Said the judge, “I will give you a scaring sentence so that the public be protected from people like you, so that we are not tempted to emulate this horrendous example.”
A gay couple convicted of having homosexual sex in Malawi have received the maximum 14-year jail sentence.
Steven Monjeza, 26, and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, 20, were told by a judge they would also serve hard labour as a warning to other gay people in the country.
The couple were convicted on Tuesday of unnatural acts and gross indecency after being arrested in December.
Coverage from BBC, CNN; a State Department spokesman says the U.S. is “deeply disappointed” by these convictions, which he also called a “step backward in the protection of human rights in Malawi.” The U.S. Government has supplied Malawi with over $70 million worth of aid.
In hs otherwise persuasive book, The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, Richard Thompson Ford argues that gay marriage is not like miscegenation [p.117]:
[T]he resistance to interracial marriage in the 1960s was only part of a larger effort to punish and deter interracial sex. The evil that miscegenation laws were designed to prevent was any and all intimate racial mixing; the prime worries were the purity and sexual innocence of white women and the potential emergence of a “mongrel race.” Laws against fornication and cohabitation worked hand in glove with antimiscegenation laws, and the threat of lynching supplemented the legal prohibitions.
Well Mr. Ford, what do you have to say about the news today? The global lgbt community is under attack; serious and deadly attack. If the U.S. wants to claim moral leadership in the world, it needs to also act on discrimination rooted in hateful prejudice at home.
The Family Research Council and the American Family Association have called for the criminalization of gays in the USA. How can we know that the role of Americans in Uganda’s anti-gay push isn’t also being played out all over Africa?
“Love the sinner, hate the sin” requires a kind of psychic, mental gymnastics I find hard to believe is possible, but in any case it still boils down to a justification to “hate.” And that hate undermines any moral leadership the U.S. hopes to claim, here and anywhere in the world.
You can find me @jwindish, at my Public Notebook, or email me at joe-AT-joewindish-DOT-com.