Response

In the Letters section of the Daily Monitor, the paper includes SMS feedback to specific questions. Yesterday the question was, “What’s your view on gays and lesbians’ demand for their rights?” I thought I would share a few of my favorite responses, so you could get the tenor for what people are saying in these parts:

“Human Rights Watch should know that nobody can have rights do wrong! Homosexuality is worse than Osama and nuclear combined together, all able bodies should fight that witchcraft.”

Come again? The real tragedy here is this person’s lack of command of the English language. Education breeds understanding, no?

“There should be specific anti-homo law, like the anti-terrorism law and also set up a gay crack unit to prohibit the media from giving them publicity.”

Um, dude, there is a specific anti-homosexuality law. This is a big reason why the gay community has no rights in this country. Which is why you’re being asked to respond to this question.

“It’s a shame to legalise such. That behind thing is very dirty.”

And now my blog is very dirty.

“These gays and lesbians all over the world are unbelievable. In science we learn that same charges/poles repel as unlike ones attract. So?”

So…No, I’m still lost.

After reading the paper, I picked up Vanity Fair from July of this year, the special issue dedicated to Africa, which a friend recently lent us. And now I’m going to include a quote from that issue, from the Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa:

“I come from a situation where for a very long time people were discriminated against, made to suffer for something about which they could do nothing—their ethnicity. We were made to suffer because we were not white. Then, for a very long time in our church, we didn’t ordain women, and we were penalizing a huge section of humanity for something about which they could do nothing—their gender. And I’m glad that now the church has changed all that. I’m glad that apartheid has ended. I could not for any part of me be able to keep quiet, because people were being penalized, ostracized, treated as if they were less than human, because of something they could do nothing to change—their sexual orientation. For me, I can’t imagine the Lord that I worship, this Jesus Christ, actually concurring with the persecution of a minority that is already being persecuted…I think God is weeping. He is weeping that we should be spending so much energy, time, resources on this subject at a time when the world is aching.”