Uganda Humanist Schools Trust benefits from PTT

This blog’s parent organisation, the UK gay humanist charity the Pink Triangle Trust (PTT), has become one of the sponsors of the Uganda Humanist Schools Trust (UK).

The UHST was established as a charity in 2008 to raise funds to support schools founded by the Uganda Humanist Association. The schools offer “an alternative liberal-secular education, are open to all children irrespective of their family beliefs and reject all forms of indoctrination”.

The PTT was set up in 1992 to advance the education of the public, and particularly of lesbians and gay men, in the principles and practice of humanism, and to advance the education of the public, and particularly of humanists, about all aspects of homosexuality.

Its work to date has included the nationwide provision of humanist “affirmation” ceremonies for same-sex couples as the alternative to a Christian “blessing; the publication of a unique online (and formerly print) magazine, Gay & Lesbian Humanist; the publication of a variety of leaflets “Introducing the Humanist Tradition”; setting this blog and an e-discussion list, Gaytheist (see sidebar for how to join up).

Last year it became a sponsor of the UK LGBT History Month and it has now provided funding for a storeroom at one of the Uganda Humanist Association schools so that books and other resources can be stored securely.

The PTT secretary George Broadhead said, “The PTT trustees think it is very important to support humanist projects as well as gay ones and the one in Uganda is obviously a very worthy recipient.

“The Uganda Humanist Association is a beacon of light in a country that seems riddled with religious bigotry and where draconian antigay legislation is still pending.”

Spineless UK government acts to prevent arrest of Ratzo – surprise, surprise!

We knew it would happen, of course. The spineless UK government is trying to prevent attempts to have that nasty piece of work from Rome arrested when he plonks his dainty red jackboot on our (i.e. British) soil in September.

Well, I agree, it would be a diplomatic disaster – but changing laws for the sake of a child-abuse conspirator who deals out death with his edicts on condoms and abortion and the dignities and rights of gay people?

Values? Don’t talk to me about values!

Gay marriage in Argentina is the work of the Devil, says a Catholic – so it must be right, then

Gay marriage in Argentina? Who’d have thought it?

But it’s happening.

This blog’s parent organisation’s secretary, George Broadhead, is chuffed about it:

“What is so welcome about this is that, like the Spanish, the Argentine government has cocked a snook at the dominant Catholic Church and no doubt enraged that frightful homophobe in the Vatican.”

Pink News, linked to above, says: “The Pope’s number one in the country, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, even claimed it was the work of the devil.”

Yeah. Well, if there is a devil, you are his spawn, and so is the entire Catholic hierarchy. God had to get something wrong, and he did it when he allowed his fallen angel to create organised religion.

It was probably on the seventh day, when he was supposed to have rested, but got so pissed he made his own pact with the Devil, and challenged him to create an organisation that could totally fuck up the world. The Devil succeeded.

Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner supports the legislation, and says that sentiments such as those of mentally subnormal Cardinal Bergoglio (my description, not hers!) “send us back to medieval times and the Inquisition”.

UK government shuts down pope petition rather than risk embarrassment – claim

Peter Tatchell

It seems that the UK’s toff leader and prime minister David Cameron has shut down a petition on the Downing Street website so the government won’t be embarrassed about Pope Ratzo’s visit in September.

That’s if Peter Tatchell is to be believed. And, since everything is verifiable, why not?

Tatchell is furious. More signatures would inevitably have been collected if the petition had run to September, as he says it was intended to do.

As you can see from the link above, the government’s response to the petition that many of us signed is just the usual whitewash.

A good day for the Daily Hate

Some interesting words from the never-less-than-interesting Symon Hill at the ever-helpful Christian think tank Ekklesia, concerning gay asylum seekers, which, of course, to the brain-deads in Tabloid World are the ultimate evil.

Under the heading A field day for the right-wing press, he begins with an old joke: “[T]he way to confuse Daily Mail readers is to tell them that asylum-seekers are the natural enemies of homosexuals.

“This wouldn’t have worked last week,” he writes “when the Supreme Court ruled in favour of two gay asylum-seekers, giving the right-wing media the opportunity to go into full scaremongering mode, firing off prejudiced comments about two groups handily combined into one.”

His article continues:

“Now asylum if you’re gay” roared the front-page headline in the Daily Express, as if asylum had been guaranteed to all gay people – which, of course, it has not.

The Supreme Court has ruled that people fleeing homophobic persecution should not simply be sent back and told to hide their sexuality. This has previously been common practice.

Helped along by an extremely ill-chosen comment by one of the judges, the papers were able to quote his words with no context and promote homophobic stereotypes about gay people going to Kylie concerts and drinking cocktails.

Anti-immigrant prejudice was also in full swing, with the Daily Star publishing an editorial headed “No room for gays”. It claimed that “millions more people” will now be able to claim asylum and get “a cushy life in Britain” (it doesn’t explain what’s so cushy about living in a country in which the media daily encourage your neighbours to fear and hate you).

The Daily Mail enthusiastically quoted Andrew Green, the scaremongering chairman of Migration Watch, who said, “This could lead to a potentially massive explosion of asylum claims as it could apply to literally millions of people around the world”.

His claim is as inaccurate as it is irresponsible. Recent analysis showed that 98 per cent of people fleeing homophobic persecution are refused asylum in the UK, compared to 77 per cent of asylum-seekers generally. Even if the number of successful gay asylum-seekers increases several times over, it would still be pretty small.

Also, as Paul Canning writes on the website of LGBT Asylum News, there have not been floods of LGBT asylum-seekers to Canada, despite its far more welcoming policy.

In an attempt to whip up even more fear, there have been claims that Britain will now be flooded not only with gay asylum-seekers but with people “claiming they’re gay” (to use the Daily Star’s words). The implication is that sexuality can’t be proved, so anyone could claim to be gay or bisexual.

But nor can religion be proved. Anyone fleeing an oppressive Islamic regime could claim to be Christian and at risk of religious persecution. The possibility of making such a claim untruthfully hasn’t caused a flood of asylum-seekers from such countries.

The homophobia implicit in the reporting reveals that – despite how far we’ve come – we still have a very long way to go to achieve a general recognition of the rights of sexual minorities. The xenophobia with which it has been combined is characteristic of the tendency of certain papers to blame Britain’s problems on the most vulnerable groups in society. Anyone would think that the economic crisis had been caused not by bankers and millionaires but by a sinister coalition of asylum-seekers, benefit claimants, gay people and Muslims.

The last year has seen growing support for democratic reform and changes to political systems so that powerful people are held to account. We need to recognise that the press is one of the most powerful institutions in our society. With parts of the press consistently using their power to attack the most vulnerable, we need to ask how that power can be challenged and changed. Freedom of speech means little when some have freedom to be heard and others do not.

Well said. Short of censorship and state interference, I don’t know how you combat this, but I guess it has to begin with individuals. The snivelling tabloids, and some of the broadsheets, would sit up and listen if the bottom line were in jeopardy.

Who profits from AIDS?

An international conference in Vienna later this week will be considering the following questions:

– Why has there been no AIDS epidemic in Europe or North America, despite repeated predictions over the last 25 years?

– Where is the vaccine against HIV that’s been “just around the corner” since 1985?

– What’s happened to the tens of billions of dollars invested in AIDS over the last 25 years?

– How did Africa manage to double its population in the last two decades while we were told the continent was drowning in disaster?

– How did Uganda become one of the fastest-growing countries today, even though it’s been hit harder by HIV/AIDS than any other African nation? And how did it overcome the epidemic without AIDS drugs?

– Why has the discoverer of HIV, Prof. Luc Montagnier, declared that “someone with a good immune system can get rid of HIV within a few weeks”?

Have you ever asked yourself these or other questions? Do you wonder why there are so few critical comments about HIV/AIDS in the public discourse? Are you curious to know who’s profiting from the HIV/AIDS hysteria? AIDS – Cui bono?

Do you suspect we might have been misled or fooled with HIV, just like we were fooled with “swine flu”, “bird flu”, “mad-cow disease” and other epidemics that failed to materialise?

You’ll remember the big row that developed over the question of whether HIV causes AIDS. G&LH carried an article by John Lauritsen, the well-known American “AIDS dissident”, and Digital Journal reported on that, and got oodles of comments below the story.

The Vienna conference is being held on 16–17 July (Friday and Saturday of this week).

John Lauritsen told me what his role would be. “Among other things I’ll argue that the AIDS holocaust didn’t just happen, but is based on ancient superstition – ultimately the taboo on sex between males in the Holiness Code of Leviticus. Also, of course, the AIDS holocaust rests on the huge profits of the AIDS Industry.”

Let the firefight begin!

Ratzo the Vile: he should
be crawling on bended
knee to the victims of
priestly child abuse

“Nobody should be pressing the Pope to meet victims of abuses to make a good photo opportunity,” says the leader of Roman Catholics in England and Wales, Vincent Nichols.

Then, referring to the countries worst hit by the sex scandal, he says: “The visit is in the UK, which is not Belgium, not Ireland, not the USA.”

Does that, then, diminish any one of the abuses carried out in Britain?

Does it make any one person who got boffed by a fat sweaty priest (or even a thin one) feel one iota better to know that more children suffered in Belgium and the States?

Just shows how out of touch these bloody Catholics are.

The Pope ought to be crawling to them on bended knee.

As for the cost of this bloody visit – well, keep in touch with the Protest the Pope website and see what you can do by way of campaigning.

Fancy a new look? Don’t let it go to your head!

If you fancy a fancy haircut in Iran, forget it. Mullets are out. So are ponytails and fancy quiffs and spiky hairdos.

All in the name of Islam, of course. Such hairstyles, you see, are decadent and Western and un-Islamic.

But you can have a bit of gel, it seems (don’t make it out of pork fat, though), and you don’t really have to wear a beard as a sign of religious devotion. Oh, well that’s OK, then.

More on council prayers

My blog colleague George Broadhead has been keeping his typing fingers hot recently on the question of prayers before council meetings.

We carried a post recently about the Mayor of Leicester and his decision to scrap this nonsense. We quoted a letter George had had in the Leicester Mercury, and now they’ve published another one.

Here it is:

The Bishop of Leicester rightly points out that the public proceedings at the council should not “assume an adherence to a faith where none exists” and his declaration of respect and value for those whose outlook is secular is welcome, if somewhat patronising.

Indeed, this is a sign of progress as I am sure that many Christians still cling to the notion that everyone must have some sort of faith or be beyond the pale.

However, does the bishop not realise that holding prayers at council meetings involves precisely that – an assumption? It assumes that everyone present has a religious faith and worships a deity or (in the case of Hindus) deities.

Does he not realise how uncomfortable, not to say squirm-inducing, it is for those who are atheist, agnostic or humanist (now a sizeable proportion of the population, according to recent surveys) to have to sit through what to them is meaningless mumbo-jumbo? In any case, surely the proper place for prayers is the church, mosque, synagogue or temple, not a public building.

Secularism – truly the work of the Devil himself

His sodding holiness (stupid title) wants to tackle secularism in the West, it seems. Secularism is the Devil in his mind, obviously.

Secularism, presumably, has been responsible for deaths in Africa and elsewhere, for overpopulation, for the lack of women’s power over their own fertility, often leading to death, and the deaths of gay Catholics who can’t come to terms with what nature intended for them, and often kill themselves.

Oh, and hundreds if not thousands of cases of abuse against children and young people in countries the world over.

Yeah, nasty thing, secularism.