Religion – Page 139 – Warren Throckmorton

Uganda’s Parliament back in session March 22. Will Anti-gay bill be debated?

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.

What is change? Exodus and the Our America segment

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.

Why is Huckabee using the madrassa attack on Bryan Fischer’s show?

Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor, Fox talk show host, and probable GOP presidential contender got himself into some trouble when he said Obama learned anti-American ways growing up in Kenya. Later he said he misspoke and meant Indonesia. Kenya. Indonesia. Practically next door neighbors. Whatever.

Anyway, he had just about come through the storm of his birther-speak when he appeared on Bryan Fischer’s Focal Point show to complain about Obama’s childhood some more. On Fischer’s show, Huckabee said:

And I have said many times, publicly, that I do think he has a different worldview and I think it is, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas. (emphasis supplied by Salon’s Steve Kornacki)

A madrassa of course is a Muslim school, with recent associations to radical elements of Islam. While nasty, Huckabee is not terribly original in his attack. Properly or not, Hillary Clinton was credited for unearthing this fact early in 2007.

Terry, this is appearing on a Web site today, Insight magazine, which is a subsidiary of The Washington Times. Here’s the question. I’ll put it up on the screen: Barack’s madrassa past. He says that “during the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent first to a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominately Muslim school.” That’s from his book, “The Audacity of Hope.”

Now in the meantime, this is what Democrats are saying, according to Insight magazine. They’re looking into his background. They’re saying: He was a Muslim. He concealed it. His opponents within the Democrats hope this will become a major issue in the campaign.

Now, we have heard about dirty politics before. Republicans aren’t involved in this one. What do you think about what’s going on over there?

TERRY HOLT, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: John, the last time I checked, there was still a freedom of religion in this country. And this is either a despicable act by an absolutely ruthless Clinton political machine. We know that they are capable of doing this. But it wasn’t directly linked to Hillary Clinton. If it wasn’t her, then certainly she should disavow it because I think we have spent an awful lot of time in this country trying to tamp down anti-religious sentiments.

Note what Republican Holt said about the effort to paint Obama as a radical Muslim – “a despicable act.” As Holt pointed out later in the interview, when Obama went to school, a madrassa was similar to any other parochial school associated with a religious view.

Now beyond Huckabee’s confusion of Kenya with Indonesia and his below-the-belt attack on Obama’s childhood is the fact that he is again propping up Bryan Fischer and the American Family Association. As regular readers here know, Fischer believes homosexuals are responsible for “six million dead Jews” during WWII, wants to ban construction of new mosques, and believes that Native Americans got what was coming to them in the near eradication of their tribes during the American settlement and expansion. The American Family Association has been silent on their official position on any of these matters and offers a considerable platform for Fischer’s supremacist views.

Is Huckabee so desperate for an audience that he needs to make news in that fringe-right environment? As Salon’s Kornacki points out, Huckabee is now making this ugly, and I add that he found one of the ugliest places to do it.

Committee chair says Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill may not be considered

Stephen Tashobya, the Chair of the Parliamentary and Legal Affairs Committee in Uganda’s Parliament told me yesterday that the Anti-Homosexuality Bill may not be considered during this sesssion of Parliament.

By phone, Tashobya told me that the committee still has many important bills to get through and when asked about the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, said, “I am not sure if we will get to that one now.”

He did not know when Parliament would be called back to session but felt it would be next week at the earliest. He said he would know more at that time but was now uncertain that there would be time to move the Anti-Homosexuality Bill given the number of other bills to be considered.

This disclosure stands in contrast to Hon. Tashobya’s earlier prediction that the Anti-Homosexuality Bill would be considered very soon after the elections.

For additional posts on Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, click the link.

Note: For the record, Tashobya, nor I, said the bill has been shelved, if by shelved one means it is no longer possible to bring it up before the end of Parliament’s current session in May. While his statements indeed represent a positive development, it is premature to make a final conclusion based on a couple of sentences from the committee chair. I will have a follow up with Tashobya in a couple of weeks. Then, I think we will know more certainly where things are.

Pakistani Minister for Minority Affairs killed

Pakistani continues to fall closer to anarchy it seems as now extremists have killed another moderate leader.

Gunmen killed Pakistan’s minister for minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti, Wednesday, in the second attack this year on a high-profile figure who has opposed the country’s blasphemy law.

Witnesses say the attackers fled the scene in their car without hurting Bhatti’s driver, who then rushed him to the nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead. City Police Chief Wajid Durrani spoke to reporters outside the hospital.

The police officer said the attackers intercepted Bhatti’s official car shortly after he left his residence for work and shot him several times at close range.

The slain minister belonged to the ruling party of President Asif Ali Zardari and was the only Christian member of the federal cabinet.

Bhatti had been threatened by Muslim extremists for speaking out against Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy law.

Police are reported to have seized Taliban-linked leaflets from the scene of the attack warning opponents of the Islamic law of blasphemy will meet Bhatti’s fate. In a VOA interview last month, the Pakistani minister had spoken about threats to his life, but vowed not to bow down before the extremist forces.

“This extremism is dangerous for the stability of the country,” Bhatti said. “It is the time that the people of different faiths and the Pakistani nation stand united against the forces of intolerance, against the forces of violence. The blasphemy law is being misused to victimize the innocent people of Pakistan.”

Read the rest of the story at the link above.