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Rick Warren, who delivered the convocation at the Obama inauguration, specifically refuses to condemn the pending legislation in Uganda that would require the execution of all GBLT people and imprison those who know about GBLT people but do not report them to the police, saying: The fundamental dignity of every person, our right to be free, and the freedom to make moral choices are gifts endowed by God, our creator. However, it is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the political process of other nations. ... As a pastor, my job is to encourage, to support. I never take sides. The bill also criminalises any speech or activity in support of GBLT people. It is a genocide bill.
And let me explain something for a minute, here. Well, first, Warren's lie that he never takes sides is, of course, a lie. He takes sides plenty. But that's obvious. No, I'm referring to this language, here: "the freedom to make moral choices are gifts endowed by God, our creator." The use of the phrase freedom to make moral choices is not accidental. It's painted so that, to the secular audience, it looks like he's saying this is something left up to you. But the freedom to make moral choices is not necessarily the freedom to also make choices he considers to be immoral.
Even if they aren't choices. Like being queer.
This is stock fundamentalist language of exclusion. To me, this looks like him dog-whistling that he hasn't started thinking that think queers have a right to be queer, because that choice is - to him and his vicious pack of allies - not a moral choice, but an immoral one, and therefore not a "gift from God," and therefore fair game.
The well-known no-longer-secret fundamentalist evangelical political club in DC known as "The Family" - a key player behind the Stupak-Pitts anti-abortion amendment to the health care plan in the House - is also specifically working to pass the bill, through one of their own members. Here's a snippet from Fresh Air with Terry Gross:GROSS: This legislation has just been proposed. It hasn't been signed into law. So it's not in effect yet and it might never be in effect. But it's on the table. It's before parliament. So is there a direct connection between The Family and this proposed anti-homosexual legislation in Uganda?
Mr. SHARLET: Well, the legislator that introduced the bill, a guy named David Bahati, is a member of The Family. He appears to be a core member of The Family. He works, he organizes their Ugandan National Prayer Breakfast and oversees a African sort of student leadership program designed to create future leaders for Africa, into which The Family has poured millions of dollars working through a very convoluted chain of linkages passing the money over to Uganda. There's a bit more here at Sullivan's website, talking about how this is where these organisations would go everywhere, if they could. More on that here, at Joe. My. God., and here, at Pam's House Blend, and here, at Box Turtle Bulletin. Uganda is a testing ground.
The Commonwealth of Nations is facing pressure to suspend Uganda's membership if the bill is passed, with the western nations in support of such an action. PM Harper has personally lobbied against the bill, speaking directly to Ugandan president Museveni on the topic. The UK government has also condemned the bill, as has Sweden; the United States and France have both called it "deeply troubling" or some close variant.
The Catholic Church, by contrast, is busy joining people like The Pink Swastika author Scott Lively and blaming foreign gay people for the bill. (For those unfamiliar, The Pink Swastika is part of Scott Lively's travelling road show of anti-gay hate propaganda. He asserts that rather than being killed in concentration camps (as is routinely and widely documented by Germany documents and laws of the time), gay men were in fact running the camps, murdering the Jews. It's a form of holocaust-denial, wherein Those Good Germans weren't doing anything, it was Teh Fagz. The Pink Swastika is basically his attempt to write a new Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but with a new target.)
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