Uganda to kill all gays with US congressionals' support

[Serafine666]

But let's not get sidetracked here.

Good idea.

[Thanas]

^Cut the one-liner spam.

[Simon_Jester]

I don't want to believe this because, Jesus Christ, it's horrible. It's further prove of the hypocrisy inherent in many large segments of Western society and shows that no, the West's intervention in these goddamn parts of the world isn't benevolent but can actually be pretty fucking horrific. You think the kind of people who made the Holocaust possible are gone but they're still here, and they control the most powerful nation on Earth. God damn.

The sort who made it possible are in control; the sort who decided it was a good idea are an alarmingly influential subgroup.

Of course, 'merely an enabler' of atrocity on that level leaves you with more guilt by mere association than gleeful participation in most everyday crimes ever could...

I find this funny in an insane sort of way. Not only is being gay illegal, not reporting homosexuals is illegal AND defending them is illegal. What better way to control the populance than to start a massive witch hunt and kill people you don't like? It is like they are trying to one-up Rwanda and show the proper way to conduct mass murder.

Although I'm not sure whether the Ugandan government is actually prepared to go all out on this. There may come a point at which they realize "holy shit at this rate we're going to have half a million people on death row within the next year!" and start seriously reconsidering the law.

Many of the people who are really harsh on homosexuality think of it as an extremely exotic perversion, such that there are only a tiny handful of them even in a large community. They don't realize that in any random crowd of fifty people, one or two of them are probably gay.

Oh come on, you can't honestly say you've never heard of right-wing anti-immigrant sentiment. It's one of the most common political phenomena in western countries, even in Europe.

My last encounter with actual anti-immigrant sentiment, honestly, was in a history book discussing the "Molly Maguires" and "Know-Nothings" from 100 years ago or so. Anti-illegal sentiment is the type I run across all the time.

In the US, that's inevitable. We already passed anti-immigrant immigration legislation; the US legally admits roughly 0.1% of its population in immigrants every year, compared to ~1% in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. And of the immigrants that do get in, many are highly educated professionals of a sort that it's hard to work up much sentiment against.

[I speculate that this is why we get so many illegal immigrants: the supply of legal immigrants is artificially lowered, to the point where only skilled foreign professionals are likely to get citizenship. Therefore, the demand for low-wage, unskilled immigrant labor cannot be filled legally, creating a black market in sneaking Mexicans across the border...]

So at this point, any American anti-immigrationist is going to be screaming at the top of their lungs about illegals, because it's the easiest way to convince the maximum number of people to cut immigration to the lowest level possible. It's a question of tactics, not of any real change in the biases of the tacticians.

[Darth Wong]

That's just political double-talk, just like the way you never hear anyone say he dislikes a certain race, but you do hear him say that he dislikes a certain "culture". People who dislike "the other" have found politically acceptable ways to phrase it.

In America and Canada, people always say they're against illegal immigrants but not legal immigrants. However, I've found that if you start arguing with them, you soon find out that they also dislike the refugee system, they think the legal immigration process is too lax, they express vague concerns about "cultural assimilation", etc. Basically, they say everything except for "I hate dark-skinned immigrants", which would be too honest. Instead, they propose a battery of immigration-related arguments which, if they were all implemented, would have the effect of nearly shutting down non-white immigration.

OK. So what about the folks who actually ARE against illegal immigration but are perfectly fine with legal immigration?

There is a group which thinks that it should be easier to legally immigrate, thus helping to solve the problem of illegal immigration. However, they seem somewhat rare.

Business, of course, quietly supports illegal immigration.

[The Grim Squeaker]

I find this funny in an insane sort of way. Not only is being gay illegal, not reporting homosexuals is illegal AND defending them is illegal. What better way to control the populance than to start a massive witch hunt and kill people you don't like? It is like they are trying to one-up Rwanda and show the proper way to conduct mass murder.

Although I'm not sure whether the Ugandan government is actually prepared to go all out on this. There may come a point at which they realize "holy shit at this rate we're going to have half a million people on death row within the next year!" and start seriously reconsidering the law.
[/quote]
You think a large amount of a persecuted minority being identified will make the oppressors stop slaughtering them or oppressing them , especially when they see them as a fucking public health/personal morals threat?
I'll laugh I think.

[Serafine666]

[quote="Simon_Jester]In the US, that's inevitable. We already passed anti-immigrant immigration legislation; the US legally admits roughly 0.1% of its population in immigrants every year, compared to ~1% in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. And of the immigrants that do get in, many are highly educated professionals of a sort that it's hard to work up much sentiment against.[/quote]
Thus my reference to the anti-immigrant sentiment at the turn of the century.

[quote="Simon_Jester]So at this point, any American anti-immigrationist is going to be screaming at the top of their lungs about illegals, because it's the easiest way to convince the maximum number of people to cut immigration to the lowest level possible. It's a question of tactics, not of any real change in the biases of the tacticians.[/quote]
Technically, the anti-illegal crowd includes both people who are genuinely against people settling in the United States through a violation of immigration laws and your ho-hum hate-the-immigrants borderline racists. Because of this, it's not always easy to determine if someone hates immigrants or simply doesn't like people living in the United States who broke the law to get there (while having no problem with legal immigrants, asylum grantees, and refugees).

[Duckie]

Well, again, in all probability the Ugandans literally will not kill every gay. They'll just have a witchhunt, kill a few tens of thousands or the a hundred thousand or so, execute some AIDS victims, and destroy their chances of ever becoming a modern state despite that they are a really economically promising part of Africa which seemed like it would ride out the AIDS storm using modern medicine and techniques such as condom promotion.

After all, not every gay went to jail in Texas in the 90s. They just used it to promote a climate of fear and to oppress any gay they feel like. In Uganda, this law would simply be used to put to death anyone gay or acting gay or appearing gay. Once enough are dead the rest will stay in the closet and never come out and the Ugandans will go 'Hurrah, they're all gone'.

So no, the fact that the law won't be enforced to the utmost doesn't really fix anything, especially since they'll keep enforcing it against gays as long as AIDS is around, since gays are the cause for AIDS (just as the Missionaries taught them). The intent is the same, and the disastrous results in the country due to the changing of AIDS from ABC (Abstinance, Be Faithful, Condom Usage) which had a significant beneficial effect to Execute Homos, Disease Will Vanish will throw the country down into Fourth World levels.

It's tragic on all levels for all the people- the only people who benefit are the Missionaries, who get to feel self-righteous, assist in a non-prosecutable-in-other-countries way with the executions of gays, and get even more converts and money from the religiously inflamed, poverty stricken, and utterly devastated Uganda.

[Darth Wong]

I agree. The idea is to run a terror campaign against gays, make examples of them occasionally, and generally cow them into disappearing from public view.

The underlying attitude is not much different from the people who start sentences with phrases like "When I'm out walking with my family, we shouldn't have to see ..."

They want to sanitize society of things that offend them. If this accomplishes that goal, they will see it as worthwhile, even if a few people have to die to accomplish the "greater good".

[Duckie]

Yeah, especially because, with newspapers publishing information like this, there will be no social support, gay communities, or other areas where gays can be safe outside of the closet. This law is a calculated attempt to destroy every vestige of public gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender advocacy- the Evangelical Missionaries who wrote the law, after all, have seen what widespread public LGBT acts and LGBT rights groups do. First they are stigmatized, but later the Evangelicals lose and homosexuality becomes as in Europe or America. And they're aware they can't execute gays in America or western Europe anymore, so they feel they have to stop Uganda before it goes down that road too.

Advocates of the law in Uganda have even said that's the point explicitly- to kill as many gays and especially public gays and gay rights leaders (thus the penalty for being part of a gay rights organisation) so that Uganda doesn't go down path as America- a 'slippery slope' view of gay rights given to them by the missionaries.

That's why you get this picture:
Large Picture

It's an attempt to wipe out any kind of potential for LGBT Rights progress- thus why the leaders of Ugandan LGBT Organisations are being specifically targeted. An entire generation, at minimum, will grow up in the closet, and any progress from western-influenced leaders in Uganda will be reset. The entire idea is to turn back the clock to the 1940s or earlier in Uganda. The 1940s in Germany, that is.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

It's Africa. More to the point, this country was the home of Idi Amin merely thirty years ago; I expect no better from them. In some sense this is probably just legally codifying what already exists, because I'm sure extrajudicial murder of homosexuals is normative in the countryside. It's just that now that they have functioning democracy, those rural shit-slinging cowherds can actually make their tribal lynch law legal. Which is exactly what happens at first in quasi-democratic countries when the rural population starts to vote. Napoleon III ended up Emperor of France for primarily the same reason--every hick farmer in France voted for the name Napoleon, and democracy was shortly dealt with. In the US we got Andrew Jackson.

India is now making a serious effort to decriminalize homosexuality, and beyond the whole thing with Hinduism being a less offensive religion than Christianity by far (because it doesn't try to convert people), it's more important to focus on the part of the world which has more than a billion people in it and some prospect of a future. If Iran used Uganda as target practice for its new nukes tomorrow, a lot of people would be upset because Iran had nukes, but nobody would really be shocked and horrified that Uganda is gone; like all of Sub-Saharan Africa north of Pretoria, it's completely irrelevant to the world.

Which is also, quite simply, why things like this are allowed to stand there. But if a tolerant climate for homosexuals is secured in China and India, which is actually possible, then 2.3 + billion people have civil rights. The population of Sub-Saharan Africa is barely a third that, and it's filled with governments of people who think drinking lemon juice can cure AIDS. It's a write-off, don't waste your nights unable to sleep over it. If they weren't executed by the government for being gay they'd just get tortured to death the next time the Lord's Resistance Army sends cocaine-addicted children with machetes on rampaging murder sprees through the country.

[The Grim Squeaker]

Well, again, in all probability the Ugandans literally will not kill every gay. They'll just have a witchhunt, kill a few tens of thousands or the a hundred thousand or so, execute some AIDS victims, and destroy their chances of ever becoming a modern state despite that they are a really economically promising part of Africa which seemed like it would ride out the AIDS storm using modern medicine and techniques such as condom promotion.

Why? It didn't bother Germany or many other modern, rich countries.

[stormthebeaches]

How much influence does the US have in this? If is a state sponsored support of Uganda's actions? Or just the usually hard line Conservatives and religious nuts doing private donations?

[Duckie]

How much influence does the US have in this? If is a state sponsored support of Uganda's actions? Or just the usually hard line Conservatives and religious nuts doing private donations?

The US is not cutting funding of Uganda with foreign aid and AIDS prevention money, despite Uganda's new policy which basically states that the money they receive will be used for 'solving' AIDS by killing gays. Further, the US State Department has refused to condemn the policy or make a fuss about it, and the office involved with PEPFAR has stated it is "Not their business to interfere with other states' internal policies".

On the conservative front, it's supported by the Family, which has membership among many republicans and conservative democratic politicians, Evangelical Missionaries, and the like. Most Evangelical groups in the US the best you can pin on them like Rick Warren is "Refused to condemn the law even when asked about it and explained what it does". But there are definite groups such as the American Family Association, EXODUS, and possibly indirectly The Family who are funding this. Groups which also get money from the US via the Faith-Based Initiatives Office.

So it's using US government money to fund anti-gay death squads, but indirectly. The worst you can say is that the White House is standing by and doing nothing, and refusing to take a side when it's brought up. But that's a pretty damn bad thing to say in itself.

Also, the entire anti-gay climate was created there by hardline extremists (the type who tend to be the most virulent missionaries in the first place, because they're such extremists and spend more time proselytising rather than helping the poor or providing actual aid like the more moderate churches).

So it's the US's mess, but not in a way that they'd be legally responsible for it. It's done by US citizens, funded by US citizens, and indirectly by the US government. But it's Uganda pulling the trigger, so the controversy won't happen because people don't follow the money and the influence trails.

[Pelranius]

On a cynical aside, would China just step in to gain influence in Uganda (they've made some token military aid/sales in the past) if we stopped giving them money? Just wondering.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

So it's the US's mess, but not in a way that they'd be legally responsible for it. It's done by US citizens, funded by US citizens, and indirectly by the US government. But it's Uganda pulling the trigger, so the controversy won't happen because people don't follow the money and the influence trails.

I know fully well who is funding this. My fucking half-brother is with his Mission trips to Uganda all the time (when he isn't hob-nobbing with the dictator of Fiji). My niece is getting married to this white kid whose family has resided over their filling the heads of the natives with extremely zealous evangelism for so long they have Ugandan citizenship. I'm sure he's met with Ugandan legislators and encouraged them to murder gays and then come back home and invited his lesbian sister and her partner over for Thanksgiving sentence (my half-sister, that is). Oh, except it's okay because said partner is only referred to as a friend, etc. Don't Ask Don't Tell is frequently applied in more than just the military.

The point is that I'm not seeing how much of a difference there is between that and those little prissbitch whores who demand diamonds for their weddings, which are paid for by narco rings, seized by drug addicted child murderers, and mined by workers who get paid a dollar a week in subhuman conditions where the only thing that's improved since The Heart of Darkness is that we don't cut their hands off anymore. Both are using the suffering of Africans to complete their own fantasies via the method of our country's excess of cold, hard cash. Africa is nothing more than a giant cesspool of human suffering and the only unique thing here is that these missionaries are actively making it worse, instead of just making it worse incidentally so they can have something on the cheap.

[stormthebeaches]

I'm not sure how this is a result of US influence. Isn't most of Africa very homophobic? I'm not sure how one could argue that America imported its homophobia over to Africa as the majority of Africa is much more homophobic that the United States.

[Duckie]

I'm not sure how this is a result of US influence. Isn't most of Africa very homophobic? I'm not sure how one could argue that America imported its homophobia over to Africa as the majority of Africa is much more homophobic that the United States.

The homophobia wasn't there until christian missionaries brought it. Uganda had a gay king before colonisation. The very christian missionaries whose leaders are named in the copious articles I've posted, who edited the bill for the Ugandan parliament. The missionaries whose theology has been accepted by the heads of the christian religions in Uganda, whose people have converted to that form over the 30 years of proselytisation that have taken place, with Evangelical missionaries bringing their religion along with their aid.

Did you even read the articles, or do you want to continue to deny it?

[Pelranius]

I'm not sure how this is a result of US influence. Isn't most of Africa very homophobic? I'm not sure how one could argue that America imported its homophobia over to Africa as the majority of Africa is much more homophobic that the United States.

The homophobia wasn't there until christian missionaries brought it. Uganda had a gay king before colonisation. The very christian missionaries whose leaders are named in the copious articles I've posted, who edited the bill for the Ugandan parliament. The missionaries whose theology has been accepted by the heads of the christian religions in Uganda, whose people have converted to that form over the 30 years of proselytisation that have taken place, with Evangelical missionaries bringing their religion along with their aid.

Did you even read the articles, or do you want to continue to deny it?

Incidentally, that brings up to mind the jackassed comment by a ZANU-PF party official that homosexuality was introduced to Africa by Europeans.

[Simon_Jester]

There is a group which thinks that it should be easier to legally immigrate, thus helping to solve the problem of illegal immigration. However, they seem somewhat rare.

I am one of them; I think that tripling or quintupling the US's legal immigration cap would virtually eliminate many of the social problems associated with illegal immigration.

More appealingly, it would force anti-immigration bigots to either shut up or admit that they oppose all immigration, not just illegal immigration.
______

You think a large amount of a persecuted minority being identified will make the oppressors stop slaughtering them or oppressing them , especially when they see them as a fucking public health/personal morals threat?
I'll laugh I think.

I'm saying I don't know. The Ugandan government may not actually be ready to build death camps or launch a Rwandan-sized mass pogrom to rid their country of homosexuals. Many of them would probably be willing to do so, for the reasons you describe. But I'm not sure they've thought this through, and the realization that they haven't might cause that 'unanimous support' to shake a little, if nothing else.

Part of the reason is that massacre on that level tends to spill over into other parts of the population, and the Ugandans ought to know that quite well, having observed just that happen in Rwanda. In Rwanda, much of the violence was Hutu-on-Hutu, because many people will take any excuse to start butchering their neighbors, even if those neighbors are not part of the Designated Victim Class of the week.

Rwanda suffered a period of bloody near-anarchy; Uganda might not want to risk going through the same thing, even if they expect their nation to be homofrei at the end of it. They may be thinking they can do this easily or cheaply, or planning to kill only a small number of homosexuals to discourage the others. I don't know.

Well, again, in all probability the Ugandans literally will not kill every gay. They'll just have a witchhunt, kill a few tens of thousands or the a hundred thousand or so, execute some AIDS victims, and destroy their chances of ever becoming a modern state despite that they are a really economically promising part of Africa which seemed like it would ride out the AIDS storm using modern medicine and techniques such as condom promotion...

This is what I was getting at, only with the long term implications thought through more clearly. I speculate that they're planning to keep the deaths limited to the thousands or tens of thousands, out of a population of thirty million.

And yes, I still find this bloody appalling in the most literal possible sense of the term.
______

It's Africa. More to the point, this country was the home of Idi Amin merely thirty years ago; I expect no better from them. In some sense this is probably just legally codifying what already exists, because I'm sure extrajudicial murder of homosexuals is normative in the countryside. It's just that now that they have functioning democracy, those rural shit-slinging cowherds can actually make their tribal lynch law legal.

What makes it worse is that it isn't even their tribal lynch law; it's ours. They caught the infection from us.

Which is exactly what happens at first in quasi-democratic countries when the rural population starts to vote. Napoleon III ended up Emperor of France for primarily the same reason--every hick farmer in France voted for the name Napoleon, and democracy was shortly dealt with. In the US we got Andrew Jackson.

Was Andrew Jackson actually that bad? I mean, he didn't abolish elections as Napoleon III did, and so far as I know he was no more compliant in the atrocities committed by Americans of his time than most other American politicians were.
________

On a cynical aside, would China just step in to gain influence in Uganda (they've made some token military aid/sales in the past) if we stopped giving them money? Just wondering.

Who cares? This is Uganda we're talking about, and this isn't 1951. "Blocking Chinese influence" is not a sufficient reason to support savagery, not in the lesser-evil terms that were used during the Cold War.
________

I'm not sure how this is a result of US influence. Isn't most of Africa very homophobic? I'm not sure how one could argue that America imported its homophobia over to Africa as the majority of Africa is much more homophobic that the United States.

To me, this seems to be a case of American gasoline poured on an African bed of embers. The dishonor may be more or less equally spread between the foreign homophobes and native homophobes here.

[Samuel]

Was Andrew Jackson actually that bad? I mean, he didn't abolish elections as Napoleon III did, and so far as I know he was no more compliant in the atrocities committed by Americans of his time than most other American politicians were.

The Trail of Tears was pretty bad. Additionally there was the codification of "democracy by rotation" aka the spoils system.

[stormthebeaches]

I'm not sure how this is a result of US influence. Isn't most of Africa very homophobic? I'm not sure how one could argue that America imported its homophobia over to Africa as the majority of Africa is much more homophobic that the United States.

The homophobia wasn't there until christian missionaries brought it. Uganda had a gay king before colonisation. The very christian missionaries whose leaders are named in the copious articles I've posted, who edited the bill for the Ugandan parliament. The missionaries whose theology has been accepted by the heads of the christian religions in Uganda, whose people have converted to that form over the 30 years of proselytisation that have taken place, with Evangelical missionaries bringing their religion along with their aid.

Did you even read the articles, or do you want to continue to deny it?

Such a bill would never gain traction unless the people in Uganda supported anti-gay death squads to some degree. Also, the Christian missionaries were most active during the 19th century and most of them came from Europe. Uganda wasn't colonized by the USA.

[Simon_Jester]

Was Andrew Jackson actually that bad? I mean, he didn't abolish elections as Napoleon III did, and so far as I know he was no more compliant in the atrocities committed by Americans of his time than most other American politicians were.

The Trail of Tears was pretty bad. Additionally there was the codification of "democracy by rotation" aka the spoils system.

The Trail of Tears was extraordinarily bad, but was by no means uniquely associated with Andrew Jackson. He didn't do thing one to stop it, and he should have, but he was far from the only federal politician to fail that test of personal ethics. The chief moving force was on the state level, from local politicians who coveted the land occupied by the civilized tribes. So if you're going to condemn someone for the Trail of Tears, it makes at least as much sense to add it to the "Fuck the South" pile as it does to the "Fuck Andrew Jackson" pile.

The spoils system issue is significant, but again, not unique to Jackson the way the abolition of elections was uniquely associated with Napoleon III. The fact that the system existed to be codified in the first place is suggestive, to my way of thinking.

I'm not saying Jackson was all that good, but that doesn't mean he was all that bad, either.

[Duckie]

I'm not sure how this is a result of US influence. Isn't most of Africa very homophobic? I'm not sure how one could argue that America imported its homophobia over to Africa as the majority of Africa is much more homophobic that the United States.

The homophobia wasn't there until christian missionaries brought it. Uganda had a gay king before colonisation. The very christian missionaries whose leaders are named in the copious articles I've posted, who edited the bill for the Ugandan parliament. The missionaries whose theology has been accepted by the heads of the christian religions in Uganda, whose people have converted to that form over the 30 years of proselytisation that have taken place, with Evangelical missionaries bringing their religion along with their aid.

Did you even read the articles, or do you want to continue to deny it?

Such a bill would never gain traction unless the people in Uganda supported anti-gay death squads to some degree. Also, the Christian missionaries were most active during the 19th century and most of them came from Europe. Uganda wasn't colonized by the USA.

Just because the Ugandans pulled the trigger doesn't mean the US didn't give them a gun.

Further, the missionaries still exist, and it's extremely dishonest of you to refer to the eighteen fucking hundreds when talking about anti-gay conservative missionaries who have been most active since the 60s and especially the 80s. If you want to go ahead and look this entire board in the metaphorical eyes and claim that no missionary activity of any significance has occured in that time, go ahead.

But sane human beings know that evangelical and mainline protestants alike have spent millions and millions of dollars going to Africa. Some of it is altruistic- they bring food and water and help construct infrastructure and treat the sick. My own sister is part of some stupid little evangelical cult that goes to rural mexico and helps take care of orphans.

But they bring their religion with them- hardline, evangelical religion, looking to convert anyone to the One True God. And this theology has taken hold in Uganda; in Nigeria; in Jamaica; in a dozen different states. African Anglicans for instance are considering breaking off from the liberal Anglicans in england and america. Why? Is it their Native Black Homophobia?

No. Africans and other third world people such as Jamaicans are no more homophobic than any other society on the whole- they may socially discriminate against such people, and will never be granting them rights until they join the first world. But this new step- mass executions- is entirely and documentably funded and organised by conservative western influence.

Missionaries have a profound influence on the theology of a nation, and Religion has a profound influence on the people. American Evangelicals are to blame for anti-gay hysteria in Nigeria and in Uganda. That's a fact. American Evangelicals are assisting in the writing of the bill in Uganda. That's a fact. American money is flowing into Uganda from missionaries and evangelicals alike. That's a fact. American Evangelicals are the closest confidantes of the president of Nigeria. That's a fact.

The scares are using language that the evangelicals use using their own terminology and theology (Gays = Nazis, for example). The scares are explicitly American-influenced: "Look at how we, the One True Religion, lost in America- soon we shall lose in Nigeria/Uganda/Jamaica". Africa is a dumping ground for the losers of the culture war to export their hateful ideology.

If you want to make yourself feel better about the United States by pretending missionaries don't exist past 1890 and that the US is blameless and it's all those stupid Africans faults, that's okay with me. But don't go pretending you're correct.

[Serafina]

Such a bill would never gain traction unless the people in Uganda supported anti-gay death squads to some degree. Also, the Christian missionaries were most active during the 19th century and most of them came from Europe. Uganda wasn't colonized by the USA.

In case you did not notice it, Africa is VERY religious - either islamic (in the north) or christian (in the south).
It has been that way for the better part of at least two centuries.

If the preacher says "condoms are evil and do not protect from AIDS", they listen to the "man of god".
If he says "gays are an abomination unto god and must be killed", they do the same.

[stormthebeaches]

Edit: Never mind.