Ugandan anti-gay bill sponsor

[mothwing]

Catching up with my Rachel Maddow Show viewing I find this interview with this person hell-bent on believing that gays are recruited and that those doing the recruiting deserve to die. He therefore proposed the famous Ugandan bill which says that gay people should face prison sentences and death sentences.

Proceed with care. I don't even know how to react to this.

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Comments

[daharyn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I happened to catch this one live. *shudder* TRMS has been pretty much the only US media covering this--it grew out of Rachel's coverage of C Street and the Family/Fellowship, which in turn grew out of her coverage of Senator Ensign, I think. She's had the investigative journalist who's written about the Family on a couple of times; he's really, really smart and contributes to a number of blogs on related issues.

On some level, this guy is the natural end product of American evangelism. Missionary work by Americans is now completely dominated by evangelicals, and it enables the proliferation of human rights abuses like this one--but it is also, in some places, the only kind of positive, material intervention (food, schools, houses, etcetera) that's happening. So is the solution more intervention by the U.S. government, via USAID and other secular agencies? That makes me worry too--as if we weren't enough of an imperial nation already.

I will say that the ties between the religious views this man spouts and the U.S. government itself are not quite as tight, I think, as Rachel makes them out to be on some of her shows. The government here is a massive bureaucracy, employing millions of people. (And that's just at the federal level.) And our government only ever gets bigger, really, despite the claims both parties make about reducing its scope. The voices spouting this nonsense are a vocal minority. Influential, certainly, but a minority nonetheless.

(Evangelicals make up less than 30% of the U.S. population. While it is certainly the fastest growing denomination by far, it's not a majority. Plenty of people here get by just fine on the doctrines of consumerism, not Christianity.)

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

I used to rather enjoy coverage of The Family with all their sex scandals and various hypocrisies - it sort of became my weekly soap - before the shit really hit various fans and I realised just how scary and dangerous these people are.

Thanks for the linkage! I don't think I've seen those before, I don't usually read the TRMS blogs.

As for missionary work - I'm not at all a fan for many of the reasons you mentioned, evangelical or not. Even "regular" Christian missionary work I think isn't a good thing, because I doubt that importing your brand of consumerist Christianity to people in need is helpful. I think that there should be more humanitarian aid available funded by international NGOs without religious trimmings and obligations, and spiritual guidance for religious crises, not both rolled into one.

Though I'm hesitatant to say that Christian missionary work does more harm than good in general, as you point out, they so often are the only help available, they certainly do a lot of harm to a lot of people. These two things needs to change.

I don't know much about Evangelicals, but they freak me out, especially some of the more radical American evangelicals seem to have been imported to here and seem to work together with some of our free protestant churches - but I never got the impression that they made up the majority of US Christians. Though - 30%? That many? That's terrifying.

[daharyn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, slightly less than 30% of the general population. This is, as with all US matters, a regional thing--there aren't that many in NYC. (Though there is an urban evangelical mission a few blocks from me. They are a site for young evangelicals to come to learn to minister to the downtrodden urban population, or so I understand!)

This isn't exactly new in American culture, though--there have been waves of Protestant revival happening for two centuries. This latest version seems more dangerous because it's more networked, but so are the rest of us.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

That's SO many! One in three, one of those people? Wow. Quite hard to believe. And pretty scary, from my entirely mellow Northern German protestant POV.