I commented earlier on the disgusting abuse of the proposed law to penalize and criminalize gays in Kenya in my post Spreading the good news: Isn’t religion a private affair. Now police there have arrested five men at a private villa in Mombasa, two in the process of getting married, accused of being homosexuals. From the article at the BBC:
District officer George Matandura said two of the men had been found with wedding rings, attempting to get married, in Kikambala beach resort. The other three men were handed to the police by members of the public; two of them had reportedly been beaten.
“We are grateful to the public for alerting the police. They should continue co-operating with the police to arrest more,” Mr Matundura said. “It is an offence, an unnatural offence, and also their behaviour is repugnant to the morality of the people.”
One person’s repugnance is another person’s basic human rights, freedom, and dignity of personhood.
The district officer said the five, aged between 20 and 35, would “undergo a medical examination before we charge them with homosexuality,” the AFP news agency reported. “We will move swiftly and close down bars which condone gays, lesbians, prostitution and drug abuse in their premises,” Mr Matundura added. A member of a Kenyan gay rights organisation condemned the arrests and said it had appealed to the Human Rights Commission to step in. But the marriage allegedly planned was condemned by Muslim and Christian clerics.
Really? But this was the perfect opportunity for the representatives of these religions that supposedly brim with morality upon which our human rights have been built to intervene and show to the world why religious belief is not a safehouse for bigotry and prejudice to live unimpeded.
“We cannot allow these young boys to ruin their future through homosexuality,” Sheikh Ali Hussein of the Council of Imams and Preachers of Kenya told AFP. “We shall use all means to curb this vice.” Bishop Lawrence Chai, of the National Council of Churches of Kenya, said: “This is immoral and we shall not allow it, especially here in Mtwapa.”
Are you surprised? The religious are always first up to use secular law to further their goals and the last to respect it when it conflicts with their religious agenda, leading us to conclude that hypocrisy, not truth, is the foundation of religious belief.
tildeb
Questionable Motives 
Are you surprised?
Nope not in the slightest – religion is used all the time to punish people for their life styles and choices – this is just awful, to think that now in 2010 there are people who are being beaten, persecuted and having their intimate private lives inspected and man handled to cure them from what?
Who cares if they are gay? What difference does it make to anyone else?
It is their business and no one else’s.
Stupid, stupid people, interfering, ruining other peoples lives, making them unhappy and physically hurting them – just awful.
Comment by misunderstoodranter — February 14, 2010 @ 5:20 pm |
Isn’t it nice that the islamic cleric won’t ‘let’ these guys live life as they wish… ie. ruin it… but has nothing to say on other people beating them or the state arresting and punishing them? It’s the sex act that ‘ruins’ their future, apparently, but the brutality shown against them in the present is of no concern at all.
As I wrote, what remarkably obtuse god-sanctioned hypocrites these clerics are.
Comment by tildeb — February 14, 2010 @ 5:54 pm |
[…] How do religious leaders inspire bigotry? Filed under: Bigotry, Catholic Church, Equality, Ethics, Homosexuality, Human Rights, Intolerance, Law, Morality, Obama, Politics, Religion, Suffering, Vatican, belief, religiously inspired violence — tildeb @ 4:57 pm Two ways in particular: promoting fear and loathing to be directed at a select group of individuals based on some unalterable trait, and by not taking a stand against fear and loathing directed at that select group of individuals. In Uganda, religious leaders aided and abetted by American evangelicals and the Vatican, we have both (See my previous posts about this exercise of religious bigotry here, here, and here). […]
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