Christopher Pearson, Uganda, hysteria, and the homosexual agenda

A few days ago, Adrian Phoon published an entirely reasonable column about The role of US evangelists in Uganda's 'kill the gays' bill.

In it, he makes various points that culminate in this par:

It used to be easy to identify homophobia. But now even homophobes fail to recognise their prejudice. Bigotry is reassuringly cosseted by an evangelising rhetoric of love, and reinforced by a medicalising language that veils the savagery of its aims.

Naturally that sort of talk is a red rag to the mindless medievalism that constitutes in large part the thinking of Christopher Pearson, as he vents in Don't blame preachers for anti-gay bill.

Well if we don't blame the preachers for trotting off to Uganda to spread idle rumors about the awfulness of gay folk and their need for redemption and/or conversion, who do we blame?

Perhaps The New York Times for being hysterical?

Phoon had leapt on to some rather hysterical reporting in The New York Times about three US evangelicals who had spoken last year at a conference in Uganda described by one of the organisers as focusing on "the gay agenda; that whole hidden and dark agenda".

What's that? A gay agenda? Isn't that kind of sinister talk, a kind of conspiracy theory that gay people want to molest your children and take over the world?

Not if you're Christopher Pearson, who can spot an agenda from a mile off, and in particular the "gay agenda":

That said, anyone concerned to defend embattled family values has good reasons for taking an interest in "the gay agenda", even though it's important to understand there are multiple strands to it and some of them are harmless .

Well in the usual way of The Australian, there are no links to the key NYT stories, but if we're starting from tores, why not have a read of them for yourself, and see how hysterical they sound.

Here's Americans' Role Seen in Uganda Anti-Gay Push:

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Pearson didn't manage to quote that bit.

Or what about the predicament of being gay in Uganda? How about Gay in Uganda, and Feeling Hunted.

Anti-gay sentiments are one thing, and hardly unique to Uganda. But what seems different here is the level of official, government-sponsored anti-gay hate speech.

“I detest gays in my heart,” said Kassiano E. Wadri, a member of Parliament and the chief whip of the opposition. “When I see a gay, I think that person needs psychotherapy. You need to break him.”

Or how about this, published yesterday in the NYT under the header Ugandan Pastor Plans "Million-Man" Anti-Gay March?

A Ugandan preacher with close ties to U.S. evangelicals and President Yoweri Museveni's family said on Friday he planned to organise a "million-man" march in February to support a proposed anti-gay law in parliament...

..."We want to show how many people support the bill," Pastor Martin Ssempa told journalists in the Ugandan capital.

"We want to give a postcard that (Museveni) can send to his friend (U.S. President) Barack Obama," Ssempa said in front of posters saying "Africans Unite Against Sodomy" and "Barack Obama Back Off." He said the march was planned for February 17.

Ssempa, one of Uganda's most prominent anti-gay campaigners, criticised Western nations as "failed states" for supporting gay rights.

Back to Pearson, who happens to live in a failed state, and his defence of three US preachers initially caught up in the controversy, and who have subsequently backed off at a fast rate of knots:

Throughout his article Phoon assumed malevolence on the part of the speakers, although he noted in passing that the three have emphatically distanced themselves from the death penalty proposal, since dropped, and insisted that their message was one of love, not murder.

However, Phoon doesn't seem to understand how it may be possible to follow the New Testament maxim to hate the sin and love the sinner.

Is it too vexatious to note that plenty of Ugandans don't seem to understand either, and that by writing this kind of gherkinish drivel in the wake of the Ugandan situation for gays, Pearson is sounding like a conservative Catholic tosser?

Because it's not just Uganda:

Many Africans view homosexuality as an immoral Western import, and the continent is full of harsh homophobic laws. In northern Nigeria, gay men can face death by stoning. Beyond Africa, a handful of Muslim countries, like Iran and Yemen, also have the death penalty for homosexuals. But many Ugandans said they thought that was going too far. A few even spoke out in support of gay people.

“I can defend them,” said Haj Medih, a Muslim taxi driver with many homosexual customers. “But I fear the what? The police, the government. They can arrest you and put you in the safe house, and for me, I don’t have any lawyer who can help me.”

The link in that NYT piece takes you to a BBC piece from August 2007, headed Gay Nigerians face Sharia death:

Eighteen men have been remanded in prison following their arrest for alleged sodomy in northern Nigeria, the state-owned news agency, Nan, reports.

The men were arrested in a hotel in north-eastern Bauchi State, which is governed by the Islamic Sharia law.

The Sharia punishment for sodomy is death by stoning.

The men, reportedly wearing women's clothes, are said to have gone to Bauchi town from neighbouring states to celebrate a "gay wedding".

Enough already. As usual, it's one of the profounder ironies of life that fundie Christians and fundie Muslims and fundie conservatives have much in common, and a tendency to gay bashing is one of them.

But back to Pearson, who sees the real problem as being relativism:

Gay Liberation used to rely on a rhetorical strategy of routinely inverting the rest of the world's taken-for-granted assumptions. It messed with people's heads big time, as the Americans used to say, reconfiguring social norms.

The basic premise was that if everything is relative, almost anything goes and all morality can be relativised and ultimately explained away as a product of historical and sociological circumstances.

It's not surprising that Pope Benedict should have identified the resulting chaos in the West, where moral absolutes have been all but banished, as "the dictatorship of relativism".

You see? Homophobia is all the fault of gay liberation and its messing with people's heads and the dictatorship of relativism. How peculiarly papist of Pearson.

Phoon's rhetorical device is to summon into being an international anti-gay movement. Previous to this novel construct there had just been First, Second and Third World societies under varying degrees of stress because of AIDS and more or less firmly attached to various regional versions of traditional family values. In defence of those values were evangelists and local representatives of the overwhelming majority of Christian churches, virtually all of Islam and large swaths of the other great world religions.

You see? The Christians and the Islamics and large swathes of the other great world religions are just defending traditional family values, no matter how they might clash and contrast in various bits of the world, and homosexuals were just collateral damage. And homosexuality just a deviant monstrous vice utterly against god's law.

But don't get paranoid. All these religionistas might hate you but they're not out to get you, and any paranoia you feel - as the result of yet another gay bashing or an incitement to gay murder or the desire to punish homosexuality with a good stoning to death or other form of execution - is really just a self-aggrandising ploy for sympathy:

The notion that a common cause animating them is a hatred of homosexuals and the desire to eradicate homosexuality is so silly that it enables us to see the global anti-gay movement for the strategic device that it is, at once self-aggrandising and a ploy for sympathy.

And then comes the real laugh. Because Pearson gets on to all the evils of the world gay agenda, and while some of them are harmless, some of them would rouse any decent Ugandan to a state of unseemly panic.

But first let's wave away the results of gay activism, against the incessant stand of the Catholic church and the preachings of the Pellist heretics and such like regressives:

For example, few Christians or social conservatives these days would have a problem with the decriminalisation agenda of the reformers of the 1970s and 80s. The same is probably true of measures on superannuation, other entitlements and some forms of partnership recognition to achieve equality before the law.

Oh yes, gays are almost people, and entitled to some limited rights, but before you get too generous, remember this:

Beyond the live and let live school of thought, there are a number of quite consciously subversive agendas.

That's right, there's no agenda amongst the fundie Christians and the Muslims, but there's a deeply subversive gay agenda:

One is determined to assert the moral equivalence of marriage and gay relationships and the moral entitlement of gay couples to adopt children as of right or to have access to in-vitro fertilisation. Another asserts that everyone is basically bisexual and that converting straight people is a liberating act. Adhering to that view doesn't prevent some from seeing psychological treatment to unleash the nascent heterosexual in unhappy homosexuals as a kind of violation.

Stone them!

Then there's an element of the ghetto subculture that goes out of its way to display disdain for breeders, some of them out of a general hatred of heterosexuals, some on equally misguided ecological grounds.

Hang them!

Another insane gay agenda drives some AIDS bureaucrats to insist on issuing condoms as a non-judgmental policy even when it has proved to be catastrophically ineffective.

Electrocute them for their insane opposition to the noble papists and their hair splitting dedication to medieval theology which results in opposition to birth control and the humble condom. Don't they realise the condom is the tool of Satan?

Last, there are the gays who for ideological reasons trivialise offences against adolescents and minors, even if they don't personally engage in them.

Ah yes, let's not forget to confuse pedophilia and homosexuality, in much the same way as we should never confuse Catholic priests with pedophilia.

Phoon had nothing sensible to offer about the subversive elements of that agenda, as though they didn't exist, were morally neutral or were nobody's business unless you were part of "the everlasting secret family".

Perhaps because Phoon isn't a paranoid conservative Catholic who blathers on about everlasting secret families as if in the grip of Frank Moorehouse, or wide ranging gay agendas that somehow have been organised by a rough equivalent to The Simpsons' Stonecutters secret society.

Or perhaps it's because Phoon doesn't indulge in weird ideological and theological hair splitting of the most arcane and meaningless kind:

But his article particularly deplored psychological interventions. "Central to the modern anti-gay movement is the proliferation of so-called `ex-gay therapies'. These encourage individuals to `convert' from their homosexual behaviour, implying that being and acting gay somehow involves a choice."

In response, I think it's necessary first to distinguish between being homosexual -- which may be a passing, intermittent or permanent inclination -- and being gay, which is an ideological position. The former may involve an element of choice while the latter is entirely voluntary.

But if you think that's weird dearie, then how about this bit of darling thinking:

As to "acting gay" -- which could mean camp behaviour but in this context is probably intended to signify sexual activity -- it's absurd to pretend that most people are so much enthralled by lust as to have no choice about how they behave.

Well flutter my eyebrows and talk to me about choice:

In Phoon's view, therapists wilfully misrepresent matters. "The assumption is that being homosexual makes you miserable", where he instead blames homophobia. "Abundant proof exists that, in the 21st century, openly gay people can live full and happy lives." That sentence reminds me of the soap-powder ad that begins: "University-controlled tests have shown . . ."

Which reminds me of the university controlled tests that showed cigarette smoking was linked to cancer. Or the columnist who used a snide joke about university-controlled tests to elude the basic notion that openly gay people can now live full and happy lives, and might even end up on the High Court of Australia, and contribute a damn sight more to the intellectual life and moral compass of Australia than the incoherent scribbling of said columnist.

Suffice it to say in reply that most of my homosexual friends agree with me that the hardest part is not putting up with homophobia, grim though that often used to be, but not having a stable family life with a lifelong partner, children and grandchildren.

Funnily enough my homosexual friends thought that the hardest part, apart from putting up with homophobia, was the ongoing reluctance of Australia to recognise their relationship, thanks to the urgings of the likes of the Pellist and Jensenist heresies. So they went off to Holland to get hitched.

Yep, never mind ongoing discrimination or prejudice, or the reluctance to allow gay people to have a stable family life with a lifelong partner, joined in marriage. And never mind the previous note about how wrong it its for gays to assume the right to adopt children or have access to in-vitro fertilisation. Because after all you wouldn't want gays around children, would you.

For Phoon, "`Curing' gay people and incarcerating or executing them both treat homosexuality as a crime requiring surveillance." This is another clumsy attempt at a moral equivalence argument. It collapses when you recall that today's therapy needn't (and mostly doesn't) make any moral assumptions except that helping people who say they want to change is legitimate. The prison hospital imagery from the era of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, when frontal lobotomies were commonplace, prepares us for one last draft of 70s-style rhetoric: "Events in Uganda expose the fraud of ex-gay therapy. Anti-gay advocates may not all espouse murder, but the ramifications of their words are lethal. Our outrage at Uganda should extend to the entire anti-gay movement."

Well time prevents me from going into all the horror stories surrounding the "curing" of gay people. There's plenty out there filling the tubes full to overflowing (start with Ex-gay here). May Priapus help you if you're vulnerable and desperate to fit in and ever get tangled up with these latter day Nurse Ratcheds.

Yep, call me seventies, call me rhetorical, but I'm with Phoon. Ain't it grand that Pearson left him with the last, final and correct word. Something sub-conscious going on there?

But my outrage at Uganda and other African countries and fundie Christians and fundie Muslims now not only extends to the entire anti-gay movement, it also extends to Christopher Pearson.

My personal hope for him? He heads off to Uganda or perhaps northern Nigeria, and explains how his agenda accords with the noble work currently being undertaken there to keep the world safe and free of homosexuality ... but whatever he does, perhaps it would be wise to keep quiet about his past life, and instead let them read No regrets about act of faith despite church's woeful state.

(Below: and now for a few cartoons).