Christopher Street boys

The only way this video could be improved is if his cat had made an appearance.

Que maravilloso!

Congratulations to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina on affirming the legality of gay marriage!

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.

A hellfire sandwich

Recall the new Ugandan bill that will render homosexuality, or harboring, supporting, or not reporting homosexual Ugandans, punishable by death. It might even lead to the execution of HIV-positive people.

Well:

Some observers have wondered if Purpose Driven Life author and mega-evangelist Rick Warren has had a role in the globally controversial bill, especially because of Warren's close association with Ugandan anti-gay activist Martin Ssempa and, more broadly, because Warren has refused to denounce the anti-gay bill. To little notice, a charismatic network overseen by Warren's doctoral dissertation advisor, C. Peter Wagner, has played a major role in politically organizing and inspiring the Ugandan legislators who have spearheaded the anti-gay bill.

Someone please explain to me why Warren, Wagner, etc. cannot or should not be prosecuted for murder should this bill be implemented.

Sigh. The answer is that there is no institution or judicial body capable of doing so. The US, conveniently, is not a signatory to the ICC, and even if we were I doubt much would happen. If we can't even prosecute our war criminals--war being the form of international interaction most robustly understood and governed on a global and juridical level (commerce is an issue for another time)--we sure as hell aren't going to get anything done about rampantly homophobic pastors indirectly killing hundreds, thousands--I don't even know--of poor Africans.

The Talk to Action piece I linked above is further interesting for the following pieces of information:

Both Wagner and Warren have designed elaborate infrastructures for blurring the lines between church and state. Wagner describes his movement as the “New Apostolic Reformation” and openly espouses his goals of reorganizing and mobilizing the church to take Christian “dominion” over government and society. Warren’s movement is described as a “second reformation”...

Wagner is the Convening Apostle in a movement of charismatic "relational networks" which has extended its reach from the United States to Uganda, and worldwide. Under its umbrella of authority are virulently anti-gay apostles in the United States and Uganda including Lou Engle of TheCall, who led thousands of young people in a twelve hour November 1, 2008 stadium rally in support of California's anti-gay marriage Proposition Eight. The San Diego event closed with Engle, a member of Wagner's inner circle of "prophets," calling for Christian martyrs. [...]

In C. Peter Wagner's 2008 book "Dominion", he describes the process through which this brand of Christianity can take dominion over government and society, and claims that this can be accomplished within a democratic framework. Wagner clearly states that Rick Warren's global P.E.A.C.E. Plan is an example of "stage one":

"I think the P.E.A.C.E. plan fits most comfortably into Phase One, the "social action" phase of strategies for obeying God's cultural mandate. The Phase Two emphases on strategic-level spiritual warfare and associated activities have not been placed front and center. And crucial to Phase Three, as I am defining it, are such things as apostolic/prophetic government of the Church, the Church (including apostles) in the workplace, the great transfer of wealth, dominion theology and the 7-M mandate."

If Rick Warren is "phase one," what do Wagner's stages two and three entail ?

The "7-M" or Reclaiming the Seven Mountains mandate encourages believers to take over key societal sectors such as government, and a leading Ugandan spokesperson for the theocratic 7-M paradigm has played a major role organizing and inspiring politicians behind Uganda's Anti Homosexuality legislation.

There's much, much more in the piece (including all the in-text links that I got too lazy to reproduce). It's very much worth reading.

What I now want to know is how these people are any different from Wahhabi or Salafi Islamic fundamentalists seeking to take over various Muslim countries and impose an atavistic reading of sharia law, other than in their remarkable success at seeing their goals enacted in countries to which they have no real connection. Who in Uganda elected Peter Wagner?

I'm truly disgusted. I'm having a hard time viewing the success differentiating Warren/Wagner from the Taliban as due to much of anything other than that the Ws are rich white men working from the global center to impose their views on the periphery, and Islamic extremists are poor brown men working from the periphery toward the center.

So we're sandwiched. With a little luck, eventually we can all look forward to living in a hell modeled on someone's holy book.

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.

Congratulations, New Hampshire!

Welcome to the club.

Good times

I am so beyond pleased to be from New England these days, what with gay marriage rolling through the region. Massachusetts' pioneer status on the issue has always been a point of pride (among many), but it's truly fantastic to see this sort of regional snowballing taking place. You can cross whole state lines within the U.S. now and still have your marriage count on the other side.

Of course, the longer this goes on the more bizarre and untenable DOMA becomes on a Constitutional level, but I'll leave that for another time. Right now I'm just happy.

Nepal treating gay and transexual citizens like human beings

Fancy that.

Nepal's supreme court ruled to "grant...protection to gays, lesbians and transgender community in the country. It also open doors for gay marriage rights and end [sic] all discriminatory laws."

It's worth reading the article--particularly where they discuss the role of Hinduism toward the end.

It remains to be seen what this will mean in practice, and I haven't read the decision, but nonetheless: congratulations, Nepal!