Ghana’s anti-LGBT+ bill seeks 10-year jail term for activists
africafeeds.com
africafeeds.com
You can't have both, it's a fight over which one is more important.
Of course you can. Most religious people the world over are tolerant and accepting in their beliefs.
The "tolerant and accepting" ones are the ones the churches would call "apostate" or "heretical."
One, most of those texts have been translated and transliterated many times over. Two, it's no shock that every religion heavily editorialists its scripture. Three, the only people calling out heretics and apostates among their flock are, almost by definition, the extremists.
TL; DR You can be well received in the eyes of your God(s) without having to promote or support the murder and oppression of your fellow human beings.
Second, the claim "You can be well received in the eyes of your God" is a religious statement, because you don't know what my God is.
Third, "heretics and apostates among their flock are, almost by definition, the extremists." Maybe religion itself is "extreme" and most of its followers are lax, not that the followers are tolerant and there are a few extreme and intolerant members.
"Oppose the agenda" is opposition to their right to exist as equal members of society. (In places like Ghana, the "agenda" is survival.)
> maybe religion itself is "extreme" and most of its followers are lax
This is a hypothesis. It's falsified by the observation of numerous tolerant and religious societies.
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-bible-on...
Finally, as much as it pains me to say it, there is also the matter of logical consistency: Many Christians would go absolutely ape shit if they were stopped in a store while wearing a cross and told "hey, your kind isn't wanted here"; yet because their preferred exclusion is noted in an old book (which of course, they wrote) that is suddenly perfectly acceptable.
He objected to making them a personalized cake that endorsed their relationship on it, which would require his creativity to be poured into something explicitly endorsing the issue. And his argument is that if he can be forced to write something endorsing their relationship, why couldn't, say, a racist come in demanding he write something racist on a cake?
I don't really object to that balance. If it's something generic and impersonal, sell it, and if it's something very personal, have the right to object. That's not significant exclusion from society. Are you truly significantly excluded from society when you can get the same service from a 7 minute walk to Walmart (as the court case declared), or buy some icing and do it yourself?
It doesn't need to be everyone to have a chilling effect on the quality of life for people in the targeted group. I'm all for freedom of expression in general but treating someone badly because of how they were born is just mean.
To ask the liberal state to do otherwise is nonsense. If you want to exercise your religion in a way that exceeds the bounds that are set for you by the state, you have to step outside of your fantasy and engage directly in politics to convince the rest of society that your religion should have greater authority than the state. If you actually believe that your religion is greater than all others, then you should be able to prove it in the political realm.
Well, you've got Saudi Arabia, and countless Arab nations. You've got Israel, and there's also Vatican City (which is a nation inside Italy, albeit a small one).
However they aren't exactly popular in liberal society...
Wow, well put!
There is a science researching those topics, it’s called Religious Studies. It is to theology what chemistry is to alchemy.
By definition, Science does not work on Religion, but that does not make the religion false (because you could have a soul even though science cannot prove it), but rather shows you are hitting the limits of what Science alone can achieve.
And it is not fair, in that case, to call a Bible Scholar not a Scholar because their field intrinsically cannot use what people call "Science."
And it’s perfectly fair to call out someone who is pretending to be a scholar, despite being just a propaganda officer, trained to only repeat, never question.
Actually, as a lifelong Christian, that's...disputed. A very common interpretation is that they were destroyed for violating the obligations of hospitality to guests. Even assuming an absence of translation error in the phrase translated as indicating a desire to use the guests sexually (itself a point of intense debate), the offense isn't “gay sex” but “demanding to have guests turned over to be gang-raped”.
I think most people would agree that there is a giant moral gulf between the morality of consensual sex and the morality of demanding someone turn over guests to a rape mob.
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-bible-on...
You can disagree, but they aren't idiots, they've thought about things. They've had over 2,000 years to think about it. Homosexuality has been around since the Roman era and much earlier.
TIL that the Romans invented homosexuality.
You seem to be ignoring the parts that split with the Roman Catholics long before Protestantism was dreamed up (in the case of the Oriental Orthodox and Church of the East, more than 1000 years before.)
So while that works with some of the arguments people sometimes make from Leviticus, it doesn’t help with the rules on sexual morality.
No, we're here today because of religion. You owe many of the luxuries of modern life because of the Golden Age of Islam. Your definition of "criminal" just happens to follow the latest fad of the day. Read https://www.kirkdurston.com/blog/unwin for a very brief overview.
Hitler leveraged religion as a tool rather than getting rid of it, and did pretty much the same kind of things as the others (which is individually worse is debatable, though Hitler generally “wins” that competition), so he kind of pretty clearly demonstratee that “getting rid of religion” isn't the source of the problem.
Christianity doesn't have a single unitary rule of sexuality and not all forms of Christianity prohibit homosexuality, even in terms of thr general doctrine of organized groups. And even within organized groups whose official doctrine says one thing, there are dissenters on various points, and homosexuality is a common one.
Moreover, I’ve been responding to points about arguments from what the Bible says, which is a distinct thing from what (any form of) Christianity says. Christians (both organized groups and, within them, individuals) have a variety of approaches to the role of the Bible and its interpretation. There's no strong, general reason to comment about the doctrine of my religion (personally or organizationally) in a discussion of the content of the Bible.
Why are you so eager to jump into a subthread where it is irrelevant and point out that your religion prohibits homosexuality?
This is simply false as a generalization of Judaism and Christianity. For that matter, it seems to be untrue as a generalization of Islam, as well, as their are organized Islamic groups that deny that the anti-gay stance is doctrinally valid, juat as there are in the other two groups.
In all three there is a historical nominal prohibition of homosexuality, in at least Islam and Christianity that got treated a lot more seriously than it was for moat of history sometime in the last couple centuries, and in all three there are modern movements, and both organized groups with distinct clergy that reject the traditional prohibition and movements within organized groups that still uphold the prohibition which nevertheless reject it.
None can claim to be the only one to stick universally to the prohibition without playing No True Scotsman (which, to be fair, religious groups historically do a lot of.)
It is absolutely, unconditionally true in Islam. It is established in Islam that anyone who denies a core established aspect of the religion (the term used is معلوم من الدين بالضرورة) is no longer Muslim. For example, you can't be a Muslim if you deny the Oneness of God.
Homosexuality is absolutely and clearly prohibited in the Quran and many Hadiths, e.g.[1][2]. These things are not open to interpretation at all.
> None can claim to be the only one to stick universally to the prohibition without playing No True Scotsman
Attempting to apply a fallacy to where it doesn't apply is a fallacy in and of itself. I'm sure you won't entertain when a flat earther or antivaxxer applies the no true scotsman. At some point, we have laws and clear cut texts that are not open to interpretation. The prohibition of homosexuality in Islam is one of them. Anyone who attempts to deny it can be trivially torn apart because the texts are so clear and unanimous. Those "groups" you're referring to are laughable, and have no understanding of the basics of Arabic, let alone Quran and Hadith knowledge, Arabian history, scholarly consensus, etc.
[1] https://quran.com/26/165-166 [2] https://quran.com/7/81-82
Anybody can make up whatever bullshit they want and call it a religious belief, and when that doesn’t violate someone else’s rights, then fine, you do you. But just because you believe some bullshit or another doesn’t mean you have the right to trample my civil rights.
I have a difficult time disentangling chicken and egg. Would a society in Ghana's state wind up with similarly-hateful policies absent religion? That is, does the situation create the calling to which religion happened to be proximate this time, but, in its absence, some other organized majority (e.g. nationalists) would rise? (More practically: is targeting the religion the most efficient way to solve the problem.)
The irony of all this being such policies promot the situation. Such laws encourage brain drain. They de facto bar many foreign firms from investing or even letting their employees visit. They also add friction to every foreign aid talk.
1. “The law, given to us by Christ themselves, requires us to condemn and fight against <insert any of the Human Rights>“
2. Eventually the society forces the Church to stop this nonsense
3. “The Church has always been a proponent of <that same human right>“
4. GOTO 1
This is a slow process, so people no longer remember the Church was against eg woman voting rights, or against freedom of thought or freedom of religion. Same way in a hundred years nobody will remember it used to be homophobic.
Women voting rights was never doctrinal - no Catholic was bound to believe women should or should not be able to vote, it was just a popular opinion among the laity with room for disagreement.
"Freedom of thought" - the Catholic Church, was, is, and remains against certain types of thought. You can't be a Satanist for example. However, other types of thought are once again not doctrinal, so it is a matter of personal opinion again.
"Freedom of religion" - the Catholic Church once again does not put this in doctrine and has not edited doctrine, but once again there is a popular opinion that may change, but nobody is obligated to have an opinion on it.
The opinions of it's members are changing, but the doctrines (the things you must believe) remain unchanged, even when unpopular. The Church's ban on birth control is very unpopular among the laity but hasn't moved.
Your problem here is you seem to believe anyone cares about the (largely made up) distinction between doctrinal vs non-doctrinal, which in real life doesn’t matter at all.
However, there is no dispute about what is doctrinal. There is instead dispute about how that doctrine is put in practice. Such as can a Pope do Action A without being doctrinally not Pope anymore, and what non-doctrinal process would need to follow.
https://www.africaproactive.com/blog/releasethe21-the-lgbtq-...
Russia 25 years later: This rainbow-colored ice cream is too gay.[2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phxQFEH51SE
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-53319505
In what world would this be a source of fake asylum claims? The potential for actual persecution that meets the internationally recognized standard for asylum seems apparent in this case.
What I do think is that the presence of immigration scams is as old as borders themselves, and that there's no particular reason to refocus an article that's about actual persecution onto handwringing about whether people will (quelle suprise) lie to obtain a better life for themselves and their loved ones.
Link 1:
> it's not uncommon for gay and lesbian Nigerians to get married simply to keep up appearances. When they come to Canada, they struggle to come to terms with their decision and assume they must be bisexual
...sounds like a good reason to leave and claim asylum.
Out of 2,055 Nigerians:
> a few lawyers were responsible for a "disproportionate" number of claims
Link 2:
...so a whole criminal enterprise is prepping fake asylum seekers but not even 15% of them are possibly fraudulent?
Link 3:
A whole 9!