Saturday Tanuki blogging:
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Saturday Tanuki blogging:
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As has now been widely reported, Bill Moyers has apologised to Reagan Cabinet and Assemblies of God member James Watt over a bogus quote. While making a speech at Harvard Medical School, Moyers said:
Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, ‘after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back’.
The Washington Post recently ran a piece making the same allegation. Alas, Watt never said any such thing, although he was, notoriously, the head of the anti-environmentalist Mountain States Legal Foundation before joining Reagan’s staff. And (this was news to me), a real quote from Watt that is often used to show his anti-environmentalism (and, by association, Reagan’s apocalypticism) was taken out of context:
I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.
This bit is famous, and supposedly shows that Watt did not see much need to care about the future. But the next sentence adds:
Whatever it is, we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.
Brian Carnell and Frank E Lockhart have looked into the origins of the bogus quote (links from Christianity Today). Here’s Lockhart’s take:
Pressed by skeptical readers for the source of Watt’s congressional testimony, [freelance Grist writer Glenn] Scherer pointed them to an obscure source – a 1990 book by a defrocked Assemblies of God preacher and former circus ringmaster named Austin Miles.
Miles’ book, “Setting the Captives Free”, attacks the Assemblies of God denomination, the United States government, the Bible (“the greatest fraud the world has ever known”) and Watt – the first member of the Assemblies of God ever to serve in a presidential cabinet.
…The Watt quote appears on page 229 of “Setting the Captives Free,” but the book does not claim that the statement was made before Congress.
In a phone interview last week, Miles said the statement was made on televangelist Jim Bakker’s “PTL Club” program in Charlotte, N.C. at some point in the 1970s or 1980s.
For a man with few identifiable talents, Austin Miles seems to be remarkably effective in getting noticed by peddling falsehoods. In 2002 he wrote an article for ASSIST Ministries which contained a bogus quote attributed to Michael Newdow and an accusation of perjury (The article is gone, but a statement from ASSIST can be read here). As I noted on this blog last year, Miles also railed against Newdow at the now-defunct BushCountry.org and last June Newdow successfully sued for libel.
Miles’s alleged Watt quote comes from a period in his life when he had been defrocked from the Assemblies of God and had become an atheist. He later converted back to Christianity, since when he has (according to Shy David) peddled quack medicines and been in trouble with the law for publishing the home address of a sheriff deputy who was investigating him. More recently, he has jumped on the inflammatory anti-Muslim bandwagon (see this profile from World O’Crap, scroll down to number four).
UPDATE: Watt milks it to death in the Washington Times.
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Argument is raging in the UK over a new law against incitement to religious hatred, passed in the Commons the day before yesterday and now before the Lords. Laws against racial hatred and incitement to violence already exist, and were recently used to jail a Muslim cleric, but some feel that further restrictions are required. The Guardian has published a letter by the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, in favour of the new statute:
…Currently, some religious groups, such as Jews and Sikhs, are protected from incitement to hatred under the law. Others, such as Muslims and Christians, are not. This inconsistency is exploited by the extreme right.
Recent figures by the Crown Prosecution Service at the end of January showed 50% of religiously aggravated offences were directed against Muslims.
…The criminalisation of incitement to racial hatred in 1986 did not put artists, authors and comedians out of work nor prevent them from using their media to tackle controversial issues. Freedom of speech must be upheld. But not a freedom to urge people to whip up hatred against people because they are Jews or Sikhs or Muslims.
Prominent among those opposed to the law are Rowan Atkinson, Salman Rushdie and the Barnabas Fund. Atkinson’s prominence might seem strange to Americans who know him primarily as Mr Bean, but Atkinson made his name in satire, including involvement with a marvellous song, “Ayatollah, Don’t Khomeini Closer” (More recently he caused upset with a sketch in which he played a vicar explaining his views on oral sex while dipping a communion wafer into wine). Atkinson complained that:
the only safety valve that they have put in the legislation is the fact that the attorney general will have the final say…A safety valve operated by a politician subject to the political agendas of the day is not to me a good enough safety valve…The incitement of religious hatred doesn’t even have to be intended, it is just if it offends any person…It couldn’t be more broad…This is undoubtedly a politically motivated move on the government’s part because they think it will give them some advantage among certain religious groups in the imminent general election
Meanwhile, Salman Rushdie adds:
The pressure of members of English PEN has wrested a late concession from the government, which has renamed the proposed offence “hatred against persons on racial or religious grounds”. But the danger the legislation carries for freedom of speech, while diminished, remain.
…The idea that any kind of free society can be constructed in which people will never be offended or insulted is absurd. So too is the notion that people should have the right to call on the law to defend them against being offended or insulted. A fundamental decision needs to be made: do we want to live in a free society or not?
…The ability of this law to protect “the Muslims” seems to me arguable. It is entirely possible that instead it will be used against Muslims before it’s used against anyone else. There are identifiable racist and right-wing groups in this country who would argue that Muslims are the ones inciting religious hatred, and these groups will use, or try to use, this law.
The Barnabas Fund, which exists to highlight persecution of Christians abroad, is also unhappy. ASSIST reports (their footnotes here made into hyperlinks):
The proposed legislation, which forms Schedule 10 of the Serious Organized Crime and Police Bill, was passed by the House of Commons on Monday 7 February and now proceeds to the Lords, according to a press release obtained by ASSIST News Service (ANS). [1]. Both in Committee and at Report Stage the government consistently rejected reasonable amendments which, though not perfect, would have reduced the risk the law poses to legitimate free speech.
The release says: “The law is tucked away on just 3 pages of this otherwise unrelated bill. Members of Parliament from all sides of the house were outraged by the very limited time allowed by the government for discussion of this crucially important issue with potentially huge ramifications for free speech”
ASSIST also notes:
in the Report Stage debate in the Commons Mr Khalid Mahmood, a Labour MP, appeared to give the impression that he personally did not rule out the possible application of the law in the case of The Satanic Verses [4]. When pressed on this point Home Office minister Hazel Blears avoided giving a direct confirmation that Salman Rushdie could not be prosecuted under the law [5]…Further information on the proposed law banning Incitement to Religious Hatred is available on Barnabas Fund’s website [7].
One thing that hasn’t really been remarked on is that religious hatred was actually pretty central to British identity for a long time, and this heritage can still be seen in parts of the UK. Wren’s Monument to the Fire of London blames “frenzied Popery” for the calamity (although the note has been amended); the Shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham in Norfolk (used by Roman Catholics and high Anglicans) is regularly picketed by dour Reformed fundamentalists. The town of Lewes, in my home county of East Sussex, famously celebrates the 5th of November (“Bonfire Night” in the UK) by burning effigies of the Pope and carrying anti-Catholic banners. And of course, while it may be simplistic to label the Northern Ireland conflict as religious, for many people it is epitomised by Ian Paisley’s outbursts against Popery and Romish superstition.
I suppose this gets so little notice because nobody really takes it seriously outside Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland. Lewes Bonfire Night is seen as just a bit of history (although when I went in 1995 I saw one reveller making comments supporting Northern Ireland Loyalist terrorists); anti-Catholic Reformed Christians are few in number, and they look and talk like they’ve fallen through a time wormhole from the 1950s (the same goes for the Seventh-Day Adventists). All they evoke is vague bemusement and ridicule – and those discussing the rights and wrongs of the new law appear to have forgotten they even exist.
(Rushdie link from The Revealer)
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Back on April 1 last year, Hal Lindsey used his WorldNetDaily column to promote shares in Zion Oil:
A man named John Brown – without much more than his faith – has put together an oil company and purchased leases in a specific place in Israel. It is a in a location that is very much a part of some important prophecies in the Old Testament. He founded the Zion Oil and Gas Company as the result of studying prophecies God proclaimed to two of the sons of the Patriarch Jacob.
Lindsey then did some bizarre Biblical exegesis to prove that there is oil in Israel, and concluded:
At this moment, Zion Oil and Gas is selling stock in order to finish its first well. It is right in the center of an area that geologically looks promising. I believe the main reason others have failed to find oil is that they did not drill deep enough.
Investment in oil exploration is always a big gamble. But, I believe this is a gamble worth taking for the sake of Israel. Besides, I believe God’s Word is giving some pretty good clues here.
What Lindsey didn’t mention was that one of the directors of Zion Oil was Ralph DeVore, who had an 18.1% share in the company. As I noted in an update to my original blog entry on this, not only is DeVore also a director of Hal Lindsey’s ministries, he is actually Lindsey’s cousin – and so Hal was using his WND column to puff his cousin’s shares, without disclosing his family’s interest.
But now, a January 5 pdf report on the Zion Oil website has announced that DeVore resigned at the end of December 2004, and includes some juicy correspondence between him and the other company directors. It seems the problem began in July, when DeVore sent a breathless letter, full of Biblical quotations, exclamation marks and bizarre capitalisations, to Brown and his Vice-President Glen Parry:
Last night (Sat., 7-24) the Lord woke me up. I could not go back to sleep. He was troubling my spirit about Zion Oil! Lately I have been intensifying my prayer time, asking the Lord Jesus why Zion has not reached its minimum offering. I have been asking Him to show me what, if anything, is standing in the way of completing at least the $6.5 million minimum offering before August 31st.
…The following is what the Lord Jesus through His Holy Spirit revealed to me concerning the present state of Zion:
After complaining about the lack of corporate prayer, DeVore gets down to what’s really bothering him:
IS ZION OIL PRIMARILY AN EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN CORPORATION? IS ZION OIL PRIMARILY A JEWISH ORGANIZATION? OR IS ZION 70% EVANGELICAL AND 30% JEWISH or THE OTHER WAY AROUND? IS ZION 50% EVANGELICAL AND 50% JEWISH? Some belief will dominate!…If the majority of Zion’s Leadership is guilty of vacillating between Christianity and Judaism, then the Word of God states that we are guilty of “Syncretism”! The MIXING OF GOD’S WORD WITH OTHER RELIGIONS! THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE CALLS THIS REBELLION TOWARDS GOD! IF THIS IS TRUE ABOUT THE MAJORITY OF ZION’S LEADERSHIP, THE WORD OF GOD ALSO SAYS WE ARE BEING “DOUBLE MINDED”.
An another memo, to CEO Gene Soltero, DeVore wrote:
…I personally believe that over 90% of the shares that have been purchased from our current IPO are due in some way to Hal [Lindsey]‘s TV reporting on Zion’s oil exploration activities. On his TV show, Hal openly spoke about John Brown & Zion Oil being an Evangelical Christian organization with Evangelical Christian Leadership!
John Brown then wrote to DeVore, urging him to resign or face being removed after the next board meeting in Tel Aviv. Concerning this meeting, Brown writes:
if you do attend, then I will expect that you will openly share your true feelings and concerns and tell our Jewish brethren exactly how you feel about them as non-believers in Jesus taking over Zion.
Needless to say, in his next communication DeVore takes offence to the suggestion that he is a religious bigot. But it is in the final document, from Soltero to DeVore, that the real reason for DeVore’s sudden objection to non-Evangelicals in the company can be divined:
Prior to and during the public offering registration process you repeatedly committed to organize presentations by John [Brown] to large groups of prospective investors in the Houston area. After the effective date of our registration you failed to organize a single meeting. Based on your representations and commitments we went through the expensive process of qualifying by exemption to sell to Texas residents. This required us to have a minimum offering of $6.5 million which we failed to meet. Your inaction severely harmed Zion in two ways. If we hadn’t relied on you for Texas investors we could have not required such a high minimum and our offering would have succeeded with the $3.7 million we did raise. We didn’t see any of the money we thought would be coming from your arrangements and commitments…Please do not call my cell phone again or bother me at home. You may communicate with me solely at the office.
In other words, the company failed to reach its minimum offering because they took DeVore’s advice, but DeVore failed to keep his end up. DeVore then received a message from God blaming the fiasco on the fact that too many Jews were involved with the company, undermining its Christian character. Another great moment for Christian Zionism…
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Just two weeks ago Stephen Prothero had this to say about religion in America:
Austrians, Norwegians and the Irish can tell you about the Seven Deadly Sins or the Five Pillars of Islam. But, according to a 1997 poll, only one out of three U.S. citizens is able to name the most basic of Christian texts, the four Gospels, and 12% think Noah’s wife was Joan of Arc. That paints a picture of a nation that believes God speaks in Scripture but that can’t be bothered to read what he has to say.
But that might be about to change, according to this snippet from the body formerly known as the Christian Booksellers Association (received via email), reporting on a conference speaker:
Thom Rainer, Billy Graham School of Missions dean [at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary] and Church Central president, said Christian apologetics is a coming hot book genre. Cultural conflicts between religions, heightened by the war on terrorism, will drive churches to understand other faiths while defending and spreading Christianity. Rainer’s recent research found many churches are forming apologetics departments to help Christians to understand what and why they believe.
Rainer’s Church Central Associates, which offers “Church Health Surveys”, can be seen here. But what if the church-goers find themselves disagreeing with what it is they’ve found out they believe?…
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WorldNetDaily reports breathlessly on a new book published by Xulon Press (a Christian self-publishing outfit used by Doug Giles, among others). Over to WND:
“The Nephilim and the Pyramid of the Apocalypse” presents an explanation for an unusual verse in the first book of the Bible, Genesis 6:4, which reads: “There were giants (Nephilim) in the Earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men and they bare children to them.”
The book’s author, Patrick Heron, says on his website that his is the only first in-depth book to throw light on the mysterious Nephilim and “to provide evidence of who built the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico and other great monuments of ancient history.”
Well, not quite the first book. SZ at World O’Crap notes:
Heron’s book does seem to be the only one about Nephilim and pyramids. However, some of the other 20 or Nephilim books floating around also sound pretty interesting. For instance, Nephilim: The First Human Clones–Why Their Existence Led to Noah’s Flood (“From cover to cover, Matthew Omaye Ajiake takes you on an “edge-of-your-seat” journey into the creation of humanity, human cloning, the Immaculate Conception, and the human quest for eternal life”). And then there’s Chronicle of the Awakenings: A Guide to Past Lives for Nephilim by Shannon Appel. While there’s no description given, the title alone is enough to sell it. And how about Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s Fallen Angels and the Origins of Evil (“Did rebel angels take on human bodies to fulfill their lust for the ‘daughters of men’? Did these fallen angels teach men to build weapons of war?”)
I’ll add to that list a novel, The Nephilim Seed, by James Scott Bell (“Harvard biology professor Bently Davis is the acclaimed voice of reason against the Intelligent Design movement and a controlling partner in UniGen, a small biotech startup. ‘Nephilim Seed’ is Davis’s shorthand name for a project that will use injectable synthetic genes to create superintelligence in humans and free participants of emotions including religious ones”).
Heron’s book is now in the top ten in the Amazon.com charts. Heron’s website makes available the introduction and the first three (quite short) chapters. Chapter one introduces us to a scholar of bygone days:
The esteemed architect and escatologiest, Clarence Larkin, made the following observations.
What’s an “escatologiest”? I take it Heron means “eschatologist” rather than “escapologist”. Larkin was a turn-of-the-century American pastor mostly famous for his Byzantine and headache-inducing “end of the world” prophetic charts. Heron uses Larkin to describe the Great Pyramid, since copying out of some old second-hand book is easier than consulting academic works by modern Egyptologists. So on to his quote of Larkin:
…Taking the Hebrew cubit to be 25.025 inches, the length of each side of the base is 365.2422 cubits, the exact number of days in the solar year (including the extra day for every 4 years).
Amazing! But…why should we “take” the Hebrew cubit to be this figure? According to my New Jerusalem Bible “Measures and Money” supplement (on page 2074):
In the Old Testament the standard unit is the cubit (a forearm, so about 45cm/18 inches)
Ahh, but there is also the “sacred cubit” and the “pyramid inch”, units which can inferred by “Pyramidolgists” without the bother of having to learn ancient languages, etc. The problem is that Heron doesn’t (apparently) really know anything about the background to the pseudo-science of “Pyramidology”. Larkin took his details from Charles Piazzi Smyth, a nineteenth century Scottish astronomer (and uncle of Robert Baden-Powell). According to the New England Skeptical Society:
Using a ‘casing stone’ – one of the stones that originally covered the outside of the Pyramid – Smyth discovered a ‘pyramid inch’ and used it to measure all kinds of fascinating things, including the…history of the world. The basic premise was that God directed the building of the Great Pyramid and put all the symbolism in it for us to eventually find. Many people don’t know that the founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Charles Taze Russel, was an ardent pyramidologist, although the Jehovah’s Witnesses have dropped that aspect of their beliefs.
However:
the casing stone used by Smyth to calculate the ‘Pyramid Inch’ turned out to be a different size from just about every casing stone subsequently found.
But back to Heron’s Larkin quote:
…The angle of slope of the sides is 10 to 9. That is, for every 10 feet you ascend, you rise in altitude 9 feet. And if you multiply the altitude of the pyramid by 10 raised to the power of 9, you have 91,840,000, which in miles, is the exact distance of the sun from the earth!
Indeed, Strange But Bullshit. A variant of this claim is repeated in the work of Grant Jeffrey, a contemporary “prophecy teacher” whom Jack Kinsella sometimes steals (crap) ideas from. Jeffrey claims the Great Pyramid is a billionth of the distance of the earth from the sun. However, as amateur Egyptologist Larry Orcutt points out (after discussing Jeffrey):
The height of the Great Pyramid is 485 feet:
Height of the pyramid times one billion = 91,856,061 miles
Distance of the earth from the sun = 92,960,000 miles
Okay, so what’s a million miles or so? Astronomically, the numbers may be close, but is this similarity meaningful, or even interesting?
Larkin goes on to discuss astronomy and also tells us that:
The Great Pyramid stands at the exact centre of the world. It is midway between the west coast of Mexico and the east coast of China. Between the north cape of Norway and the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. It stands at the intersection of the 30th parallel, both latitude and longitude.
Orcutt shows us Smyth’s chart that “proves” this, then points out its shortcomings – shortcomings that seem not to have even entered Heron’s head.
In chapter two, Heron changes topics completely for no apparent reason and writes an uncritical précis of The Bible Code, Michael Drosnin clearly being a soul-mate.
The original “Pyramidologists” argued that the Great Pyramid must have been created by God (using the Hebrew slaves) as evidence for his existence. In the 60s, Erich von Daniken rehashed the theory for popular a “UFO” readership. Heron, in contrast, argues that the Great Pyramid was created by the offspring of fallen angels and humans. As quoted by WND:
The result of the unions, Heron says, were the Nephilim, Hebrew for giants, that are mentioned in verse 4. The fathers, also are referred to as Nephilim, which also means “the fallen ones.” The author says the fathers were malevolent spirits, or demons.
The Nephilim, then, were “a hybrid of demons and men. They were evil and wicked by nature and could not be rehabilitated and made good, for the evil was in their genes.”
Yes, angels and demons have DNA. But Heron does have tradition on his side – as my Bible notes,
Later Judaism and almost all of the earliest ecclesiastical writers identify the ‘sons of God’ with the fallen angels.
Back to Heron:
These giants and others, Heron writes, actually practiced genetic engineering, citing the fact that it took two spies to carry back one cluster of grapes on a staff between them.
Perhaps the most famous biblical Nephilim was Goliath, the man who stood over 13 feet tall and was slain by shepherd boy David.
So where does that leave the Jolly Green Giant? But this is where Heron’s tomfoolery turns sinister. The idea that evil can be found “in the genes” of particular people has a worrying pedigree. The Bible clearly states that Goliath was a Philistine – and I’ve personally heard Christian Zionists describe the Palestinians as the “Philistinim”, and so identified with the Israelites’ ancient enemy.
But why did the Nephilim build the Pyramid?
I have become convinced that the pyramidal shape is a demonic exercise in counterfeit design, for I believe that the pyramid is a paradigm of the City of God which is at present in the heavens and which was seen and described by John in chapter 21 of the Apocalypse
But that’s not all: the Nephilim will soon be back, hence the lurid “Pyramid of the Apocalypse” part of the title. Heron tells us:
It is the first book to show that the dark forces which roamed the Earth in those primeval times will once again be at large during the coming Apocalypse, with the purpose of visiting mass destruction on an unsuspecting world…
WARNING!
THIS BOOK IS NOT FICTION
Heron, who is based in Ireland, lists a theology degree from The College of Biblical Research in Rome City, Indiana. However, it looks like this is really “The Way College of Biblical Research”, which became defunct in 1997. Although Heron says he is now non-affiliated to any church, this connects him to The Way International, a controversial para-Christian New Religious Movement that no longer operates (Xulon’s other Christian authors are going to love this!)
Brad Reed notes that WND ran a daily poll on the subject. He has preserved the results for us:
What do you think the Nephilim mentioned in the Bible refer to?
1.) The offspring of angels who mated with human women 26.88% (733)
2.) I don’t know, this is one of the great mysteries of all time 24.86% (678)
3.) ‘Fallen ones,’ beyond that, I’m just not sure 11.07% (302)
4.) Giant human beings 9.20% (251)
5.) Angels who mated with human women 8.21% (224)
(A conservative Christian takedown of Pyramidology can be read here. Pyramidology was also a big part of the British-Israelite movement.)
UPDATE: Heron’s book is now being made into a TV show, courtesy of pseudo-documentary maker David Balsiger. See here.
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JERSEY CITY, N.J. — The FBI is trying to determine whether an Islamic Web site that tracked users of an online chat room had anything to do with the killings of a Christian Egyptian family…The New York Sun report published Monday quoted one barsomyat.com member writing on the Web site, “This is a picture of the filthy dog, curser of Muhammad, and a photo of his filthy wife, curser of Muhammad. They got what they deserved for their actions in America.”
“You are a bad Belgian and you have signed your own death warrant.”
That was the message to factory owner Rik Remmery when he opened his mail one morning just before Christmas.
…”December,” another letter read “will be a nightmare.” The death threats against Rik were caused by one simple fact – he employed a Muslim woman who wore a headscarf to work.
The screening of a film by Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker murdered by an alleged Islamist extremist last November, has been called off amid fears of violence.
Organisers of the Rotterdam Film Festival had hoped to screen the film Submission, which criticises Islam’s treatment of women, over the weekend. But they decided not to go ahead on the advice of the police after receiving threats. “The decision not to show Submission was made on the basis of security concerns,” the film rights holder, Column Productions, said in a statement.
UK:
BBC executives have been put under the protection of security guards as police investigate death threats made after the British TV network’s 8 January broadcast of the controverisal musical show Jerry Springer — The Opera.
Security guards monitored the North London home of Roly Keating, the Controller of BBC Two, who received threats from protesters. The homes of six other BBC executives were also targeted after an evangelical Christian group posted the addresses and telephone numbers on its website.
etc, etc…
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An interesting letter in yesterday’s Guardian (link added):
Chris Stentaza’s experience of persecution (Gay Ugandan Christian denied visa to visit UK, January 29) has become extremely common among gay Christians in Africa.
The most recent wave of imprisonments and beatings in Uganda started in 1999 when President Yoweri Museveni launched a crackdown on homosexuals, publicly supported by the Anglican archbishop.
Just last month, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission reported that the persecution of homosexuals in Uganda had intensified following the Anglican church of Uganda’s aggressive campaign against homosexuality that was launched as a direct response to the American church consecrating a gay bishop.
Throughout Africa, gay Christians are frightened, isolated and desperate. Those who are open about their sexuality are commonly excluded from church life and refused baptism and communion. They can be subjected to verbal abuse by their priests and bishops. Those working for the church are sacked.
The Anglican church has committed itself to listen to the voices of lesbian and gay people. Yet the church attacks and excludes them as soon as they make their voices heard. The bishops of the Anglican communion must make it possible for listening to take place and engage in the dialogue that it has been so repeatedly promised.
Rev Colin Coward
Director, Changing AttitudeRev Dr Giles Fraser
Chair, Inclusive ChurchRev Kelvin Holdsworth
Changing Attitude ScotlandRt Rev Barry Hollowell
Bishop of CalgaryThe Rev’d Susan Russell
President, Integrity USA
The Archbishop of Uganda is Henry Orombi, who was installed a year ago. Last summer, several parishes in Los Angeles seceded to the Church of Uganda in protest against their liberal bishop. The IGLHRC’s account of the crackdown appears in its 2004 annual report, which notes:
Based on recent reports that we received from activists in Uganda, the government is escalating the persecution of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activists and has directed the police to investigate and “take appropriate action against reported activities of homosexual associations2 at a local university. Activists in Uganda have perceived this as a direct threat to their freedom of expression and association. In addition, the Broadcasting Council of Uganda, a government agency, has imposed a fine on Radio Simba, a popular radio station, for hosting openly gay and lesbian activists on a call-in talk show. Arguing that the radio program violated Uganda’s Electronic Media Act, which prohibits broadcasting matters that are contrary to “public morality,” the Broadcasting Council of Uganda has ordered the station to publicly apologize and warned other broadcasters to “be more responsible about the content of their programs.” The government’s actions have instilled tremendous fear into the community. IGLHRC has been providing assistance to several groups as they attempt to design an effective response.
Further details from an IGLHRC spokesperson can be found on the OIA Newswire. In 1999 Museveni announced that he had instructed police investigators to “look for homosexuals, lock them up and charge them.”
A BBC interview with Christoper Senteza from 2003 can be read here. A 2002 essay by Kevin Ward from the Anglican Theological Review is also worth looking at for a bit of context. I have not been able to find any reference where Orombi has distanced himself from Museveni’s stated wish to persecute homosexuals.
(As it happens, Museveni is currently hosting TD Jakes.)
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