Fair's fair

In light of my last, rather vehement post on Uganda's kill-the-gays bill and American Evangelical Christians, it's only fair to acknowledge Rick Warren's speaking out against the Ugandan initiative:



Andrew Sullivan comments:

This is an extremely positive if overdue development. I remain deeply concerned that Uganda's public policy is based on the "curing" homosexuals rubric, but that sure is better than executing them. The Ugandan bill should be abandoned. And Warren's call on pastors to disown the bill is a real step forward.

[...]

What I think is most significant is that Warren called this bill "extreme, unjust and unchristian towards homosexuals". It is absolutely and unequivocally unchristian to demonize a whole group of people and to threaten them with execution simply because of their sexual orientation and their need for love and sex and intimacy and companionship like every other human being. And for Warren to deploy Christian arguments in defense of the dignity of homosexual persons is a big step forward in this debate. I am grateful to him for staying true to the Gospels.

About that

Regarding the most recent post:

I suspect that what we will see in the future is a church basing itself in the developing world, and adopting more African views on the subjugation of women, criminalization of homosexuality, and the evils of Western liberal capitalism. Europe will remain the enemy, Islam a useful ally and America's Republican Party Christianists a source of money and power as the Western flock shrinks to the rump that Benedict devoutly wishes for.

This is about the Catholic, not any Protestant, Church, but it could be interpreted as an interesting sort of reversal of the dynamic I was trying to describe in that post. I would say I need to think about this more, but I don't have anything like the time. Alas.

Family knows best?

Sitting in Logan airport using Google's free holiday wi-fi (thanks, Google!), I came across the following:

With their reported $13 billion tax-exempt financial empire, the Mormons may be the wealthiest cult in America — and Scientology may be the big thing among the rich and powerful in Hollywood — but when it comes to political power neither of those sects holds a candle to the Family, the Christian extremist political group that operates the now infamous C Street house on Capitol Hill in Washington.

[...]

But what many people may find surprising is that the Family has branches around the world. In fact, yesterday, Jeff Sharlet, author of “The Family: Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,” reported on NPR’s “Fresh Air” that it was a Family member in the Ugandan parliament who introduced a bill that would increase the punishment for homosexuality from life imprisonment, which is the maximum sentence today, to death:

SHARLET: [The] new legislation adds to this something called aggravated homosexuality. And this can include, for instance, if a gay man has sex with another man who is disabled, that’s aggravated homosexuality, and that man can be – I suppose both, actually, could be put to death for this. The use of any drugs or any intoxicants in seeking gay sex – in other words, you go to a bar and you buy a guy a drink, you’re subject to the death penalty if you go home and sleep together after that. What it also does is it extends this outward, so that if you know a gay person and you don’t report it, that could mean – you don’t report your son or daughter, you can go to prison.

And it goes further, to say that any kind of promotion of these ideas of homosexuality, including by foreigners, can result in prison terms. Talking about same sex-marriage positively can lead you to imprisonment for life. And it’s really kind of a perfect case study and the export of a lot of American largely evangelical ideas about homosexuality exported to Uganda, which then takes them to their logical end.

[...]

[The] legislator that introduces the bill, a guy named David Bahati, is a member of the Family. He appears to be a core member of the Family. He works, he organizes their Uganda National Prayer Breakfast and oversees a African sort of student leadership program designed to create future leaders for Africa, into which the Family has poured millions of dollars working through a very convoluted chain of linkages passing the money over to Uganda…

So who are the members of Congress who belong to the Family and tolerate, if not encourage, this sort of extremism overseas? According to Jeff Sharlet, while most cult members are Republicans, members of both parties are welcomed. “Jesus didn’t come to take sides,” the members are fond of saying. “He came to take over.”

Now check this:

The mainstream media avoids referring to the Family as a cult, but check out this description of the group’s belief system from Jeff Sharlet and decide for yourself:

They have a very unusual theology in the sense that they think that Christ had one message for an inner circle and then a kind of different message for a sort of slightly more outer circle. And then the rest of us, Christ told us little stories because, frankly, we couldn’t handle the truth. And the core members are those they think are getting the real deal.

He didn't come to take sides, he came to take over. It makes me shiver.

But what makes me shiver more than the Family/cult/power network stuff is the overarching dynamic. A lot of gay people in Uganda are going to die, or live in misery. A lot of their friends and family will, too. And they will go through this directly because of globalized Evangelical Christianity.

I was just reading about a much different, milder, nicer version of this in a book about the Full Gospel community in Trinidad. Protestantism plus colonialism in Trinidad, at least, has rendered the local and the native identical to the carnal and the primitive, while the nonlocal (North America in particular) is identified with the spiritual and pure. This gets played out in choices of music appropriate for worship services, but that's not the point here. In Trinidad, at least, sects are concerned with the "global church" (largely Pentecostalist and Evangelical) as a way of defining for themselves what is proper religious practice and what is appropriate for someone living a religious life.

I admit that I don't know much about Uganda, and I am very ready to be wrong. But as we know, a little information is a dangerous thing, and so armed with my one book about Trinidad I see a bit of a parallel here of a global (read: American) church having a strong influence on congregations far from the global center--peripheral nations like Trinidad and Uganda. And especially in the case of particular issues, like abortion and birth control, this flow of influence has been strengthened and backed by explicit U.S. policies.

That makes me shiver, too. In a much less titillating fashion.

"Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms," said Ex-British Parliament Member Oona King. Upsetting but not surprising, sadly. The need for a particular ore in making, among other things, PlayStations, has been fueling violence and conflict in Congo. (Note that the article emphasizes Sony's video game products--a frivolity--but glosses over the use of the same material in cellphones and other items that we aren't giving up, not from our cold dead fingers. Convenient, no?) You'd think in the Information Age these things would come up sooner. Oh, right, we don't care.


In other news, John McCain, supposedly the Second Coming of foreign policy, is seriously addled. Why, exactly, would we even bother talking about throwing Russia out of the G8? It's dumb, unproductive, and--oh, yeah--impossible.(The G8, for your edification, is the Group of Eight, a forum for the leaders of eight powerful nations in the world. They hold a yearly summit--the most recent was in Japan, where Bush made us all so very proud by signing off saying, "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter!" Aww, what an authentic, beer-drinking cutie!)





IllDoctrine is pretty much always the shit. Now, what he's saying here I know well, and many of you do too, but it's worth spelling out always. Especially keep it in mind next time a public figure/politician is called on any form of discrimination--racism, sexism, sizeism, ableism, heterosexism, homophobia, classism, any and all of them, this kind of thing applies.

Because that's the thing about oppressions--while they're all different in whom they affect, how they affect them, and how they feel, many of the patterns are the same. That's why intersectionality is so everpresent, and why the Oppression Olympics a) won't go away and b) are useless.

Those last two paragraphs are total duh obviousness for those who are into the study of any of the above isms and I'm almost embarrassed to write them, but I guess that's why this is a livejournal and not a real blog--I get to be as dumb as I want! Eat it! Sucka FOOL![*]

[Obviously, that was written when I was still writing on Livejournal.]

1. Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General of the UN, says:

"The world faces three simultaneous crises — a food crisis, a climate crisis and a development crisis,” he told reporters. “The three crises are deeply interconnected and need to be addressed as such.”

Thank you. Yes.

2. Jakaya Kikwete, president of Tanzania and head of the African Union, says:

"We are saying no party can govern alone in Zimbabwe and therefore the parties have to work together in a government and look at the future of their country together,” Mr. Kikwete said. “And as friends, at the end of the day we will come to an understanding.”

This is the best explanation for the relative silence or timidity of African leaders re: the situation in Zimbabwe I've seen so far. It's true, I think, and it addresses a more root aspect of the problem than the more common concern along the lines of "ROBERT MUGABE OUT NOW." Not that I disagree with that at all, because Mugabe is a scourge and an evil man, but if you just get rid of him there's no reason something similar couldn't happen again.

I thought the suggestion in the NYT the other day that Zimbabwe's parliament just get together and eliminate the office of president altogether (I mean, there's no prime minister already--thanks, Mugabe--so why not go all the way?) in order to get rid of Mugabe, get rid of executive abuses, and better represent an ethnically diverse nation through parliamentary representation was interesting, but again I don't really know enough to say.

Not that I really know anything about this. I'm kind of a babe in the woods when it comes to Africa; I just don't know very much beyond broad colonial history (and I mean broad), some more specific facts about HIV/AIDS, its spread, and its treatment, and a very, very basic (like factoid level) picture of the green revolution initiative. And I have a decent idea of the history of the Democratic Republic (hardy har) of Congo, but that's pretty random.