Saturday, November 29, 2008

Perfect Christianity.

Begs the question, perfection according to who? But I love the wording of this article title, from which I picked (tongue in cheek) the blog title.

The article itself.. “Africa may be the future of 'seamless garment' Catholicism.” That article reminisces on how the virtues of ‘real’ Christianity (Catholicism) are taking hold in Africa. As opposed to the lawless Americas and decadent Europe. The paraphrasing is mine…

Christian fundamentalist ideals.

‘Real’ as opposed to ‘fake’ whether it is ‘real America’ or ‘real Christianity’…

But I note that in Burundi, a small Central African country, homosexuality was not criminal. That is, until now. Apparently, a bill has passed the lower house, and will soon pass the upper house and be signed by the president, criminalizing homosexual activity.

--
On the other hand, the new penal code also criminalizes homosexuality for the first time, making same-sex acts punishable by anywhere from three months to two years in prison and a substantial fine. The law comes atop already-existing legislation in Burundi banning gay marriage, even though analysts say no serious advocacy for such arrangements exists in the country.
--
“While the new penal code still has to be adopted by the senate and signed into law by the president, local analysts say the 90-0 parliamentary vote suggests that it’s likely to be adopted in its present form.”

--

Sweeping aside my prejudices, I wonder whether it is not just a fact that the homophobia agenda is just too strong in our countries. As the article notes, us gay Africans are too low ranked for us to even fight effectively for our right to have sex. For goodness’ sake we are so closeted many of our people don’t believe we are real. But our countries are banning same sex marriages, and going ahead to make sure that, if caught, we are punished. Why?

If there is no gay lobby in Burundi, why have there been efforts to come down strongly against gay Burundians? From forbidding them marriage to criminalizing the behavior.
Something is going on beneath the surface.


GayUganda

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're right that something is going on....and sadly there's not very much you or I can do about it.

HOWEVER, globalization is coming, and before long, African countries will have to begin to open up or Western companies (who value the work of gays) are not going to do much business there. Curiously, it will probably take some eventual secular and commercial pressures to bring about changes.....but they will come -- maybe it will take a generation or more, but it will happen or Africa will simply slip into global irrelevance.

Leonard said...

That´s so funny (if it weren´t deadly and tragic)...I love how we all know how to be invisible...we even have our own language when shifting words around to suit our needs...no, we don´t go anywhere, we´ve always been right here, and there, but it´s so SICK for people to PRETEND we don´t exist...and even if we do, and didn´t have sex, they´d still squirm...the bigots are cowards, the blowhards are cowards and I wouldn´t be surprised if some legislators, along with Archbishops like Orombi and Akinola don´t get special ¨considerations¨ via money from abroad. Cowards I tell you!

FOSCO said...

This is shocking to me. Thank you for your blog.

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