Resistance Is Futile

Thinking about all the gay-hating homophobic and transphobic groups infesting our fair country today, and masquerading as religious or even educational or even civil institutions - I counted the big boys. 

 

Right at the top of the list of lunatics, there's the "Christian Action Network" (CAN), a vocal umbrella body which appears to operate like a sort of sanctuary for the crazies - a haven for smaller independently created activist bodies set up around a seemingly shared or common (I mean, really common) ideology of Christo-fascism. Together, they share the limelight from whatever local press will be desperate enough to give them attention, resources, and of course, rotate their talking heads to address rallies, meets and whatever these people get up to in their spare time.

 

After occasionally stirring up all sorts of drama over "blasphemy" in student magazines, publishing perverse false "expose's" on homosexuality, and whipping the minority of religious conservatives in South Africa into a froth about "moral" issues like abortion and the "Sexpo" in Cape Town, this body - which I would eagerly describe as a nest of domestic terrorists, has fallen remarkably quiescent of late. 

 

In the meantime, other, newer associated groups which haven't been around the political stage quite long enough to lose their veneer of public respectability yet, have emerged to take their shared repugnant anti human rights agenda into the halls of South Africa's government.

The Minister, The Barrister & The Thought Police

Recently the Deputy Minister of Home Affairs, Mr Gigaba, announced his intention to push legislation for censorship of the internet and also the mobile phone network, supposedly to block people from accessing pornography. 

 

I believe that aside from just affecting negatively the civil freedoms instilled in the Bill of Rights for all South Africans, this will have dire consequences for freedom of expression, and the right to access information - and the potential threat that this legislation will be made to serve a religious fundamentalist portion of South African society that has long sought to police the morality of the rest of us.

Doublethink

I recently learned of the South African government’s pandering to religious fundamentalist groups, and began warning of this threat to civil rights and freedoms as protected by the Constitution. Just this week, I saw a news article announcing further confirmation of this collusion between the Deputy Minister of Home Affairs in particular, and the religious right wing - in the form of the "Justice Alliance of South Africa" (JASA).

It reminds me of the old National-Party government and the Apartheid regime, for people to work to introduce censorship - particularly censorship based on the shaky ground of religious objection - into a modern constitutional secular democracy. In fact, to me it bears the same stink of the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and the old Soviet Union - and in places like Zimbabwe, where it is illegal to even criticize the president.

The Justice Alliance of SA is a small fringe group of religious fundamentalists masquerading as a bona fide legal interest group - but with clear ulterior motives to further a conservative and theocratic agenda which will deprive the broader public of freedoms and liberties they now take for granted.

The Trouble With Censorship Is XX XXXX XXXXXXX

The Ministry of Home Affairs has announced plans to ban pornography on the internet. 

 

Also mentioned prominently in the article is their partner in this affair - a shadowy organization calling itself "The Justice Alliance of South Africa", which as it turns out, is a pitifully small right-wing Christian fundamentalist group which pretends to have the legal best interests of the South African public at heart, and which masquerades as a "friend to the court" whenever any legal issue related to matters of interest to the Christian hegemony appears before the bench.

This group has tried very hard to disguise the scent of Christian extremism emanating from within, with a thin veneer of legal respectability, and a spritz of eau de justice, but try as it might, the odors of religious extremism and conservative ulterior motives still linger.