Year: 2011

The BBC hosts a debate about whether homosexuality is un-African.

Ugandan MP David Bahati and Festus Mogae, former President of Botswana, debate homosexuality with host Zeinab Badawi.

According to the New Vision:

THE Speaker of Parliament, Edward Kiwanuka Sekandi, has summoned MPs to report to the House on March 22.

Hellen Kaweesa, the public relations manager of Parliament, said the clerk to Parliament had already notified all the MPs to return and handle unfinished business.

Last year, Sekandi sent Parliament on recess to allow MPs get enough time for their campaigns. The Bills to be debated include the parliamentary pensions amendments Bill of 2010, the anti-homosexuality Bill and the retirements benefits authority Bill.

This sitting will be the first since the Constitutional Court kicked out 77 MPs from the House for refusing to vacate their seats before defected to other parties.

The 8th Parliament, whose term expires in two months time, has remained with only 255 MPs.

This is of concern given that The New Vision’s majority ownership is the Ugandan government. I suspect that opponents and proponents of the bill will be jockeying for their agenda over the next several weeks.

I reported recently that Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee Chair Stephen Tashobya was unsure if the bill would come up. In light of the New Vision report, I asked him if the bill might now make the agenda. He told me that the Parliament would indeed reconvene on March 22 but that the agenda had not yet been decided. He said, “What I can say is that we have a lot of work to get done and if there is time to get to that bill (the Anti-Homosexuality Bill) then we will look at it, but if there is no time, then we won’t be able to this session.” Tashobya added that the agenda would not be worked out until Parliament reconvenes and that he could not confirm anything at this point.

Perhaps other Uganda watchers could help handicap this situation but it seems to me that the public status is going to remain cloudy through the Spring.

I still haven’t seen the whole thing, but I will later.

By request of a commenter at the Exodus blog, I want to link Alan Chamber’s response to the segment.

During the segment I linked to yesterday, Alan acknowledged that he continues to experience same-sex attractions. At one time, this would have seemed like a betrayal of the “change is possible” mantra. However, Alan defines change as an ideological experience, first and foremost.

Diminishing or elimination of same-sex attraction can occur to varying degrees, but Exodus does not believe that an absence of same-sex attractions is necessary in order to live a life in harmony with biblical principles. Like I said during the interview, God wants our hearts more than he wants anything else.  When He has our heart then and only then can He begin the transformation process.

Change is possible.  For Christians change is ultimately about embracing a new identity. This new identity is rooted in what God says is His best plan for individuals, humanity and sexuality.  This involves a personal decision to reject behaviors and an identity that conflicts with biblical truth about life and relationships.

There may be a few people, mainly women, who have experienced an elimination of same-sex attraction, but I have only met a handful who claim it. I have met more who once claimed it and but then later experience SSA again.

Alan’s statement, to be consistent, needs to be understood not as a statement of science but one of faith and belief in the primacy of self-definition. Gay, to many evangelicals, means approval of homosexual behavior. And since they do not believe that is right, they change everything they can to achieve congruence with their beliefs. However, they have not changed their automatic attractions in ways that would meet categorical definitions of change.

And of course, for purposes of identity, this is just the way it is for some. According to the 2009 Task Force report, this is a defensible objective. Task Force chair Judith Glassgold told the Wall Street Journal:

“We’re not trying to encourage people to become ‘ex-gay,'” said Judith Glassgold, who chaired the APA’s task force on the issue. “But we have to acknowledge that, for some people, religious identity is such an important part of their lives, it may transcend everything else.”

Exodus has of late come much closer to clarity about what changes when they say change is possible. With the OWN segment, they have come another step closer.

Looks like must see TV…Our America with Lisa Ling (details at the link)

I am coming late to this party, but I am just glad to be here.

George Will explained concisely in his Sunday column why any Republican with a set of working neurons is really nervous about 2012. Let me start where Will finishes:

Let us not mince words. There are at most five plausible Republican presidents on the horizon – Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Utah governor and departing ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former Massachusetts governor Romney and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.

So the Republican winnowing process is far advanced. But the nominee may emerge much diminished by involvement in a process cluttered with careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons.

Notice that Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich are not on that list. Will delineates with precision that these two men have fallen on the Obama-is-not-a-real-American sword in such a way that they may not only impale themselves but also the rest of the party. 

Huckabee disappoints the most as he first panders to two far right talk show hosts about Obama’s birth place. Huckabee first told Steve Malzberg that the current President grew up in Kenya, then later after being called on the error, said he simply meant Indonesia and went on a bit to the second, Bryan Fischer, about Obama and community madrassas. Will dismisses the excuses and notes that such episodes have consequences:

Republicans should understand that when self-described conservatives such as Malzberg voice question-rants like the one above and Republicans do not recoil from them, the conservative party is indirectly injured. As it is directly when Newt Gingrich, who seems to be theatrically tiptoeing toward a presidential candidacy, speculates about Obama having a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” mentality.

Let’s pull over and park here a minute. There in a nutshell is my point about why GOP candidates are digging themselves a hole by doing puff interviews on the American Family Radio network with Bryan Fischer. The current crop of contenders is so intent on injuring Obama that anything goes, and in the process, the critic is injured more than the target.

Will then dismisses Gingrich’s affair with Dinesh D’Souza’s theories about Obama.

To the notion that Obama has a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview, the sensible response is: If only. Obama’s natural habitat is as American as the nearest faculty club; he is a distillation of America’s academic mentality; he is as American as the other professor-president, Woodrow Wilson. A question for former history professor Gingrich: Why implicate Kenya?

Reading Gingrich further, he calls Obama’s world view “factually insane” and says the President “is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works.” In addition to Will’s correction of Gingrich’s picture of Obama, I offer this. Gingrich’s hyperbole obscures any serious consideration of his ideas from those he most wants to reach. He is talking trash to the choir; most others dismiss him after the first sentence or two. Gingrich, Huckabee, Malzberg and Fischer almost make Obama look appealing by comparison, even to some of the choir.

Now let me end where Will began:

If pessimism is not creeping on little cat’s feet into Republicans’ thinking about their 2012 presidential prospects, that is another reason for pessimism. This is because it indicates they do not understand that sensible Americans, who pay scant attention to presidential politics at this point in the electoral cycle, must nevertheless be detecting vibrations of weirdness emanating from people associated with the party.

Color me pessimistic.