Puppet Electorate

Something is still really badly wrong with our democracy in South Africa. 

 

The poorest of the poor are still frequently being intimidated into voting for particular parties - being threatened with their homes being burned to the ground, or that they or their families will be killed if they do not vote for the ANC - little realizing or actually believing - that their ballots are secret.

 

Though there is probably no way of knowing if those issuing these low-key threats are in any way directly tied to the ANC itself, or whether this is just a form of terrifying peer-pressure from fanatical supporters, regardless, many ordinary South Africans capitulate to these threats - and this makes the outcome of recent general elections pretty much a foregone conclusion.

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. 

Community Building

Recently I wrote about cohesion in our pink community, and over the weekend I was again faced with the exact opposite. Some trans-women seem to feel that I have been remiss in campaigning for transgender rights and focusing only on gay rights. They feel, as I do - that there are some rather prominent advocacy groups, some of them advertising that they stand for all GLBTI rights, some not - and that these groups are abandoning trans people.

A prime examples of this is the ENDA (Employee Non Discrimination Act) in the USA, which has failed to pass in the past - and from which transgender rights were conveniently removed by some of our gay allies in order to see that the act had a "better chance" of passing. Hmm. I have to point out that (duh) this is not the act of an ally. The dust around this issue still has not settled, and I wait with bated breath to see how it goes down.

Making The Difference

I want to focus today on Africa, and African affairs. Of late, African countries all around South Africa have been flaunting an increase in their peculiar brand of homophobia, laced with ignorance - often deliberately willful ignorance - on matters of medicine, science, fact - and tasting remarkably of religious fundamentalism. 

 

Relating to this issue, an item came across my inbox today, which was forwarded to me by a friend. It was a message from an ACDP support group on Facebook, and it went as follows:

"Jo-Ann Downs May 27, 2010 at 2:28pm Subject: DRC visit

I am off to Lubumbashi in DRC tomorrow to teach about 1000 Church leaders about getting involved in improving the country. Need lots of prayer. There are so many terrible things happening to women and children I hope to really make a difference."

This of course, is where the ACDP completely crosses the line between religion and politics, and works to blur the line separating church and state as well - which it already does, simply by existing as a registered political party.

It's A Small World, After All

When Uganda recently tabled its Bill which would effectively have instituted the death penalty for homosexuality and a pink genocide, many countries applied great pressure to Uganda to drop the Bill. So far this Bill has been put on hold, yet in Uganda gay people still face an existing law which prescribes a 14-year prison term simply for being gay - just as in Malawi and several other former colonial African countries.

Malawi has just this week rewarded a gay couple with the maximum prison term for loving each other - 14 years of hard labor, a potential - and even likely death sentence in such a prison. The world has begun to apply pressure on Malawi too because of this outrageous human rights abuse, but the question remains - how much pressure will they apply, and what will happen if Malawi doesn't budge?

Hook, Line And Stinker

In a new press release in which the Family Research Council (of Focus on the Family and James Dobson infamy) dragged an eight year old "study" out of mothballs and served it up with today's sauce, they once again misrepresented scientific data to undermine human rights and promote their own fascist agenda.

"WASHINGTON, D.C. - Family Research Council released a new analytic report today showing that women who did not grow up with their biological mother and father are much more likely to engage in homosexual conduct as adults than are women who grew up in an intact family."

"Oh, goody," Some people will be thinking. "A new study to show how nasty, immoral, un-patriotic, and hostile to "the family" gay people are. And how much of a threat they pose to "our" children!"

As somebody pointed out to me, all to rightly: "Before long, phony religious right experts will be citing this study as fact. It's best to refute the lies before they have a chance to spread." And among the things recklessly promoted in this libelous and poorly researched "study" is the claim that "Women who never attend religious worship are more than three times as likely to have homosexual relationships than are women who attend worship weekly." 

 

This is exactly the sort of thing that bigot preachers will seize upon and preach from their pulpits as "gospel truth" and "fact".

Hate The Sin, Hate The Sinner

Where I come from, being called a bigot used to be an insult, and being called bigoted was an accusation people used to take very seriously. 

 

Considering that I grew up in South Africa during the last years of the Apartheid regime, and was schooled under its influence, this ought to be something of a revealing scenario.

In those days, liberals used to refer to people as bigots because they were supporting and defending racist policies, and were very enthusiastic about it. Very often, the same people used to "categorically deny" being bigoted and would take such accusations very personally while often going to extremes - very often religious extremes - to try to justify their bigotry, or to discredit the applicability of the term to themselves.

To my mind this has only served to alter the concepts of accountability and responsibility in the mindset of particularly religious conservative Christians - who tend to believe that if they believe their God, Bible or pastor directs them to hate anyone or anything - or to act out of that hate against anyone or anything, then this direction is canonical and thus absolves them of any earthly accountability or responsibility.

Sadly for them, it doesn't work that way. 

Or does it?

Alternative Healing

I was impressed by two stories this week. I know, it is only Tuesday, but I am already beginning to think it will take something pretty extraordinary to top the past few days, at least for me - and at least, in the field of human rights in South Africa.