Tag: homosexuality

Liberian Senate Leader Says Gay Legislation Not Needed

In what appears to be a quick move to downplay reports yesterday of draconian anti-gay legislation in Liberia, the Senate President Pro-tempore, Gbehnzongar Findley, said yesterday that no need exists for pro- or anti-gay legislation.

The President Pro-tempore of the Liberian Senate, Gbehnzongar Findley has said that there is no need for any legislation on the protection of gay and lesbian rights in the country.

Addressing his monthly press briefing on Thursday, Pro-tempore Findley said the issue of gay right is not an issue in Liberia as no one has been denied his/right to practice gay or lesbianism in the country.
Pro-tempore Findley clarified that the Constitution of Liberia guaranteed the right of everyone including those involved in same sex practices. “Are these being any act of discrimination against any of them; is there any discriminatory law against them or have they been disfranchised or are people throwing stone at them?” Pro-tempore Findley wondered.
He said as President Pro-tempore of the Liberian Senate any act of infinitive whether for or against will not fall under his gavel. He noted that the Constitution does not in any way infringe on the right of anyone including gay and lesbians. He said the organic law of the country guarantees such right and will not be the one to decide.
“There is no need for legislation for gay and lesbians right because it is in the law and if anyone feels that their right is being violated let them go to the court,” the Grand Bassa County Senior Senator averred.
I know very little about the situation for LGBT people there so I don’t know whether gays would share the Senator’s assessment of the situation.
Sen. Findley seems clear that he will not entertain proposals from either Senator Taylor or LGBT campaigners.

Current Official Text of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009

This morning Helen Kawesa, Public Relations Manager for the Uganda Parliament provided this copy of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill which was introduced on Tuesday. As you will see, it is the same bill as was printed in Uganda Gazette on September 25, 2009 and then first tabled on October 14, 2009. Click the screen capture to go to the Gazette copy.

To date, the bill has not been amended and this is the version re-introduced on February 7, 2012.

This morning AFP news service has an article that correctly reports the story about the bill, amendments and the process involved.

Parliament officials said Thursday that the bill — which US President Barack Obama has described as “odious” — had been reintroduced in its original format, which included the death penalty clause.

Bahati continues to say he will recommend the removal of the death sentence for aggravated homosexuality.

A Ugandan lawmaker behind a proposed draconian anti-gay bill that sparked an international outcry said Friday he wanted to drop clauses that would see the death penalty introduced for certain homosexual acts.

“There will be no death penalty at all…that will go,” David Bahati, the legislator who formulated the bill, told AFP.

However, it remains to be seen whether or not the Parliament will alter the bill in the way Bahati now proposes. Two sources within Parliament have informed me that the MPs will be inclined to agree with recommendations made by Bahati and the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs committee. If he can be believed, Bahati’s strategy seems to have shifted to making it dangerous for GLBT people communicate or gather. More on this in the next post…

Reparative therapy and confirmation bias: An illustration

One of the biggest problems I have with reparative therapy is the self-fulfilling nature of the approach. Reparative therapists assume that the existence of same-sex attraction means a person has suffered gender based trauma during a specific period of childhood.

Reparative therapist David Pickup has commented on another post that straight men may have wounds but, from his point of view, they are not as deep as those which haunt gay men. In other words, if a straight man says he was traumatized in the same way, the reparative therapist’s answer is that the trauma wasn’t deep enough to trigger the reparative drive leading to same-sex attraction. If the gay man says he does not recall any such trauma, then the reparative drive theory posits that the gay man has repressed it and needs to uncover it. It seems to me the powerful effects of confirmation bias are at work.

The assumptions necessary to work as a reparative therapist remind me of the assumptions often associated with the repressed memory movement. Especially during the decade of the 1990s, many therapists assumed that negative moods such as depression or relational problems were due to childhood abuse of some kind that had been forgotten via the defense mechanism of repression. Some therapists harbored a belief that clients who could not remember trauma from the past were in a state of denial. This belief  led some therapists to repeatedly ask about recollections of trauma and hold out the possibility to their clients that they were simply unable to remember.

By questioning the mechanism of repression, I am not questioning the reality of gender based trauma. I am not questioning that some gay people had very impoverished childhoods. Of course that is true. But so did many straight people. In his recent comment, Mr. Pickup proposed that gay people have experienced deeper trauma than straight people experienced. This seems circular to me. How can you tell which experiences are worse? As far as I can tell, the way reparative therapists answer this question iss by knowing the sexual orientation of the client. Straight people have deep wounds; gay people, by definition according to the reparative approach, have deeper wounds.

As an illustration of how clients can adapt themselves to the theories of their therapists, I offer the experience of Carol Diament. Ms. Diament initially thought she would not need to detach from her family, as the other clients at Genesis Associates did. However, after awhile, “memories of abuse came up” and she detached from her parents (over three years), husband and even small children (at least 8 months and maybe longer).

Eventually Carol got away from Genesis, sought another therapist and came to realize that her memories were reconstructed with the help of her therapists at Genesis. By then, the damage was done. She had lost years of her life and had even lost her immediate family.

The clip is just over nine minutes long, but I hope you will watch it all the way through. Then, I hope you will discuss this and let me know what you think. Am I seeing a parallel with reparative theory that is valid or not?

Over the years, I have worked with many clients, gay and straight, who have experience significant trauma with parents. However, I have not been able to differentiate them based on the severity of their experiences. Furthermore, I know and have worked with many gay men and women who recall no deep trauma relating to their parents or peers. I also know gay men who experienced trauma after they came out to their parents because of the tension surrounding homosexuality. However, prior to the disclosure, the relationship was on par with any comparable straight person’s home life.

I also want to be clear that I am not closed to the possibility that certain childhood experiences could influence some people to question sexuality and engage in same-sex behaviors. In addition, some experiences of abuse are associated with risky sexual behavior of all kinds. Therapy, even reparative therapy, might help such people. However, I think these scenarios represent only a portion (probably very small) of the total gay and bisexual population.

Nigeria moves to criminalize same-sex unions

From July 14, 2011, Sharon Slater of Family Watch International, and recent speaker at the annual convention of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), told delegates at a Nigerian law conference that same-sex marriage in the United States was a threat to religious and family freedoms.

On July 25, a bill was tabled in the Nigerian legislature to criminalize same-sex unions. The bill forbids any marriage contracts civil or religious between members of the same sex. It even removes the freedom to conduct such ceremonies in a church if such unions were permitted within the theology of that church. Here are the penalties:

According to an AP article out today, the bill has now gone through two readings and has had public hearings.

This bill is a watered down version of a prior bill which would have imposed more restrictions (see BTB for an earlier article on this bill). Thus, I am not suggesting that Slater concocted the bill or the effort. However, when she spoke to the Nigerian audience, she certainly did nothing to discourage the restriction of personal freedoms and added fuel to the fire already burning.

She and her organization have taken the position that they oppose laws which execute gays but she supports nations who want to make or maintain other laws which criminalize homosexuality.

In essence, this bill criminalizes any same-sex union. Here is the definition of same-sex marriage:

The clause “or for other purposes of same sexual relationship” is so broad that any coupling or any duration could be in view.

 

Christians behaving badly

LivePrayer’s Bill Keller really did not need to comment on a tragedy he knows nothing about, but he did.
In a press release out today, Keller used the suicide of 15 year old Jamie Hubley to go on a rant about gays.
Keller blames the victim, Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow and Ellen DeGeneres for the suicide, assuming that the boy was in distress because he had come out as gay.

Last Friday, a 15-year-old Ottawa boy Jamie Hubley, committed suicide after documenting his hardships of being “gay.” Liveprayer’s Bill Keller said that while the media wants to demonize anyone who dares call this CHOICE of sexual activity what God calls it in the Bible, a sin, it is those in the media who glamorize and promote this choice as normal and acceptable, along with gutless pastors too afraid to speak out against this sin, along with faux churches that glorify this deviant, unnatural, and unhealthy choice of sexual activity, who are most responsible for Hubley’s death.

Rants by fundamentalists about homosexuality are not really news, but this one is so noxious that it illustrates the growing gulf in the church between those who know something about homosexuality and those who don’t. The scholars, ministers and lay people who are making an attempt to understand the subject are moving in one direction and what is left are those who ignore abundant evidence to the contrary of their beliefs.
Recently, I was talking with a 20-something minister who told me that he had become disillusioned with the culture war machine, most clearly over homosexuality. He told me of his struggle to relate to a gay friend, because the friend was more devout in his Christianity than many of his straight Christian friends. His friend was nothing like the right wing stereotypes about “the gay lifestyle.” He also said he worked with some gay men and lesbians at a job where they talked freely about their lives. This young man told me about how common their descriptions were and how normal their families sounded.
He struggled because what he read and heard from evangelical leaders did not square with his own experience. He felt internal pressure to conform his attitudes to the conventional wisdom he was hearing and to disregard his direct experience. He also told me that he didn’t care what anyone said, he didn’t believe his friends could change their orientation, “any more than I can change mine,” he said.
I fear that the rants and rhetoric from those who seem threatened by social change will become more strident. Like a huge self-fulfilling prophecy, they will behave badly toward gays and others who disagree with them, and then they will use the natural reaction of those attacked as a proof of their righteous stance.
I just wish suicides by 15 year old kids could be left out of it.