvement in Africa revealed alliances with Christian Right clergy who sidelined science-based approaches to combating AIDS in favor of abstinence-only education.
These clergy sabotaged Uganda’s once highly successful initiative to combat HIV/AIDS. Comprehensive sex education — consisting of lessons in abstinence, monogamy, and condom use — slashed HIV infection rates during the 1990s and up until 2003, when Christian Rightists in the Bush State Department and Congress began to sabotage the initiative. By 2005, Blumenthal notes, federal aid was being redirected to deny access to condoms and to discourage their use. Progress against HIV infection rates then halted. (Read More)
National Public Radio has terrific story on the role social conservatives have played in exporting anti-gay extremism in Uganda. According to NPR:
Jim Naughton, a former canon in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C., says their [Conservative Evangelical] message plays one way in the U.S., but differently in a place like Uganda. And they should have known.
“If you go to countries where there’s already a great deal of suspicion and maybe animosity towards homosexuals, and begin to tell people there, ‘Well, actually these people are child abusers, they’re coming for their children, that they’re the scourge that is being deposited on you by the secular West,’ you’re gonna get a backlash.” Naughton says it’s like “showing up in rooms filled with gasoline, and throwing lighted matches around and saying, ‘Well, I never intended fire .‘ “
Many U.S. evangelicals, including Lively, say they are “mortified” by the death penalty provision. Naughton doesn’t buy it.
“I think if they were mortified, they would have been mortified immediately,” he says. “Instead they were mortified — oh, two, three months into the campaign against this thing, when it was getting real traction.”
Megachurch pastor Rick Warren is a case in point. Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, has extensive ties with religious leaders in Africa, including Uganda. Initially, he refused to condemn the bill. Finally, two months after the bill was introduced, he urged pastors in Uganda to oppose it.
“We are all familiar with Edmund Burke’s insight, ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,’ ” Warren began. He explained his silence by saying, “It is not my role to interfere with the politics of other nations,” then stated that the bill “is unjust, it’s extreme, and it’s un-Christian.”
If Warren was slow to condemn the bill, other Christian conservatives have yet to do so, says Warren Throckmorton, who teaches psychology at Grove City College and has been monitoring U.S. evangelical response. He says some of the Christian groups most publicly tied to Uganda have been the quietest. Joyce Meyer Ministries, Oral Roberts University, the College of Prayer in Atlanta — all have close ties and declined to express reservations about the death penalty.
“Silence is often interpreted as consent,” says Throckmorton, who is himself a conservative evangelical. “So I think those kinds of responses may lead those individuals in Uganda to think that perhaps what [they're] doing really is according to the evangelical faith.”
Michael wrote last night about the piece in the New York Times about the Uganda “Kill the Gays” bill and its American Evangelical supporters. The piece exposes the inciting role Don Schmierer of Exodus played in the inception of this bill, and showcases his mewling attempts to deny any responsibility for what’s now happening in Uganda. Schmierer’s statements can be summed up as “We was fooled!” That’s right, they’re just a few innocent, sweet ex-gay activists, and they’re just trying to help! Give me a break. Jim Burroway handily disposed of that notion in a piece last night. If you haven’t read Jim’s piece, do. I’ll wait.
What I want to draw attention to, though, is Amanda Marcotte’s piece on this, because she brings in some really important historical perspective on what Schmierer, Caleb Lee Brundige, and Scott Lively did on their little jaunt to Uganda, and she also makes an important point about the weak denials and condemnations they (and Rick Warren) have issued, now that the American press is paying attention:
Right now, Rick Warren and company’s slow-moving denunciations of this law are due strictly to their desire to stay in the mainstream of American society, and have nothing to do with actual moral outrage. After all, it’s an article of faith for the religious right that gay people “recruit” children because they can’t have their own. There are so many assumptions bundled up in that—that gay people don’t have children, that children can be considered carbon copies of their parents, that homosexuality is something taught at the knee instead of a genuine expression of sexual desire—but I’d like to point out that what the accusation is, at its base, is a 21st century version of the blood libel. The traditional blood libel that was a big deal in medieval Europe was to accuse Jews of killing and eating Christian children. Nowadays, the accusation has changed somewhat—now it’s that gays rape and recruit children—but the structure is basically the same, which is to say that the hated group is constructed as a cult that feeds on your children. And the religious right believes this stuff. (…)
The point is that the blood libel exists to justify extreme violence against the targeted group, painting them as child-thieves who inflict a society’s most dreaded crimes (molestation, cannibalism) on the children, and by doing so, take them away from the parents. So when the people who perpetuate this myth about gays and lesbians play innocent, we shouldn’t let them get away with it.
Exactly. I’ve said several times in the past (I’ve actually said it today) that there is no fundamental difference between religious extremists in the West and those in Uganda, or in the Middle East, etc. They look different to the untrained eye, simply because they can’t get away with what they really want to do in the West. Modern society won’t allow it. So of course they’re trying to cover their lily-white behinds in the American press, for their own followers, and for the rest of the American public which still thinks of Warren as the Purpose-Driven Cuddle Monster. These people have a narrative to uphold, and it’s a narrative that is in sharp contrast to their actual beliefs and actions: That Evangelical Christianity is primarily about love and family and patriotism and lots of other Pollyanna BS that plays well with the Fort Worth crowd. And for many Evangelical Christians, it is about those things. They may be misled about a lot of things, but I highly doubt that the average Saddleback member is jonesing to kill gay people.
But their leaders? As Amanda says in the piece, they’re not off the hook for this one. Growing up in That World, and now analyzing it from the perspective of one who knows the language, I’ve often noticed that the people who follow these leaders are, for the most part, fairly decent human beings, but that they have no idea what their leaders are really like. (And of course, when you point it out, most of them retreat into their shells or stick their fingers in their ears.)
The blood libel is not new. But it’s taken far too long for the LGBT community and its supporters to realize that the tactics of Warren, Lively, Schmierer, Brundige, Richard Cohen, etc., are indeed the modern-day version of this age-old Christian tradition. And the ex-gay element is just more delicious icing on the cake for those who promote this blood libel. Elsewhere in the piece, Amanda puts it this way:
When an ex-gay claims that gays recruit by raping children, wingnuts can feel good about themselves, because they say, “Hey, he should know.” But of course, that’s simply not true, because the religious right has created huge incentives for so-called ex-gays to lie about their previous (and often ongoing) sexual behavior and habits, in order to keep the esteem and the paychecks coming.
Sick and sad, but true. What a feat these religious extremists have accomplished — they have an entire “ex-gay” industry devoted to making gay people hate themselves so much that they’ll travel thousands of miles around the world to confess the sins of which they’ve been brainwashed to believe they’re guilty.
For these leaders to now claim that they couldn’t have imagined that things would play out the way they have is simply more disingenuous lying. They know what they’re doing.
David Bahati (left), the psychotic would-be-murderer behind Uganda’s kill-the-gays bill, has said he will not water down the anti-gay legislation as previously reported. The bill may become law by February.
“We are not going to yield to any international pressure – we cannot allow people to play with the future of our children and put aid into the game,” said Bahati. “We are not in the trade of values. We need mutual respect.”
Bahati also rejected Rev. Rick Warren’s plea to eliminate the bill after the televangelist called it “unchristian.”
“It’s unfortunate that a man of God who has inspired many people across the world can give into pressure and disappoint them,” said Bahati.
It is becoming clear that Warren should visit Uganda to help kill this bill, before this bill kills gays. We applauded Warren for his statement last week, but it would be much stronger if he delivered it from Kampala.
It is worth noting that Bahati is quoting American “ex-gay” quack therapist Richard Cohen’s book “Coming Out Straight” verbatim when he talks about homosexuality as a “learned behavior” that can be “unlearned.”
“Learned behaviour can be unlearned,” said David Bahati. “You can’t tell me that people are born gays. It is foreign influence that is at work.”
Bahati is an ignorant, blood-thirsty tyrant who should be staunchly and forcefully opposed by anyone who cares about human rights. And Cohen does, as Rachel Maddow said last week, have blood on his hands. He and everyone associated with his International Healing Foundation is a would-be accomplice to death squads. They should be treated accordingly. It is amazing that the lives of GLBT Ugandans hang in the balance because of an idiotic book printed by an obvious madman like Cohen. (See video below)
In Entebbe last week, The Guardian reports that 200 religious leaders, under the powerful umbrella group Inter-Religious Council of Uganda, demanded diplomatic ties be severed with “ungodly” donor countries, including the UK, Sweden and Canada, who are “bent on forcing homosexuality on Ugandans”.
Is heterosexuality really that weak in Uganda? It sure seems like it based on the hysteria and pandemonium surrounding gay people. Particularly Mr. Bahati, who seems, based on his rhetoric, like he might mount a man any second if his clownish bill isn’t ramrodded through the legislature.
Personally, I think that the United States government would be foolish not to grant these preachers and imams their holiday wish. Uganda is about to treat GLBT people as if they are diseased vermin who need to be exterminated. Where have we seen this movie before?
It would be unconscionable for the U.S. to continue forking over our tax dollars to this sanguinary police state so they can declare war on our defenseless people. Our nation has a moral duty to display its values and cut off every cent of aid to Uganda if the Anti-Homosexuality bill becomes law.
After weeks of stalling, Sen. James Inhofe expressed opposition to Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill — but he did not say whether he will tell this to his friend, President Museveni of Uganda.
And finally, Sen. Chuck Grassley denied any ties to The Family, but insiders continue to say otherwise.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow and journalist Jeff Sharlet on Monday discussed Uganda’s “Anti-Homosexuality Bill,” which would execute sexually active LGBT and HIV-positive Ugandans and imprison, for three years, any relative, pastor, or doctor who failed to report an LGBT person to police within 24 hours.
Sharlet described the connections between leading U.S. Christian Rightist Republican leaders, evangelist Rick Warren, and antigay Ugandan leaders such as President Yoweri Museveni; pastor Martin Ssempa; and David Bahati, the Uganda “ethics” minister who is leading the battle to enact the legislation.
Michael 
