Last night, toward's the end of his Afghanistan speech, President Obama said this:
... And we must make it clear to every man, woman and child around the world who lives under the dark cloud of tyranny that America will speak out on behalf of their human rights, and tend to the light of freedom, and justice, and opportunity, and respect for the dignity of all peoples. That is who we are. That is the moral source of America's authority. ...
So when is Obama going to speak out on behalf LGBT Ugandans?
Sponsored by the same quasi-religious creeps that brought us the Stupak amendment in the US, Uganda is considering a law that would change homosexuality from a lifetime imprisonment offense to one that carries the threat of execution for HIV-positive men and repeat gay offenders. Other features of the law include imprisonment for those who would cover for gays, including health workers, while the government also wants to enact mandatory testing and disclosure of HIV status. |
| Maybe Obama can't quite overcome the squeam to help LGBT people in a whole other country, but this repressive atmosphere sure won't help straight Ugandans, either. That laws like this would roll back AIDS prevention while terrorizing half a million people is inevitable, because when you turn a necessary social service into another policing apparatus, people try to avoid it.
The administration seems unbothered, unwilling to take sides or examine how AIDS funding is being used in Uganda, where the disease mainly strikes heterosexuals and 30,000 infants get it from their mothers every year.
And it's funny, but Obama's good friend Rick Warren also doesn't want to take sides on this unpleasant gay execution business, being as he's so politically impartial. The US Council of Catholic Bishops, other Capitol Hill favorites extremely interested of late in preserving fetal tissue residing in other people's own, personal uteri, has nothing to say about inaction over the execution of gay adults, either.
The hypocrisy of all these alleged supporters of bettering the human condition would be super hilarious if we weren't talking about the actual execution of inarguably live human beings who expressed love towards other consenting people. I mean, can there be anything more offensive, more unethical, more destructive, more batsh*t and unacceptable than killing people who haven't hurt anyone for loving each other?
You don't even have to be particularly keen on gender equality to take that view on killing people. You just have to not be a monster.
Even Republicans managed to muster up some outrage over the death of Matthew Shepard. Yet the government of Uganda is considering creating thousands of him and the State Department official in charge of administering the AIDS program, Eric Goosby, compared the situation to the Ryan White laws and wants to engage this in a "collegial and respectful way."
Maybe Goosby thinks this approach will ultimately serve that greater good, about which I've heard so much.
But look, there is no reasonable definition of a greater good that includes innocent people being pointlessly murdered with malice aforethought. So make some noise, because silence is death. And tyranny. And Goosby, we know how your boss hates tyranny. |
