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Obama’s First Gift to Africa: Rick Warren Source: McGill Global Aids Coalition By: KELLY JEAN COGSWELL 01/11/2009 http://treatthepeople.com/article/obamas-first-gift-to-africa-rick-warren/If you want to foster AIDS and kill queers in Africa, Rick Warren’s the man for you. While Warren’s characterization of queers (and Jews and Muslims) as godless perverts fuels bigotry in the US, the real effects of inviting Warren to preside over Obama’s inauguration will be felt in sub-Saharan Africa.
He has missions all over the place, and he’s rolling in dough and influence built on the best P.R. campaign I’ve ever seen. He hobnobs with Bono and Melissa Etheridge while liberal journalists regurgitate his press releases, crowning him a moderate evangelical and touting his AIDS campaign, which is little but a thinly veiled mask for his proselytizing work. The last thing he needs is more power.
In case you actually care, his campaign for AIDS prevention, in a region decimated by the disease, sneers at condoms, needle exchange, and sex education. He claims all those efforts merely slow the spread of AIDS, while his plan can stop it flat. The secret - abstinence before marriage, religious conversion, and, not included on his website, that perennial favorite, queer-baiting.
One of his closest allies in Uganda in his so-called fight against AIDS is Martin Ssempa, an evangelical preacher who blames queers for the disease, makes a show of burning condoms, and this spring organized a rally with the theme “A Call for Action on Behalf of the Victims of Homosexuality,” where he spent most of his time railing against queers.
As far as treatment goes, Ssempsa offers faith healing in his Pentecostal services if only victims believe enough and make a nice donation. In general, the bulk of his anti-AIDS activism seems to be legal battles to ensure that homosexuality remains illegal and the media continues to portray queers as sexual predators.
He’s getting it done. Homosexuality is still illegal, and queers face increasing harassment and violence from everyone from the government to their next-door neighbors. Newspapers sometimes print lists of people suspected of being lesbian or gay, opening them up to job loss and physical violence. Several activists are arrested every year.
Though a Ugandan judge recently ruled in favor of LGBT activists protesting an illegal raid in 2005, it’s more likely in that nation that you’ll get government officials like Deputy Attorney General Fred Ruhinde and Minister of Ethics and Integrity Nsaba Butoro, who in 2007 actually joined a coalition of conservative Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, and Bahai congregations, “the Interfaith Coalition Against Homosexuality,” calling for the arrest, deportation, and even murder of gays and lesbians.
And where’s the sanctified Rick Warren in this delightful hate fest? Where’s the man the New Yorker’s Hendrik Herzberg complacently characterized as “much, much less of a jerk than, say, Pat Robertson or James Dobson” and whose inclusion in the inauguration he actually applauded as “another of Obama’s brilliant chess moves”?
Well… when the Ugandan Anglican archbishop, Henry Orombi, announced his aim to “purify” the Anglican Church by driving out gay and lesbian Christians and their supporters, Warren got right on board. When the Ugandan Church announced its boycott of the global Anglican conference in March last year, Warren told the press, “The Church of England is wrong and I support the Church of Uganda on the boycott.” Warren further declared that homosexuality is not a natural way of life and thus not a human right. “We shall not tolerate this aspect at all.”
Terrible for queers, Warren and his pals are almost worse for AIDS. Uganda’s HIV infection rate, which had dipped from its 1996 height, has been climbing back up in recent times. The problem? Advocates like Warren and Ssempa dumping sex education and condom promotion in favor of abstinence-only programs, which study after study show actually increase risky sex.
Homophobia and HIV/AIDS go together in Nigeria, too, where thanks to people like Rick Warren, UNAIDS estimates that only 18 percent of women and 21 percent of men between the ages of 15 and 24 correctly identify ways to prevent HIV. After South Africa, Nigeria has the second largest number of people living with HIV in Africa.
The most vulnerable of all are gay men. Warren has supported figures like the archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, who in 2006 and 2007 campaigned ferociously for anti-gay legislation which stipulated five years’ imprisonment to anyone who had anything to do with a same-sex marriage ceremony, participated in gay organizing, or had anything to do with anything gay of any kind “directly or indirectly in public and in private.”
Hate-mongering may have become a habit for Akinola. In 2005, he was implicated in the massacre of more than 650 Muslims by a Christian mob tied to the Christian Association of Nigeria. He was president of the group at the time. For all this, Akinola earned praise from Warren in an April 2006 Time Magazine article lionizing him as a defender of the faith, a “Nelson Mandela”, and “a model for Christians around the world.” ........... There is genocide of GLBT happening in Africa and other places around the world and this should be something that is spoken more of. If you don't think this is genocide read this: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007043The term "genocide" did not exist before 1944. It is a very specific term, referring to violent crimes committed against groups with the intent to destroy the existence of the group. Human rights, as laid out in the U.S. Bill of Rights or the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, concern the rights of individuals. ..... Thank you for posting this very relevant issue and we should all be totally against it if we are true progressives! |
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