Op-Ed In Ugandan Gov’t Newspaper: “Parliament Should Not Pass This Bill”

[ccharles000]

This is not the sort of column one would expect to find in the Ugandan government-owned New Vision. It’s by John Nagenda, a senior advisor to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. After the usual paragraphs to establish his personal disdain for all things gay (this is something of a ritual in Uganda for anyone who is about to say something remotely positive for LGBT people), Nagenda writes:

And that is where same-sex lovers’ haters will do their nut! The recent month I was away a parliamentarian introduced a Bill of hugely draconian measure, including heavy penalties on those who wouldn’t report same-sex lovers they knew about! In the US there was a man whose name, McCarthy, is now a synonym (as mccarthyism) for cruel witch-hunting. For him Communism was the hot issue, although he would doubtless have looked at same-sex love as a product of that political system.

In the Inquisition period, evil prelates tortured people who deviated from current beliefs, including by saying the world was not flat but round! Now we all laugh about these odd characters. Lower down the scale, people were tortured for being left-handed (indeed called sinister for it) or being very short, or being blind: in short for not being normal. I believe, and I am raising the bar, that we must laugh at this MP and others like him: laugh and stay sane. What crime have same-sex lovers committed, per se, by being who they are? Would those who believe God made mankind exclude them, and on what grounds?

Nagenda goes on to talk about the pace of change for LGBT people — his take-it-excruciatingly-slow advice obviously comes from someone who has little understanding of what it’s like to live in such an oppressive society. But he ends on this point:

When times have changed, if they change enough, then these words will include a leavening of same-sex relationships. Gradualism is not a sin. But hunting down people for same-sex love, I believe to be a sin, against Love, one of God’s greatest gifts to mankind. (I say all this without being a homosexual.) Parliament should not pass this Bill.

http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/12/11/17842#comments

[mitchtv]

1. a glimmer of light

from the Xian paradise which is Uganda

[Divine Discontent]

2. I'd call it the fundie paradise... the nuts of fundiedom flock to these places...

Jan & Paul Crouch and her Barbie-handouts to the poor kids of Africa make me nauseated.

I'm so glad to see some budging on this subject, and a true glimmer of hope, yes, after all.