Fairly common, but around here it generally results in Pit threads. 
UGANDA be kidding me! Heh! Heheh! Ha! Hahahahahaha! HAW HAW HAW HAW!!! Oh, YES!!!
Luckily, using buzzword and bogeyman distractions to divert the populace from more substantive issues is something that would never happen in an advanced, democratic country like the United States. No sirree.
Still, politically this would get nowhere if there weren’t the underlying social attitudes (detailed by even sven that make it possible. It seems to somewhat put the lie to something that has been preached by the gay rights community for decades: the idea that most non-western cultures tolerated or even embraced homosexuality, and that the Judeo-Christian ethic is uniquely bigoted and intolerant for condemning homosexuality. I suspect that homophobia (or “the ick factor”) is a lot more universal than we would like to think. Certainly it must be painful for liberals who champion third-world peoples to hear homosexuality described as a “decadent Western perversion”. Or was Uganda a utopia of tolerance before the missionaries arrived?
I guess that would be rather aggravating.
I can probably be described as a pretty liberal - at least from an American point of view - but I’ve never heard of this idea that “most non-western cultures tolerated or even embraced homosexuality” unless you mean the ancient Greeks and Romans where we have actual historical records to support the claim (and the extend in which they tolerated homosexuality in the modern sense is pretty debatable anyway).
I’m not convinced that the “ick factor” is all that universal, though I must admit that i the sight of men kissing was quite shocking and uncomfortable to me the first time I observed it. But maybe that just depends on what you’re used to, or your own sexual preferences - I never found women kissing icky in any way. (If you haven’t guessed, I’m a heterosexual male).
Anyway, anyone who’s suggesting that the Congo was better off during the “missionary” stage should read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. That’s not to suggest the country was any better before. People ate each other before.
Afterwards, they were robbed.
I was listening to Fresh Air last night when that interview came on. Deeply, deeply disturbing.
As I understand it, the Chinese government is so homophobic that it refuses to acknowledge there is any homosexuality in China. (Which is probably going to become problematic, sooner or later, what with their woman shortage and all.) I do not know if that’s just the Communists’ hangup, or if it was the same when the ruling ideology was Confucianism. Either way, they didn’t learn it from the missionaries.
First it was dog eat dog.
Then they were robbed.
Now, its just bend over.
Sounds like democracy is just around the corner…
Um… what? Where on Earth did you ever hear that?
Again, where did you get the idea that liberals think of the third world as bastions of enlightenment and tolerance? I dare say, we’re all pretty well aware of how far behind most of the world lags in areas like gay rights, women’s rights, and other pillars of Western liberal thought.
There is a segment of the academic left that buys or bought into the idea that primitive cultures were all innocent free-love egalitarian paradises, until Western Imperialism/agriculture/the Patriarchy corrupted them. And there’s certainly an effort by some to blame everything on Judeo-Christian “sky god” religions and hark back to supposedly more benevolent ancient cultures. But personally, I’ve always gotten the impression that was a fantasy of the loonier feminists and Luddites
, not the gay rights movement.
Over at the blog Box Turtle Bulletin, they’ve been following developments in Uganda since February. Here’s the latest in the series (pretty much covering the Terry Gross interview mentioned above) with links to all the past articles.
That might have been true in the past, but it’s not anymore. Homosexual acts were decriminalized in the 90s, and here, for instance, are some articles from the Chinese press in 2005 about homosexuality in China.
http://www.danwei.org/trends_and_buzz/the_chinese_government_its_ok.php
Seconded.
Ignorance fought, thanks.
I’m assuming the same ones who brought us the “Burning Times” bullshit.
As for China and homosexuality, you run into another cultural interpretation. Here is what I understand of it (real Chinese people, please correct me!)
Basically, in traditional Chinese culture, getting married and having kids is not optional. It is your duty. It is your duty not just to your parents, but to your ancestors going back for generations. And frankly, your opinion on that duty isn’t all that important. It’s what you have to do like it or not. So being a full time homosexual, without a marriage and kids, would be like flipping off your entire family line and basically the whole culture. It just wasn’t okay. You’re just making a unilateral decision to end a family line that persisted for generations, and really that wasn’t seen as your choice. Of course, if you got caught messing around on the side, well, that wasn’t be gay, was it? That was just boys being boys!
The modern government took these ideas, and complicated them further with the idea that personal actions should serve the state. So really it didn’t matter who was gay or who wasn’t gay. If it didn’t serve the state, it wasn’t okay. Once again, it wasn’t really seen as something that was your choice.
In recent times, things have opened up. Homosexuality has been decriminalized, larger cities have thriving gay scenes, and even small cities have plenty of openly gay men. Most offices and classrooms have the token gay guy. While most of my students respond to gay-related stuff with theatrical disgust and comments like “That is against our culture, we do not accept it,” it is my experience that in private people are pretty willing to be friends with gay people.
Surprisingly, it seems to me that lesbians get the brunt of the actual hate. Men are expected to mess around. But for a woman to refuse her defined social role is deeply disturbing to a lot of people. That said, a sort of lesbian chic is in vogue on college campuses and every classroom has a short haired girl who wears men’s clothes. Whether this represents true lesbianism or a reaction against a culture that still has very strict gender roles (especially in regards to beauty) I’m not sure. But my foreign lesbian friends never seem to have trouble finding girlfriends.
Maybe a very small segment who has never had actual experience with other cultures. I don’t know a single overseas aid worker or the like who holds beliefs like this (and I know lots.) I imagine there are a lot more people who hold views like “all non-Christians cultures are full of crazed blood-thirsty savages.”
Hmmm? “Overseas aid worker or the like” would be the “small segment” of people here. Not having significant experience with other cultures, especially primitive cultures is the American norm.
But those would be a completely different demographic than left wing academics in geenral, much less the faction of which I am speaking about. Who even if they find out about some non-Christians who really are “bloodthirsty savages”, will blame the Christians/Western Imperialism or whatever particular bugaboo they have ( I recall reading about an incident where some scientists who studied a violent tribe were accused by such people of deliberately manipulating the tribe into being violent, because primitive people being violent on their own was just unthinkable, apparently ).
They believe in the Noble Savage, not the bloodthirsty kind.
I guess what I’m asking is who exactly are you talking about? Do you have any reason to believe that people espousing this kind of ideology are more numerous or taken more seriously than, for example, the segment of MDs who believe in homeopathy or the segment of degreed historians who believe in holocaust denial?
Actually, I guess you admit they are a small segment. I’m more confused about Lumpy’s comments.
Because just about everyone I know is a “liberal” who “champion third-world people” (if that is what you want to call people who spend their lives trying to help others have access to food, clean water, education, basic medicine and peace.) and not one person I have ever met has held these kinds of beliefs. We are all painfully aware of the problems that “traditional” cultures can have.
That said, Lumpy’s comments are nonsensical anyway. Only 1% of Uganda primarily practices traditional religions. The majority of the country is Christian, with a strong Muslim minority. So actually, anyone who did feel like putting the blame on a religion could probably blame Christianity quite confidently.
And FWIW, Cameroon’s modern concept of witchcraft is not some throwback to traditional beliefs, but rather a very modern and thriving set of beliefs that has and continues to evolve with current events. This isn’t old stuff that is on it’s way out. These beliefs- which are widely held across religious and ethnic groups- have come into being during the last century (often replacing the more varied local beliefs) and continue to change today. A great book about this is The Modernity of Witchraft. For example, Cameroon’s most universally believed set of beliefs about witchcraft (that people’s souls are regularly stolen to do farm labor on a specific mountain in the West Province) sprung up in the 1950s and is now believed pretty much everywhere. This is not some ancient legend that “primitive” people believe. This is a modern belief that, for whatever reason, modern people believe in. So rants about “traditional culture” have little to do with it.
Yep. And here, from the horse’s mouth, the Chinese government’s own official periodical People’s Daily mentions the growing support for homosexuals in China:
http://english.people.com.cn/200412/10/eng20041210_166876.html
And here’s one (albeit written by a non-Chinese and in a more daring, though still official, newspaper) that says gays actually have a better chance at equal rights in China than in America:
http://opinion.globaltimes.cn/foreign-view/2009-11/485927.html