Uganda - and also Ireland and the Catholic Church

[solarbird]

Here, have a today's round-up of updates on the Uganda situation, and a brief note on a brutal report on the Catholic Church child-molestation scandal and Pope Benedict's role in the coverup.

First, Uganda:

Enjoy Dancehall star Beenie Man's songs calling for the execution of gay men. The link also includes an April 19th newspaper's naming of various GBLT people ("TOP HOMOS IN UGANDA NAMED") which was followed by arrests, blackmail, and torture.

GayUganda reports on statements made Friday declaring GBLT people to be "cockroaches." He notes that during the Hutu genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda, this was the language used by the Hutu leadership: the Tutsi were "to go out and 'kill cockroaches.'" This extremely loaded language is being used by Rev. Michael Esakan Okwi of the Anglican Church in Uganda, lecturer at Uganda Christian University in Theology and Philosophy.

Scott Lively - author of The Pink Swastika and newtype holocaust denier who claims that Nazi regime was run by gay men, who also ran the concentration camps, and not Those Nice Germans - published a statement on the Uganda law he helped inspire, denying all responsibility and blaming everything on Fags of Old, as he does with literally every evil in human history. He can pretend this law goes "too far," but that's a load of crap; deaths from this law will be, in part, on his head. He, of course, claims anti-Christian persecution. You can see the effects of his hate literature here, as Ugandan anti-gay activists quote "The Pink Swastika" and other commentary from his lectures in Uganda.

Remember: this is what they would do everywhere they could.

Box Turtle Bulletin talks about how Uganda's oil developments are making foreign commentary against this bill less influential. Uganda's political leaders are apparently happy to listen to and stoke GBLT hate, but not opposing voices.

Finally, and importantly, it looks like Pope Benedict XVI personally, as Cardinal Ratzinger, was key to the Catholic Church's attempts to cover up the systematic molestation of children by priests, threatening bishops who came forward with information about molestation allegations with excommunication. Given that Pope Benedict's entire reaction to the Catholic Church's molestation scandal (and coverup he helped run) were to blame GBLT people for it, the lack of church commentary on Uganda's extermination bill seems likely to continue.

Comments

[cow.livejournal.com]

Is it possible for me to become less Catholic? Because I feel like I just did. I didn't think one could go below zero on that scale but hey.

[solarbird]

It's been exclusively a force for evil before; this is just like old times, really.

[cow.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure, but under JP2 we[*] could at least convince ourselves that That Was The Past And We're Better Now[**]. Even though it wasn't, even though it was a really heavy act of denial. That luxury is not afforded at all anymore and the surprise and disillusionment continues to grow.

[*] I quit the Church the day Benedict was elected. So the JP2 years I can use first-person plural.
[**] I wasn't the only openly queer-identified person in my church at the time. Post-Vatican II, we could be naïve enough to believe that, in time, the Church would come around on this and so many things. How wrong we all were.

[solarbird]

That luxury is not afforded at all anymore and the surprise and disillusionment continues to grow.
I'm sorry, for that, utterly non-sarcastically. I wish you'd been right.

[loopback.livejournal.com]

and yet these people have the gall to accuse me & mine of being the ones that can't be left around children because our religion makes us monstrous.

[kallisti.livejournal.com]

When I was 17, I rejected the RC Church. This was precipitated by a series of events. First was my parish's priest retired, and for some reason, I felt that I there was something wrong with the new priest, even though he knew my father when he went to high school. I quit being an altar boy. It later turned out he was molesting my fellow altar boys when he took them up to the parish's retreat/camp ground. Next was a counsellor at school who told us that it was OK for our father's to beat us up under the guise of "corporal punishment". The final straw was I fell in love with a nice Jewish girl, and my waking up somewhat and realizing that there was more to religion than going to Mass every Sunday. Then running across prejudice when her father and my father conspired to separate us, and we were both told not to contact each other ever again....and I was told that this was because she was Jewish.

I quit the RC Church, and became a Pagan after reading Drawing Down the Moon. That was 29 years ago.

Why all of this is important is that to me, what the world is just discovering about the RC Church, the callous hypocrisy that is the reality of today's Church is what I discovered back then. To me, there is a direct line from those actions that I experienced to the horrors that paedophiles perpetrated and those who covered up their actions. And that lines continues to the tacit acceptance by the Church of the potential murdering of people just because they are gay. What ever happened to Thou Shall Not Kill? If it's someone who is different, or performs certain medical procedures...then it's OK to kill, or so says Godfather Bennie and the Card's? But they never say it out loud...Their words are pure, but their thoughts and actions show who are the true Devils on this Planet!