International Gayhaters Vs. Prague Pride And Friends

Tomorrow, Czechs will celebrate Pride in Prague, and the US State Department's helping. Exactly what the State Department's up to is difficult to know without reading Czech, but the US Embassy is, at the very least, promoting Pride like mad on its website. 

The embassy is very clear on why it's gotten involved:

Prague Pride Festival will focus on the topic of minorities within the LGBT community. The main goal of this Festival is to address discriminatory behavior based on sexual orientation and to promote a tolerant civil society and equal opportunities in the Czech Republic.

Tolerance! Equal opportunities! The embassy doesn't even mention "marriage"! 

Still, some Americans are upset. Elite homophobes of the United States and elsewhere have come together to protest with a very angry letter:

We the undersigned pro-family and pro-life leaders vigorously protest the participation of the United States Embassy in the Czech Republic in a so-called gay-pride parade which will take place on August 18.

As representatives of the international pro-family movement, we note the following:

The full list of complaints is tediously long, but includes:

At the directive of the president of the United States, Washington is aggressively promoting the “gay’’ agenda internationally, including same-sex “marriage” and the stigmatization and marginalization of any who object to the same. 

And:

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948) provides that “Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.” 

And: 

The Madrid Declaration of World Congress of Families VI (May 25-27, 2012) -- which was unanimously adopted by more than 3,200 delegates from 72 countries -- provides, in part: “We affirm the natural family to be the union of a man and a woman through marriage for the purposes of sharing love and joy, propagating children, providing their moral education, building a vital home economy, offering security in times of trouble, and binding the generations.” 

(This is an odd thing to mention, because the World Congress of Families, an international collection of anti-science, hyper-religious wackadoos, has no authority over anything but itself.)

And:

We can not imagine a worse form of cultural imperialism than Washington trying to force approval of the “gay” agenda on societies with traditional values. 

The letter also includes a shout-out to Czech gayhater Michal Semin, who asserts on his webpage that the site of the first-ever Pride celebration was ancient Sodom.

Signatories of note include Scott Lively, Linda Harvey, Peter LaBarbera, Tom Wildmon, Tom DeLay, and, most troublingly, Nigeria's Theresa Okafor, who runs the anti-gay Foundation For African Cultural Heritage. 

(HT: RightWingWatch.)

NEWS: George Walks, TED Talks, Scott Lively Freaks Out, And Goodbye Ernest Borgnine

Ernest Borgnine has died.

A lesbian mum responds to Jane Pitt, Brad Pitt's anti-gay mother.

Scott Lively pleads with a Missouri city to get serious about the rainbow menace:

Framed as an “anti-discrimination” measure it is in reality a “Gay Fascism” Bill that will make disapproval of homosexuality illegal in the City of Springfield and grant gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders (GLBTs) legal standing to sue their opponents, primarily Christians.

Starting in the 1980s in cities like San Francisco, homosexuals have forced many U.S. cities and numerous states to adopt similar “Gay Fascism” laws with disastrous effects on Christian landlords and businesses. Empowered by recent successes, they are now pushing into conservative cities.

... in a strategic political sense ... an “anti-discrimination policy” based on “sexual orientation” is the seed that contains the entire homosexual agenda with all of its poisonous fruit, including “gay” marriage, “gay” adoption, and heavy taxpayer funding of “gay” programs and projects. Wherever the seed takes root, “gay” power and control just keeps growing until it supplants traditional family values with San Francisco-style sexual anarchy in every social and political sphere.

Conversations about homosexuality and the Bible in Africa.

Gayfolk and Rick Perry have something in common.

George Zimmerman is out of jail.

On the cheap thrill of looking at other people's mug shots:

A mug shot doesn’t simply provide information, it lures us into a drama in which we are given an intimate, Leviathan’s-eye view of the state asserting dominance over an individual. In the old days, this spectacle took place live, on the scaffold of the pillory. Today, it happens in the creation and online circulation of the mug shot. In the faces of these photographic subjects we behold an alarming look of knowledge without consent, and the formal elements associated with this type of portrait—the rigid, head-on stare, the non-professional lighting and institutional accouterment—are charged with the candid photo’s shock of spontaneous revelation.

On the art and science of TED talks.

Fleeing from Scientology's "Land Flag Base," in Clearwater. The architecture's cool, but the sales pitch is creepy.

Three-hundred homeless folks take the stage at the Royal Opera House.

Fifty years of Bond on display in London:

... a bullet-shaped entry way leads through to the Gold Room, which features a life-sized recreation of character Jill Masterson's death by gold paint from the 1964 film "Goldfinger."

"Shirley Eaton's golden body is one of the most iconic Bond images, and we went to great lengths to cast a form -- not just a mannequin -- to painstakingly make a body that resembled her nubile proportions from Goldfinger ... "

NEWS: Sexual Inverts, Sacred Sites, Richard Dawkins, And A Huge Pink Dot

 Happy birthday to The Well of Loneliness, the pioneering lesbian novel published 84 years ago today in Britain. It hit mainstream bookshelves at the end of July, and initially drew praise from critics who appreciated its empathetic, psychologically acute depiction of "sexual inverts" (of which the author, Radclyffe Hall, was one.) From Wikipedia:

James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express newspaper, did not agree. Douglas was a dedicated moralist, an exponent of muscular Christianity, which sought to reinvigorate the church by promoting physical health and manliness. His colorfully worded editorials on subjects such as "the flapper vote" (that is, the extension of suffrage to women under 30) and "modern sex novelists" helped the Express family of papers prosper in the cutthroat circulation wars of the late 1920s. These leader articles shared the pages of the Sunday Express with gossip, murderers' confessions, and features about the love affairs of great men and women of the past.

Douglas's campaign against The Well of Loneliness began on Saturday, August 18, with poster and billboard advertising and a teaser in the Daily Express promising to expose "A Book That Should Be Suppressed". In his editorial the next day, Douglas wrote that "sexual inversion and perversion" had already become too visible and that the publication of The Well brought home the need for society to "cleans[e] itself from the leprosy of these lepers". For Douglas the sexological view of homosexuality was pseudoscience, incompatible with the Christian doctrine of free will; instead, he argued, homosexuals were damned by their own choice – which meant that others could be corrupted by "their propaganda". Above all, children must be protected: "I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul" ...

[The book's nervous publisher] Jonathan Cape sent a copy of The Well to the Home Secretary for his opinion, offering to withdraw the book if it would be in the public interest to do so. The Home Secretary was William Joynson-Hicks, a Conservative known for his crackdowns on alcohol, nightclubs and gambling ... He took only two days to reply that The Well was "gravely detrimental to the public interest"; if Cape did not withdraw it voluntarily, criminal proceedings would be brought.

Cape announced that he had stopped publication, but he secretly leased the rights to Pegasus Press, an English language publisher in France ... With publicity increasing demand, sales were brisk, but the reappearance of The Well on bookstore shelves soon came to the attention of the Home Office. On October 3 Joynson-Hicks issued a warrant for shipments of the book to be seized ...

 Singapore's lovely alternative to a Pride Parade: A huge pink dot.

 200 PhD's against that ridiculous Regnerus study about gay parents:

... the author is unable to distinguish between the impact of having a parent who has had a continuous same-sex relationship from the impact of having same-sex parents who broke-up from the impact of living in a same-sex stepfamily from the impact of living with a single parent who may have dated a same-sex partner; each of these groups are included in a single “lesbian mother” or “gay father” group depending on the gender of the parent who had a same-sex relationship. Specifically, this paper fails to distinguish family structure and family instability. Thus, it fails to distinguish, for children whose parents ever had a same-sex relationship experience, the associations due to family structure from the associations due to family stability. However, he does attempt to distinguish family structure from family instability for the children of different-sex parents by identifying children who lived in an intact biological family ...

 Bradlee Dean suggests that the LGBT rights movement is a Trojan Horse for pedophilia, and that gay blogs have refused to condemn Jerry Sandusky. He's not real hot on research, huh? 

 New tween fad: Burning yourself with ice and salt. What happened to planking?

 Jennifer Keeton, counseling student program expelled for refusing to provide secular counseling to LGBT students, loses her discrimination case.

 A rather sunburnt looking Richard Dawkins gets 35 minutes on Al Jazeera. 

 By living in sin, are you breaking the law?

 On the import of Massachusetts's new HIV testing rules.  

 The destruction of ancient Sufi holy sites in Timbuktu continues amain. 

Ugandan Government Discovers Evidence Of Gay Conspiracy

The anti-gay Ugandan government, and especially its jabbering homophobe-in-chief, Ethics and Integrity Minister Simon Lokodo, are excited to report that they've found proof of a homosexual conspiracy to overturn the moral order in Uganda and promote gay sex in the Ugandan media. From The Kampala Observer:

The government says it has intercepted minutes of a recent meeting that discussed wide-ranging strategies on how to promote the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in Uganda.

These strategies include how to raise funds and recruit 'friendly' journalists into the cause of fighting for homosexual rights in Uganda. Some sources have told The Observer that security operatives infiltrated gay groups and managed to get a document containing minutes of the meeting.

The unsigned document, a copy of which we have seen, names 41 people, from 23 NGOs, as having attended the meeting on May 4, 2012, under the coordination of the Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights and Constitutional Law ...

Not incidentally, Andy reported earlier this month on a raid of a meeting of LGBT rights activists meeting in Kampala. It's unclear if Mr. Lokodo's document was obtained during that operation.

Mr. Lokodo, a former Roman Catholic priest, is now doing his best to ensure that the 23 NGOs named in the document are banned from doing business in Uganda:

... he said he had passed the list of the NGOs to the Internal Affairs minister to get all of them deregistered, as they were engaging in an illegal activity. Lokodo told journalists that the NGOs were receiving support from abroad and "recruiting" young children into the vice.

Mr. Lokodo says he believes the recovered document will be an important component of his case to revive the punitive anti-gay bill introduced three years ago by MP David Bahati, and which has been languishing in the parliament ever since. The bill originally instituted the death penalty for those convicted of repeat homosexual relations, but the punishment has been amended to life imprisonment.  

The Washington Times, the Moonie paper, points out that the recent intensity of anti-gay sentiment in Uganda provides a useful distraction from the rolling public disaster that is the government of President Yowery Museveni:

The move to ban the NGOs comes amid sharply declining support for the government and power struggles within the administration.

An Afrobarometer poll in March found that Ugandans’ approval of President Yoweri Museveni’s government had fallen to 26 percent, from 64 percent in January 2011.

Meanwhile, news outlets reported last week that Speaker of Parliament Rebecca Kadaga and Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi are angling to unseat the 68-year-old president, who has been in power for 26 years.

“This campaign against sexual minorities is meant to shift attention from the challenges this country is facing and the issues affecting day-to-day lives,” said Hassan Shire, executive director of the East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Project.

NGOs have become more vocal and critical amid the government’s increasing reliance on patronage to retain power, massive unemployment, crumbling infrastructure and violent crackdowns on journalists and activists.

It's worth noting that President Museveni has expressed disapproval of the anti-gay bill, though only after initially endorsing it. 

Gay Man Stoned To Death Outside Nairobi

Identity Kenya reports that an apparently gay man from Kayole estate, outside Nairobi, was stoned to death on May 27th.

The man was a cook at a food-vending kiosk in an open-air market portion of the estate. He was discovered by passersby having sex with a male co-worker, who seems to have done prep-work in the kiosk. According to Identity Kenya:

It is said the two have ‘been enjoying prolonged stares for month and the deceased made the first move.’

The two are said to have agreed to have meet up behind the Catholic Church building in Soweto estate at 8pm on the fateful day.

From there, sources say, they began to have sex.

The area is described as ‘deserted with bushes and a dumping site.’

In the darkness, the two were caught with passersby as they were having sex and they were beaten up.

Later, a crowd milled around and started to stone the two men amidst insults.

One of the men survived by crawling away from the mob. "Anonymous sources" tell Identity Kenya that the survivor suffers broken arms and internal bleeding.

The dead man's body was discovered by authorities on the morning of May 28th, in a "dump site" not far from where he was murdered. His remains were taken to a mortuary, and he was buried in early June. Identity Kenya doesn't report whether police are searching his killers.

Note: There was something very much like a witch scare in Kayole not long ago, in which the townspeople became terrified of half-mythical transvestite serial killer. Anti-gay sentiment is always prevalent in Kenya, but the scare probably doesn't help.

Swedish Minister of Culture Called on to Resign Over Interaction with Artist's Cake: VIDEO

An art installation by Makode Linde meant to draw attention to the issue of female genital mutilation in Africa is making headlines in Sweden:

The artist, Makode Aj Linde, who created the installation for World Art Day on 15 April, took part in the cake-cutting, with his blackened face and head sticking up next to the cake's stomach and arms. The cakes "insides" were a gruesome red. A video shows him screaming loudly every time a visitor hacks off another slice of the cake. Linde posted photos of the "genital mutilation cake" on his Facebook page. But the images provoked a furious response, with Sweden's African-Swedish Association describing it as "a racist spectacle".

Sweden's Minister of Culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth has been called on to resign by Sweden's African-Swedish Association for cutting into the cake:

"Her participation, as she laughs, drinks and eats cake, merely adds to the insult against people who suffer from racist taunts and against women affected by circumcision."

Adelsohn Liljeroth denies she did anything wrong:

"They wanted me to cut the cake." Ultimately, the artist was to blame for any confusion, she said, arguing that the situation had been misinterpreted. "He claims that it challenges a romanticised and exoticised view from the west about something that is really about violence and racism," she said. "Art needs to be provocative."

Watch, AFTER THE JUMP...

(via animal ny)