LGBT crisis in Nigeria?

From All Out:

--- merged: Mar 3, 2014 at 4:33 PM ---
From the New York Times:

 

That's some sick shit right there. It's a shame how many places in the world are still sinkholes of ignorance, fear, and hatred.

Those poor people.

 

Shit.

Everytime I start thinking that we've evolved at least a bit in accepting others sexuality, something like this happens.

 

Religion. Just when you think you're out, they pull you back in...

 

*Fundamentalism.

Not all religion is fundamentalist.

 

I question the faith of the non-fundamentalists... But I'm a jackass. Religion is one of the biggest excuses to do bad things, and feel justified.

I know most religious people do not support these actions.

 

One of my sisters is religious. She's a good person, but she sometimes gets caught up in the fanatical anti-whatever movements.

I once told her, "What is more unnatural, what consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedrooms, or the anti-gay fanatics obession with what they do? Spending that much time thinking about gay sex sounds perverted to me. Take the effort & money used on anti-gay campaigns, and use them to help the children who need food, clothing, and an education."

 

Just dont scare the children or the horses.
Fundamentalists. Wasnt there an anti gay one that got exposed with a rent boy and a crack pipe? Guessing his church were pretty forgiving. Do these peoples ban plays like 'The Importance of Being Earnest' - on the grounds that it was written by a flaming pooftah?
Whatever the religion - doesnt their god advise to love not hate.
Wonder how many of the hate mongers are involved in buggery right now anyway? Me thinks some doth protest too much.

 

More anti-Enlightenment than pre-Enlightenment, I think. Fundamentalism as we know it is really a phenomenon dating from the 19th and early 20th centuries, a movement chiefly spreading outward from Protestant Christian sects in America, Wahhabi-influenced Sunni Islam in the Middle East, and schools of Orthodox Jewish thought in Eastern Europe who followed the teachings and precedents of the Chatam Sofer (Rabbi Moshe Schreiber, Frankfurt and Bratislava, 1762-1839). These groups felt threatened by the new ideas and freedoms of the Enlightenment, and, unlike the more moderate elements of their respective religions-- which sought to find nuanced theological and practical ways to reconcile traditional teaching and life in modernity-- their response was a wholehearted rejection of not only the particular ideas and practices they found threatening, but everything that came along with them. They sought refuge from complexity by remaking their worldview into a simplistic, black-and-white position, with what was appropriate and safe or inappropriate and dangerous clearly and sharply defined by rigid theological buttressing.

This was different than what went on in the pre-Enlightenment era, when much (though, admittedly, by no means all) of what was most oppressive in the religious world did not derive directly from theology, but from the (ab)use of religion by governments and aristocrats as a tool of politics and convenient military justification. And much (though, again, not all) of the rest of what was oppressive stemmed from legitimate ignorance rather than a deliberate choice to deny available knowledge.

Yeah, this is deeply true, especially given that the problem here is not limited to Nigeria. It exists in many places in Africa, and many places not in Africa also. Uganda, for example, is in the throes of a huge homophobic crisis perpetrated by its government (and, FWIW, the Ugandan Jewish community are among those local groups at the forefront of opposing the homophobia), and similar issues have taken place in Kenya, Liberia, and the Ivory Coast, among numerous other countries-- as well, apparently, as Arizona.... And the same is true both in "religious" countries like Indonesia or India but in less religious countries like North Korea, Russia, China, and so forth.

Fundamentalist religion can, and often is, a factor in such problems, but it is by no means the only or even the most decisive factor. As critical, if not much more critical, are poverty, public safety, lack of education, corruption in politics, lack of political transparency and democratic effectiveness, lack of class mobility and/or extreme income inequality, disease and/or poor public health, and other similar social problems. When these factors are well controlled, such as in parts of Europe, parts of America, most of Canada, most of Australia, and a few other similar places, there is a marked decrease in uncontrolled hatred and violent bigotry. Not an elimination of it, certainly. But a dramatic decrease in at least violence associated with hate, if not from hate itself.