Olympic Hypocrisy

Wow—wonderful what this blog can do! True, I had to keep harping about it, and I do apologize to any reader who may have gone a bit crazy, hearing my rants over and over. But admit it, dear Readers: Aren’t you glad we kept up the pressure? Because now we have it from a new-found friend, no less than Vladimir Putin himself, that the Winter Olympics in Sochi will be… OK, here’s The New York Times itself:

Speaking at a meeting with leaders of Russian winter sports federations, which was also attended by Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, Mr. Putin said Sochi would be fully tolerant. 

Oh, and the name of this article? Putin Says Sochi Welcomes Gays!

Guys?

Look, I have lived over half a century, and I’m hard pressed to think of a more blatantly false and outrageously self-serving statement. And memo to Putin? Gay people, generally speaking, are not fools. So if you think this statement gets you off the hook, think again.

The question, of course, is who is more turpid—sorry, computer, but I looked it up, and Nabokov used the word too—here: Putin and his heinous laws that criminalize even talking about homosexuality, or the Olympic Committee, which sat around and watched Putin enact these laws without raising a word of protest. Then, of course, things got hot, so the Olympic guys had to go and put pressure on the Russian president to make this ridiculous statement.

Well, this was not the only news about LGBT issues in the Times, today, because Frank Bruni had a story about Paul Singer, a billionaire Republican who gave a pot of money to Mitt Romney, but who is also giving money to the Human Rights Campaign. Why? Well, Singer among other things has a gay son—and a gay son-in-law. And he thinks support for gay rights is not incompatible with the Republican Party. Here’s what Bruni has to say:

In Singer’s view, gay rights are consistent with a Republican philosophy of individual liberty, and gay marriage is “an augmenter of social stability, family stability and stability in raising kids.” In other words, it’s conservative.

Nor is Singer the only Republican to join with the HRC—there’s also Daniel S. Loeb; here’s what he has to say:

As we witnessed in its successful campaign to advance marriage equality in the United States, HRC is a uniquely effective organization that achieves what it sets out to do.

Right—so what’s the campaign about? Well, the HRC has decided it’s time to act globally and support the organizations in other countries that are struggling to advance the causes of LGBT folk. Here’s what Singer has to say about the campaign:

“Every day around the world, LGBT individuals face arrest, imprisonment, torture and even execution just for being who they are,” said Paul Singer.

And guess what? The situation is getting worse around the world, just as it’s getting better in the United States. And why is that? Because we are exporting our bigotry around the world, as evangelical Christians have given up on the domestic market. So what have people like Scott Lively done? They’ve run down to Uganda and over to Russia to stir up hate and urge draconian laws.

Which makes it all the interesting what Bruni says:

It (the campaign) intends to name and shame American religious zealots who sponsor antigay campaigns abroad. So Republican money may wind up challenging a constituency within the party. (We’re most definitely not in Kansas anymore.)

Well, it’s an interesting world presenting itself today: Republicans supporting LGBT issues, and our new buddy in the Kremlin. Is it that I have the cynical blood of journalism coursing through my veins? Because I’m back to suggesting this….

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Good Old American Hate

I have a theory—if they can live it, I can watch it. So I didn’t back off, when I saw the hour-long documentary from the BBC titled “The World’s Worst Place to be Gay.” I stayed true to my principles, but never has my right index finger more itched to click a mouse.

So I spent some 57 minutes watching a very cute, engaging British guy talking with Ugandans. That was the redeeming feature. What made the video almost unbearable was seeing the Ugandans, often very charming, but almost consistently filled with hate.

Our hate—if, like me, you are from the United States. Because up until a decade or so, most people in Uganda were not terribly accepting of LGBT folk, but they also weren’t filled with hate towards them.

All that changed when a guy named Scott Lively, the pastor of the Abiding Truth Ministries, located in Springfield, Massachusetts. Lively makes it his chief business to go after gay people; and to say that he’s virulent is to speak mildly. Think I’m exaggerating? Well, check out the clip below.

As you could see, that was from the 2009 visit to Uganda, and Lively lived up to his name. Here’s the Boston Magazine on the subject:

The evening of his arrival, he says, he met with more than 50 members of Parliament. He also claims to have spoken privately for 30 minutes with the country’s minister of ethics and integrity. In all, he estimates, he directly addressed about 10,000 people. And then there’s the much wider audience he reached with his media appearances. He was particularly proud of what he’d managed to accomplish at the Hotel Triangle conference. On March 17, while still in Uganda, he boasted online that someone in Kampala had told him that his campaign there had been “like a nuclear bomb against the ‘gay’ agenda,” and he went on to say that he prayed that this was true.

The effect? Homophobia exploded across Uganda, and culminated in what has been called the “Kill the Gays Bill.” And no, this is not hyperbole, here is one LGBT activist, Frank Mugisha, on the bill:

It introduces the death penalty for any homosexual person living with HIV/AIDS, so if someone is born with HIV and they come out gay, they should be killed. It has aggravated homosexuality — any kind of male rape, they should be killed, and if any person has sex with anyone below the age of 18, that’s death penalty. If any person engages in same-sex acts with someone who is disabled, that is also death penalty. Or if any person engages in same-sex acts with someone who they are in authority of. So, for example, if I have sex with my boss, my boss can go for the death penalty because they are in authority over me. There’s death penalty for serial offenders, so if you break the law many times, then you can also be killed.

OK—now what about heterosexuals? Here’s Mugisha again:

The bill has a clause that says you should report any person who is known or perceived as a homosexual to the authorities, so that means families have to report their own children, doctors have to report their clients, priests have to report people who come to confess about anything that is related to homosexuality. If they don’t (report), they become criminals. The bill also requires Uganda to withdraw from all international treaties that are in favour of sexual orientation and gender identity, and (it) requires all NGOs working in Uganda — if they are receiving funding from any organization affiliated with an organization that works on sexual orientation or gender identity — (to be) deregistered in Uganda.

Mugisha is the director of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SM-UG), and a total hero. Actually, anyone who is openly gay in Uganda at the moment is a hero. And so it’s not surprising that he has done the right thing: taken Scott Lively to court.

SM-UG is hardly a major force—it’s an umbrella organization of 8 groups, each with about 30 people; we’re talking, then, about 240 people in a country of 33 million. So SM-UG partnered with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) to bring Lively into court for violating the Alien Tort Statute, which allows foreigners whose human rights have been violated to file suit in US courts.

Right—so what kind of abuse are we talking about? Beatings, murder, stoning of houses, and one particular abuse—newspapers printing photos and addresses of gay and lesbians. Oh, and one newspaper does it with the headline, “Hang them!”

Gay people, then, are frequently hounded out of their neighborhoods, and live, as you can see in the video below, in the worst possible conditions.

There are two important facts: the CCR states that Lively has traveled to over 40 countries, and that he is, in the words of the Public Research Associates, “globalizing the U.S. culture wars.”   And lastly, consider these words, when the Ottawa Citizen asked Mubisha what activists outside of Uganda could do to help:

Activists? I think that would have been the frustrating question, that the LGBT community has not helped us, has not stood by us. Because, like you said, people have gotten their rights here, they feel there is no need to get engaged in the other global civil rights for LGBT people, so the LGBT people have sort of taken a step back, they don’t really care. People in Uganda think we receive tons and tons of support from gay groups in the U.S. and Europe. Not at all. It is mostly human rights organizations that are not entirely focused on LGBT issues that work in supporting us.

Ouch. OK, guys—here’s what the CCR says we can do.

Get Involved

⇒       Share this factsheet and information about the case via social media and blogs.

⇒       Sign up on CCR’s website for email alerts so you can take action as needed.

⇒       Write a letter to the editor of your local paper about the role U.S. evangelicals are playing in spreading hate in Uganda and elsewhere.

For More Information:

www.ccrjustice.org/LGBTuganda

I’d add two more things. Check out the website for Sexual Minorities Uganda: http://www.smug.4t.com/index.html And then consider making a donation and following some of the suggestions in the website for International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Campaign: https://www.iglhrc.org/content/support-our-work

People started taking gay people seriously when they saw us pushing baby carts and changing diapers. We fought hard and—most of us, most of the time—we won. Now it’s time to look around at the rest of the world.