Nigeria bans gay marriage, gay meetings -- Does so secretly

[patrick bateman]

 

[nako xl]

 

[Nouss]

Nako, do you agree with the message of that song?

Btw, what happen to anton?

 

[sea manup]

 

how does he make the bible argument then go into talking about how its not the same as what african americans went though. the bible stuff was pretty much the exact same 

 

[deleted]

Turrible.

 

[nako xl]

Nako, do you agree with the message of that song?

Btw, what happen to anton?

Not at all.  He makes the same false arguments most people do against gay marriage.

Civil unions give all the same rights (they don't), no gays were ever killed or attacked over homosexuality (they were), etc.

Then argues that marriage is a Christian construct (as if only Christians get married or that the Bible even invented the concept) and that because homosexuality is a sin in christianity so you can't get married if you want to be gay because christians can't be gay therefore anyone who's married can't be gay. Ignoring that fundamentally, we're not meant to be a "Christian state".

The whole thing is silly.  But seeking out dude on twitter to argue with would be dumb.  I've done that in the past.   I imagine it made my twitter feed unbearable for people -- though I did get a couple of underground dudes to concede that they see my points though they don't agree with them.

I just wanted to see NT's take on the song.  Boxden seemed to think he made valid arguments without being disrespectful or ignorant. 

Boxden.

And Anton's around... In the rafters like Sting.

 

[scarsorscabs]

So much wrong with that song and sadly there are more than a few NTers who feel exactly like that talented, successful rapper that'll co-sign the hell out of it.

I think it's hilarious how frequently he tells his audience how they can react and tries to justify his bigotry.  "Let me make this clear, the hate I have for these people who I look at as lesser than me isn't really hate because I'm only talking about certain ones and because I sin too plus at the end of this I'm gonna say I got love for them.  I'm okay if I knowingly continue to do wrong but you're not because God."

Couple things...where's the vocal outrage over non-Christians (specifically atheists, agnostics, etc) getting married if religion is your reason for not supporting gay marriage?  Shouldn't they only be allowed the "right" to civil unions?  His "bars" about pedophilia, I don't even...that was disgusting. 

And since comparison to blacks civil rights is such a sensitive subject...if people like MC Gaybasher are to represent certain beliefs, he says "domestic partnerships gave you rights a long time ago."  Do you see where I'm going with this?  Not that I agree with it in the slightest and to be honest, I don't think the two movements should be compared because they are different...but I believe people should have the same rights regardless of race, sexual orientation, even religion.  My problem is when you use one of these characteristics to try to justify hatred.  "I don't hate you, I'm just going to describe you as evil sub-humans."  Hmmm...

If being given certain rights is all it takes, shouldn't everyone be happy with their position because we're all equal now and the world is a wonderful place?  The end.

 

[nako xl]

Man, in school I made a lot of people mad because when we argued about marriage equality and the religious people spoke up about it being a church construct, I was like "Well then, NO ONE should be allowed to get married under the law.  Give everyone civil unions and keep that marriage **** in your church."

But people didn't like that, because well, they acknowledged actually being married meant more because our culture places an emphasis on its importance.  That and most states DON'T give identical rights to married people and civil unions/partnerships.

 

[rico x hood]

Man I just read an article saying the Disney Channel just introduced a lesbian couple on one of their shows.

 

[teamjordan79]

 
9 black people in a room with 1 white person who is the abnormal one?

So abnormality is based on numbers?


I mean if I somehow end up in a room with 5 paraplegics, am I the abnormal one?

well if you're an inmate and you dont like the booty, ur def abnormal

 

[heliumclinton]

Man I just read an article saying the Disney Channel just introduced a lesbian couple on one of their shows.

Good, hopefully kids won't grow up to dislike people they know nothing about like their parents

 

[Nouss]

Repped at Nako and scars or scabs.

I've been waiting for interracial couples to be incorporated into those shows. LGBT couples would be a huge step.

 

[zipp 202]

Great song, gotta check this dude Bizzle out. 

 

[wr]

 

[johnnyderp]

idk about a lesbian couple on disney. maybe as neighbors or something, but as the main characters? it'd probably be mad weird.

 

[nako xl]

Didn't listen, but ok...

And MLK Jr. was a womanizer who would rent hotel rooms to cheat on his wife. 

He also plagiarized part of his doctoral dissertation.

My point being, if you posted that to somehow imply that he was infallible and everything he said was gospel, then my reply to you is "everybody makes mistakes.  As great as he was, especially Dr. King."

P.S. James David Manning is a racist hateful fool (read: *** hole) and you only lose credibility using him as a prop for your views.

 

[wr]

Didn't listen, but ok...

And MLK Jr. was a womanizer who would rent hotel rooms to cheat on his wife. 

He also plagiarized part of his doctoral dissertation.

My point being, if you posted that to somehow imply that he was infallible and everything he said was gospel, then my reply to you is "everybody makes mistakes.  As great as he was, especially Dr. King."

P.S. James David Manning is a racist hateful fool (read: *** hole) and you only lose credibility using him as a prop for your views.

Not using him as a prop.

I disagree with Manning on a lot of things.

I was just posting this video because it was relevant to the thread.

The video is not his opinion. He is reading MLK's conversation with a homosexual black man at the time.

Calm down....

Maybe you should've listen to the video first.

 

[nako xl]

 

Didn't listen, but ok...

And MLK Jr. was a womanizer who would rent hotel rooms to cheat on his wife. 

He also plagiarized part of his doctoral dissertation.

My point being, if you posted that to somehow imply that he was infallible and everything he said was gospel, then my reply to you is "everybody makes mistakes.  As great as he was, especially Dr. King."

P.S. James David Manning is a racist hateful fool (read: *** hole) and you only lose credibility using him as a prop for your views.

Not using him as a prop.

I disagree with Manning on a lot of things.

I was just posting this video because it was relevant to the thread.

The video is not his opinion. He is reading MLK's conversation with a homosexual black man at the time.

Calm down....

Maybe you should've listen to the video first.

Nah, I made a decision not to entertain Pastor Manning anymore.  MLK's convo is relevant to the thread, but so is my response.

 

[nako xl]

@Wr I should add I'm sorry if it makes it look liek I was attacking you.  I wasn't.  And I may be wrong but I'm pretty sure you've been one of the reasonable posters on the other side of the argument.

Manning just gets me irked

Can't be bringing that clown as ammunition to a debate.

 

[nako xl]

Nigerian intellectuals are fighting back against the law.
[h2]  [/h2]

[h2]A NIGERIAN INTELLECTUAL lines up the homophobic arguments and knocks them down one by one[/h2]

We’ve seen a range of responses from African intellectuals to the crisis of homophobia, especially in states that are planning  oppressive anti-gay laws As well as Binyavanga Wainaina, several Nigerian intellectuals have also weighed in. Yesterday was Chimamanda Adichie’s turn, and she made a very important contribution.

The thing I like about the piece is her generosity. She confronts directly the confused and contradictory assortment of ideas which have become so influential in shaping homophobia and the language in which homophobia is now being expressed. She is frank and uncondescending, refusing to gloss over or euphemize the vulgarity of homophobic thinking. The hardest thing for an intellectual when speaking out against such crass, hateful ideology is to take it seriously enough as a way of thinking to which large numbers of people have become deeply attached. That’s what Adichie does here, and that’s one reason why this intervention might challenge people in a deep way.

Here are some key excerpts:

The new law that criminalizes homosexuality is popular among Nigerians. But it shows a failure of our democracy, because the mark of a true democracy is not in the rule of its majority but in the protection of its minority – otherwise mob justice would be considered democratic. The law is also unconstitutional, ambiguous, and a strange priority in a country with so many real problems. Above all else, however, it is unjust. Even if this was not a country of abysmal electricity supply where university graduates are barely literate and people die of easily-treatable causes and Boko Haram commits casual mass murders, this law would still be unjust. We cannot be a just society unless we are able to accommodate benign difference, accept benign difference, live and let live. We may not understand homosexuality, we may find it personally abhorrent but our response cannot be to criminalize it.

A crime is a crime for a reason. A crime has victims. A crime harms society. On what basis is homosexuality a crime? Adults do no harm to society in how they love and whom they love. This is a law that will not prevent crime, but will, instead, lead to crimes of violence: there are already, in different parts of Nigeria, attacks on people ‘suspected’ of being gay. Ours is a society where men are openly affectionate with one another. Men hold hands. Men hug each other. Shall we now arrest friends who share a hotel room, or who walk side by side? How do we determine the clunky expressions in the law – ‘mutually beneficial,’ ‘directly or indirectly?’

Many Nigerians support the law because they believe the Bible condemns homosexuality. The Bible can be a basis for how we choose to live our personal lives, but it cannot be a basis for the laws we pass, not only because the holy books of different religions do not have equal significance for all Nigerians but also because the holy books are read differently by different people. The Bible, for example, also condemns fornication and adultery and divorce, but they are not crimes.

For supporters of the law, there seems to be something about homosexuality that sets it apart. A sense that it is not ‘normal.’ If we are part of a majority group, we tend to think others in minority groups are abnormal, not because they have done anything wrong, but because we have defined normal to be what we are and since they are not like us, then they are abnormal. Supporters of the law want a certain semblance of human homogeneity. But we cannot legislate into existence a world that does not exist: the truth of our human condition is that we are a diverse, multi-faceted species. The measure of our humanity lies, in part, in how we think of those different from us. We cannot – should not – have empathy only for people who are like us.

Some supporters of the law have asked – what is next, a marriage between a man and a dog?’ Or ‘have you seen animals being gay?’ (Actually, studies show that there is homosexual behavior in many species of animals.) But, quite simply, people are not dogs, and to accept the premise – that a homosexual is comparable to an animal – is inhumane. We cannot reduce the humanity of our fellow men and women because of how and who they love. Some animals eat their own kind, others desert their young. Shall we follow those examples, too?

Other supporters suggest that gay men sexually abuse little boys. But pedophilia and homosexuality are two very different things. There are men who abuse little girls, and women who abuse little boys, and we do not presume that they do it because they are heterosexuals. Child molestation is an ugly crime that is committed by both straight and gay adults (this is why it is a crime: children, by virtue of being non-adults, require protection and are unable to give sexual consent).

There has also been some nationalist posturing among supporters of the law. Homosexuality is ‘unafrican,’ they say, and we will not become like the west. The west is not exactly a homosexual haven; acts of discrimination against homosexuals are not uncommon in the US and Europe. But it is the idea of ‘unafricanness’ that is truly insidious. Sochukwuma was born of Igbo parents and had Igbo grandparents and Igbo great-grandparents. He was born a person who would romantically love other men. Many Nigerians know somebody like him. The boy who behaved like a girl. The girl who behaved like a boy. The effeminate man. The unusual woman. These were people we knew, people like us, born and raised on African soil. How then are they ‘unafrican?’

If anything, it is the passage of the law itself that is ‘unafrican.’ It goes against the values of tolerance and ‘live and let live’ that are part of many African cultures. (In 1970s Igboland, Area Scatter was a popular musician, a man who dressed like a woman, wore makeup, plaited his hair. We don’t know if he was gay – I think he was – but if he performed today, he could conceivably be sentenced to fourteen years in prison. For being who he is.) And it is informed not by a home-grown debate but by a cynically borrowed one: we turned on CNN and heard western countries debating ‘same sex marriage’ and we decided that we, too, would pass a law banning same sex marriage. Where, in Nigeria, whose constitution defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, has any homosexual asked for same-sex marriage?

Read the whole post over at The Scoop.

Here’s a clip of Area Scatter, the performer Adichie refers to (h/t @kritzmoritz):


Seun Kuti also weighed in not long ago (don’t be put off by the odd headline).

What these critical interventions by Adichie and Kuti in the wake of Wainaina’s courageous stand suggest is that a certain obduracy is setting in against the nonsensical homophobic demand for the expulsion of LGBT people and those who refuse to persecute them. As Binyavanga Wainaina told the Guardian last week:

It’s like my father said, ‘When trouble comes you don’t put your worldly goods on a bicycle.’ This is my place. I am 43, I have bad knees, you know, diabetes. I could easily take another teaching gig in New York, hang out in Brooklyn, have some nice sex, write a funky book. But you know, that’s gone. I want to put a stake in the ground. My mum and dad are not here. It’s kind of my turn.

A comment posted on the article that mirrors something I said earlier in the thread:

jjwintrs on February 20, 2014 at 9:37 am said:
Reply ↓

The imported Bible of the right-wing, western evangelicals has taken on a specific hell-fire and brimstone quality in Africa…this is the latest ‘gift’ it is delivering. That and the missionary influence lobbying corrupt governments of ‘princes’ such as Gyimah.

I don't want to post Cliff notes, because it would cheapen the overall message, but I'll try to highlight some parts I think worth emphasizing.

Some posters who have been heavy in this thread and may find this a worth while read (or not.)  I know the thread is dead but thought the article worth sharing, but not necessarily worth starting a new thread over:

@eNPHAN @LIONBLOOD @lobotomybeats @Wr @sneakaprince   @HTG Designs @PLVN @Methodical Management @enlightenedespot  

 

[lobotomybeats]

Thanks for that nako xl

 

[timcity2000]

note to self: don't travel to nigeria, russia, kansas, arizona or uganda

Uganda's President Museveni signs controversial anti-gay bill into law

 

[smangalang]

Naija for the WIN!

 

[Nouss]

note to self: don't travel to nigeria, russia, kansas, arizona or uganda

Uganda's President Museveni signs controversial anti-gay bill into law

Yea I was just watching the news and this came up. Dude literally told his interviewer that he found homosexuality disgusting and that "offenders" deserved to be prosecuted for their unnatural actions.

It's unfortunate that people like this are running entire countries. SMH.
Sup, Putin.

 

[rillo561]

Sick and sad.

Here's a shocker.


Uganda Among World's Top Gay Porn Consumers

http://www.advocate.com/politics/2014/01/16/uganda-among-worlds-top-gay-porn-consumers