A good thing from last May – Stephen Fry chatting with Craig Ferguson about homophobia. In particular, he reports meeting with the Ugandan Minister for Ethics and Integrity. Progressive Secular Humanist has a transcript.
I actually got a Ugandan Minister to say on camera- he’s the Minister for Ethics and Integrity, it’s the only such ministry in the world. I said to him… there’s so much more to worry about in your country than the odd gay person going to bed with the other gay person. For example, you have almost an epidemic of child rape in this country, which is just frightening.
And he said “Ah, but it is the right kind of child rape.”
[Ferguson reacts.]
I said “That was on camera. Do you know that was on camera?”
He said “Yes.”
I said “Can you just explain what you meant?”
“Well, it is men raping girls. Which is natural.”
Fry’s two-part TV show Out There was superb in exposing global homophobia without any liberal posturing about ‘different cultural values’. I hope it has been shown outside the UK.
Ah, I see it’s on YouTube. Hooray.
Uganda’s bigoted, virulent, hateful Anti-Homosexuality Bill is now law: we should take care to NEVER forget the role of US Evangelical Christian groups in that deplorable business.
I still remember Rachel Maddow’s interview with David Bahati – the hate was spine-chilling.
I just happened to catch the second part the other day on one of the rare occasions where I was near a TV.
There was an episode of “House” with Hugh Laurie where it comes out that a father is having sex with his thirteen-year-old daughter. She’s a patient, and they find out near the end of the episode that she is actually biologically a boy (I don’t remember the specifics, sorry). When Dr. House tells the father, the father looks horrified. House then says something like “Oh, NOW it’s gross.”
Encouraging, though, that that kind of conversation can still be broadcast in the US.
The minister doesn’t seem very ethical if he’s condoning child rape.
Funny they mention the “need for ceremony” at the beginning – it appears that this mumbo-jambo, the incentive waving and pomp and so on, originally came from an urge of the early church to compete with roman theater and circus games. Allegedly it happened quite often that a church would empty in front of the preacher when a performance started somewhere. So they tried to make their own kind of spectacle to hold the masses.
@ 7 Al Dente
It’s probably one of those Orwellian doublethink things.
Ministry of Peace (War)
Ministry of Truth (Propaganda)
Ministry of Ethics and Integrity (Immorality and Hypocrisy)
Fucking consent*, how does it work?
* Pun not intended, but I suppose we are literally talking about fucking consent.
Arrrrgh. *headdesk*
Androgen insensitivity syndrome, so she’s XY, but the Y doesn’t do anything, except that she has testicular cancer.
The rapist consents to the irresitable allure of the
victimslut.@David Marjanović
Sorry, I think I saw that episode in 2008 or something. Not a biologist either. :/
The one thing I did take issue with in “out There” was that Fry did seem remarkably willing to capitulate on whether anal sex is bad – eager to say he doesn’t do it, and almost seem to join in the disapproval of it. Seemed like an odd point to concede to bigots.
H2s,
As I remember it, Fry didn’t quite say that. The person he was talking to was fixated on the idea that homosexuality was entirely about anal sex and that anal sex was bad. I think Fry was trying to say that homoexual relationships are about relationships, not about anal sex.
Anyone capable of that sort of statement could be capable of another (e.g. “the right kind of genocide”).
latsot (#15) –
Or that male/male intimacy doesn’t have to include anal sex. The bigots have a neverending fascination and fixation on anal sex, as if that’s all gay relationships amounted to.
@left0ver1under:
Yes. I think Fry might have come across as disapproving of anal sex because he was clearly frustrated with the very attitude you describe and with this person’s use of it in particular. Part of what he was saying was (and I paraphrase) “Oh, it’s anal sex that makes homosexuality bad, is it? Well I’ve never had anal sex, so my kind of homosexuality is OK then, is it?” In other words, he was pointing out the hypocrisy and foolishness of the argument. Needless to say, it seemed to be lost on the person he was talking to.
At least, that’s the way I remember it.
@1. Shatterface : ” I hope it [Fry’s ‘Out There’ doco – ed] has been shown outside the UK.”
It was broadcast on Aussie Tv fairly recently few weeks to month ago memory serving. On either ABC or SBS forget which now.
It’s the sex that god can’t see!
://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ZF_R_j0OY