WDJD (What Did Jesus Do) ?

Happening upon another debate on a religious political party Facebook group hate wall, I noticed somebody posted the following in a debate about GLBT and their party's dicriminatory policies:

"God gave us freedom of choice so if you want to be bisexual, be bisexual; if you want to be a pedophile, that is your choice;"

So who's a hypocrite now?

COPE Lied To Us!

Late last year I was part of a group that lobbied the new party COPE to include GLBT rights in its policies and manifesto. COPE was then making all the right human rights noises and astonishingly even invited GLBT to the table. It seems in hindsight, that it may well have been just another ploy to win as much support as they could, at almost any cost. Almost.

- Next!

Today the rights, dignity and equality of gay and trans people are under relentless attack from people who use religion - and even the same religion of their victims - against them as a weapon. It is not just the rights we seek to be equal to them that they assault - but us as people as well. Gay-haters make physical attacks on hapless outnumbered victims, those thinking of themselves as "christian soldiers" have even bombed gay establishments around the world. America launched a war against terror for just one incident, horrible as it was - and yet for decades, GLBT have been on the receiving end of a largely ignored, publicly condoned and silent War OF Terror.

There Is No Fence!

A feminist friend pointed out to me the other day that men seem to be the root cause of all of women's - and society's ills:

We have MENstruation, MENopause, MENtal illness, deMENtia,

...and it seems now we can add fundaMENtalism as well.

She may have a point.

The Road To Heaven Is Paved With Hell

Taking on the immense hate there is out there for gay and transgender people is a very, very difficult thing to do. You open yourself up to all sorts of attack, both verbally and physically - in the online world and also in the real world.

In the past few years I have built up a small collection of what I call "fan mail" from "admirers" who have threatened - even from half the world away - to hurt me and even to kill me. Some of the lesser creative ones have even threatened legal action without any solid basis whatever for daring to tackle their unadulterated bigotry. Some of them would make pretty good one-liners, except they have no actual punchline. Just to cheer me up, I have also committed to memory the verbal threats and bullying I have been faced with in real life.

The Taste Of Irony

For the past three days I have heard people bantering on about the poor Dalai Lama being denied a visa to enter SA, about what a fantastic human rights icon he is for trying to free Tibet from Chinese rule (to return it to his rule, of course) - but not a word about his dark views on GLBT people.

Enough!

Barbara Hogan, our new health minister has set the cat among the pigeons by daring to criticize her ANC masters for refusing a visa to the Dalai Lama. Apparently the public at large view this man as a man of peace and some kind of spiritual icon. She even expects the government to apologize to the people of SA for this action.

High Altitude Atitudes

High Altitude Attitudes

Diversity seems to scare some people. The thought of being equal to people they look down upon and think of as dirty or "too different" can scare them out of their half-wits. In another sense, this being brought down to the level of the rest of us ordinary sinful mortals makes some people doubt their own religion and forces them to face the fact that perhaps what they believe in is not as sound as they thought - and that the only way to 'save face' is to deny all truth and facts and turn extreme fundamentalist and to look for scapegoats to blame their worldly woes on. This is what seems to be happening in SA and around the world today.

Found In Translation

My girlfriend comes from Finland and her entire family still lives there. Luckily she speaks perfect English (with a slight American accent, a result of watching so many TV shows) or we would never have understood each other. I speak two languages fluently - English and Afrikaans, with a growing understanding of German which I find interesting because of my ancestry. 

Learning a Germanic language after knowing one is relatively easier, seeing as they basically have the same roots. She also speaks a little Swedish and I find the similarities between German, Swedish and Afrikaans uncanny. Not that I haven't tried to learn Finnish, but to be quite honest after a few minutes, I feel like I have been sucking unsuccessfully on a very thick milkshake and my head is about to implode. In short, it really 'Finnishes' me. (She also stopped laughing at jokes like that a long time ago.)

Assumption Is The Father Of All Screw Ups

While browsing a site on the treatment of transgender and intersex patients, I noted the following assertion: "Newborns with intersex deformities must early on be assigned to one sex or the other."

WHY?

This is surely the biggest error medical caregivers can make.

Unity And Strength In Diversity

Spending quality time with the people you love - and who love you - is more than just goofing off or finding ways to spend time not actually doing anything useful. Many activists feel that taking such time is risky and wasteful and could be put to better use promoting the cause of human rights. After all, we are greatly outnumbered - and our enemies have no shortage of volunteers eager to drive another nail into the coffin of our human rights while our backs may be turned.

However, it does serve a very important purpose. Aside from reducing or countering the stress we as activists are met with in the world, it helps to remind us what it is we are fighting for - and why we are fighting in the first place.