I see – so you’re saying you’re just extraordinarily inept when it comes to written communication?

“In the meantime, I think you come off sounding like you’ve spent several years smoking the best hydroponic weed you could find.”

Ah, a personal attack. Not a very good one, but still, points for effort.

“Isaac, you refuse to acknowledge that, at some point, individuals are responsible for their output, and individuals are responsible for their impact on others. Look into that, please.”

So what you’re saying is that you completely ignored everything I said in my last post? I really don’t have the time or energy to repeat myself, so how about you go back and read what I said again? If you do you’ll see that I said repeatedly that there are reasons why Africa is in the state it’s in, but there is no excuse for persecution of individuals because of their sexuality.

Seriously, take a deep breath and then try reading what other people have said before launching into an attack. You’re ranting about excuses no one is making, accusing people of refusing to acknowledge things they’ve clearly acknowledged, accusing people of picking a fight while picking apart their words just so you can initiate an argument, and generally making a tit of yourself.

James…what makes you think our perspectives are so divergent? I’m half-tempted to think you’d rather have some fight on here than maybe talk something out. You can access my e-mail. I’m asking you to do it, not just to stir shit, but to talk. You take me up on it, and I act like an ass, then it’s on me. But you’ve already gone bully pulpit on me, which tells me that you’re less interested in talk than in posturing. If you have insight, then share it with me. I’m man enough that I can talk about ideas and beliefs. Talk to me instead of trying to talk down to me. And Happy New Year.

The other evening, I watched a report on Yemen, and part of the report focused on how their tribal factions are more powerful than the centralized federal government (sound familiar?!). Then, we watched the movie “The Internationalist,” which was about a world-wide bank making money off of conflicts across the globe. I thought, “Some people are still fighting for their tribes, while others are trying to subordinate nations to the power of International corporations.” It makes for some very, VERY ugly interactions.

I doubt there would be many who would see the past as an excuse. You do have to consider the past to understand how things got to this point – the influence of colonialism and the introduction of Western religion, the impact of Christian and Catholic charities on the development of the Third World and the political extremism that has developed in many African nations have all played a role. Western nations have meddled in African affairs and that meddling can easily be argued as being directly responsible for the current situation, but these are reasons, not excuses.

In case you don’t understand the difference, a reason is offered to understand how something came to be, while an excuse is offered to mitigate or forgive it. Nothing can mitigate or forgive the decision to implement laws criminalizing homosexuality. Plenty can be said to understand how these nations might have been brought to a point where they considered such laws reasonable and justified.

Unfortunately, there is a temptation for many to simply dismiss the people of Africa as “savages with bones through their noses”, as has been said on this site over the past month. People who adopt that viewpoint need to understand that it is not the “savage” that is criminalizing homosexuality, but rather it was born of the attempt by Western nations and organizations to “civilize the savages”.

Colonialism created political and social instability. The British tactic, most notably in India but also applied in many of the nations they colonized in Africa, was to manufacture disagreements between different groups so that they would not rise up together against their colonial masters. This can be argued to have been directly linked to the modern extremist political climate as well as current instability in African society.

Once the colonies were abandoned to fend for themselves, many faced extreme poverty, starvation and disease. Did their Western “masters” return to help? No. Instead a number of charitable organizations, most religiously motivated, stepped in to provide aid, build homes, schools and hospitals, in the process indoctrinating the people they were there to help with religious ideologies.

Is this an excuse? In my mind we can no more consider it an excuse than we can consider religious influence an excuse for the denial of equal rights in the US. It is a reason. It is an explanation. It is not mitigation or a reason to forgive. The persecution of individuals because of their sexuality is unforgivable, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason for it. It’s not a good reason, it’s not a reason you or I can accept, but it’s a reason nonetheless.

But while we live in a nation that still persecutes people because of their sexuality, even if it is to a lesser degree than in Africa, we cannot preach or condemn on behalf of our nation. It is hypocritical of our politicians to stand up and criticize these policies in Africa while they endorse lesser discriminatory policies in their own backyard.

One nation executes gays. One nation imprisons them. Another denies them equal rights and protections under the law. It’s all degrees of discrimination. We can stand up and say that one is worse than the other, but in the end we’re all holding bags of sh*t arguing over which smells worse.

Forget about labels like “gay” and “lesbian” – people are being persecuted both at home and abroad. Nobody is asking you to fight for equality abroad when there are battles to be waged at home, but compassion and appropriate condemnation should not be too much to ask.

Keep riding that horse.

James

James, I don’t suggest that the colonial influence was neutral or generally positive. I never did and I never will. I take issue with the colonial excuse because it provides so very much cover to so very many wrongdoing people, from Hitler to Pol Pot to David Duke to Sarah Palin, and with way too many stops on the way. If you look back to the Rwanda discussion, you will note that I made reference to the colonial actions which turned Tutsi and Hutu into far more concrete identities, lacking the fluidity which is identified in scholarship well into the 20th century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwanda#Colonial_era At that time, I cited the French as the forces of change; it was Belgians, who entered from the west (Congo, now DR Congo). I won’t post the section, because it’s too long to post here, but my acknowledgement of colonial roots of Rwandan genocide is already there in a previous thread. But was that colonial legacy so rigid and absolute that Rwandans themselves had no memory of a less discriminatory past? Obviously not, if evolution of the colonial standard extended into the 1930′s.

My point on colonialism is simple: if you point to bad acts in the past, whether inspired by outsiders or entirely homegrown, and you use those past bad acts as a kind of inevitable excuse for not moving past that bad act, then you–those in the current generations–have chosen doing wrong over what you know to be alternative paths. A few examples. I mentioned South Africa, which is far more diverse than some (looking for examples of white oppression of blacks) seem to feel comfortable acknowledging. Let me stop in South Africa for a moment, just to highlight my point. I seem to have drawn some attention for mentioning it. Secrity tried to take me to task for an aspect of South African colonial history that I didn’t touch on. If you’re going to cite me, show the quote, and don’t use your free-asociation as a reason to correct me. I made no mention of British colonial involvement in South Africa; in any event, the point secrity alluded to–British colonial involvement being predicated on discovery of diamonds–Peter Formaini made partial correction on that. Let me expand, since it seems that I’m being painted as a justifier of colonialism by Mr Withers. The Cape Colony was intended by the Dutch East India Company to be a refreshment station, on the way around the Cape of Good Hope to the East Indies. The location was already marked by Vasco da Gama (sailing for the Portuguese crown) in 1497 or so. The colony grew on its own, without any overt direction, and it should be mentioned that it expanded across the southwestern tip of Africa because the land was so very sparsely settled. The Dutch East India company established its post in the 1650s. The British took the Cape Colony around 1800. The British were almost as brutal to the Dutch descendants in the Boer Wars, as they were to local blacks. Gold wasn’t found until the mid-1880s, in the Witswatersrand, but the diamond rush did start in the 1860s, in Kimberley. British interest predated discovery of either mineral. Recall that a significant number of South Africans are descended from Indian and Malay workers, along with a smaller number of Chinese. There was major admixture of these groups with Zulu, Xhosa and the various whites. Under apartheid, whites were on top, followed by Indians, Coloureds, and blacks. People may remember the old ways, but they’re not stuck in them. They’re not stuck in the stupid and pointless racism of the past, certainly not when you look at the scale of what they experienced for decades.

Never have I said that any Africans are just too backwards to be on par with rich countries. I wouldn’t expend so much energy on this subject if I wasn’t so friggin’ tired of seeing the past used as an excuse. If past wrongdoings are justification to continue, then there can be no reconciliation, no treaties, no progress. It was people from Uganda who conceived its independence, and it was that way across sub-Saharan Africa. These are people who argued legal points with their colonists AND THEY WON.

In American law at least, there is a point where we are responsible for our actions. You can live in the worst projects, you can go to godawful schools, your parents can be strung out on drugs and do nothing for you, but even with that, you can still be held accountable for your actions. You can’t kill a woman in your neighborhood bodega and then blame your CHOICE on racism, or your bad childhood. If you as an individual are so scarred by events that you aren’t qualified to make your own decisions, then meeting that standard in the US means that you will have a guardian appointed for you. Or you may be institutionalized. There’s that whole Rudyard Kipling thing about the “White Man’s Burden.” It’s a viciously racist notion that the locals can’t do for themselves, so they need the white man to come in and tell them how to behave. Now, in Malawi, in Kenya, in Uganda, in Rwanda, in Nigeria–now we have Africans who pass vicious antigay laws, and they use the pretext that “gay” is an contaminant of the colonial years. Not one of these countries has spent five years as a true democracy. The worst, most racist remnant of the colonial era, South Africa, is busy with the future. It isn’t all black. It is busy building itself up. South Africa doesn’t use its extraordinary past as justification–South Africa has chosen to write laws that specifically DO NOT discriminate. South Africa isn’t perfect, but given the blood and the sacrifice that so many millions of people gave so that future generations would have better, I get angry as hell when I see others take an easier, more bigoted, and ultimately more circumscribing path.

James Withers posed the question. I will quote him quoting me:

“I propose that any discussion of why African countries are so reflexively anti-gay has to refrain from the stock excuse of colonialism.”

You love that straw horse dont ya? Where is that argument in this article and who has made that case on the site (without being mocked for it!).

Nice try though! A for effort.

James, I don’t get an A for effort, I get it for achievement. Where is the on-point claim IN THIS ARTICLE? That’s sophistry, because James, you know too well that the issue of East African countries passing anti-gay laws was a point of conflict in the earlier thread about the bill up for debate in Uganda. This article is a direct successor to the subject material of that one, because the core issue (homophobic laws in East African countries) is just as central to this story as it was to the story about Ugandan legislation.

I’m angry because I see wrong happening in other countries, and people in my country (and other rich countries) are ready to give cover to the present bad act by arguing that it’s because of colonialism. I’m saying that I credit people across Africa with more intelligence than that, simply because they’re people. If I credit them with the same intelligence that the previous two generations used to argue successfully for independence, then I’m crediting with them with an intellectual equality. At the time that Argentina embraced first Juan Peron, and then Evita, Argentina had a far higher standing in its economic performance relative to the rest of the world. I have previously commented that, despicable as Pinochet was in Chile, Pinochet’s regime shielded Chile from the economic chaos which grabbed South America from the 1960′s to the 2000′s. The “gift” of stability and prosperity does not, and I never claimed it did, justify an attempted destruction of a civil society. The Perons didn’t stay in power, Argentina has been to hell and back, but still the majority of Argentines expect a functional state, a functional civil society. If Argentina and Chile, and for that matter Spain and Portugal and Greece and Turkey, can all claw their way back from their own dark days, then I don’t think it’s asking something impossible that Africans look to their own strengths to do the same. I don’t question their intellectual capacity to do so, and if their bad acts are the consequence of interference by American evangelists, I have no problem with any of these countries trying such Americans for treason or sedition.