More harassment for Leo Igwe

Leo Igwe, contributor to Gay & Lesbian Humanist magazine, member of our Gaytheist discussion group (see sidebar for both) and director of the Centre for Inquiry in Nigeria, has just had this piece of disturbing news to report:

Around midnight of Wednesday August 4 2010, two gunmen invaded my family house in Mbaise in Imo state in Southern Nigeria. They shot twice in the air and my other fainted. They later descended on my aging father and started beating him. They blindfolded him with a piece of cloth and hit him several times with stones.

He later fainted and the hoodlums ransacked the whole house and made away with whatever they found valuable. My father bled from the right eye, nose and mouth. He had bruises on his head, hands, legs and chest. After the attack, some neighbours came and rushed him to a nearby hospital. From there, I moved him to an eye hospital in Lagos where the doctor confirmed that he had extensive injuries in the right eye and recommended that it be removed. Yesterday, August 11, 2010, he underwent a surgery and the right eye was removed. He is currently recuperating at the hospital. I called the police to inform them. And they said I should send a formal petition .

This attack is the latest in the vicious campaign of harassment and intimidation of me and my family members by state and non-state actors for our efforts to bring to justice a 50-year-old man, Edward Uwa, who raped a 10-year-old girl, Daberechi, in my community. Since 2007, Edward and his associate, Ethelbert Ugwu, have brought several police and court actions against me, my family members and our witnesses including Daberechi’s father. They have brought many fictitious allegations against us. In January, they brought police officers and soldiers and arrested me and my father for murder. In 2008 Ethelbert Ugwu brought some soldiers, who arrested brutalized and detained my two brother at a local police in Ahiazu.

Unfortunately, the authorities in Nigeria are not helping matters. They have refused taking appropriate actions against Edward and Ethelbert. The police and judicial systems are corrupt, inept and ineffective. Police officers are only interested in making money from petitions, not in fighting or preventing crimes. And the court system is slow and expensive. So in Nigeria police and court actions are used by criminally minded people to harass and intimidate others, and block access to justice particularly for the poor and less privileged.

The local police stations in Ahiazu and Umuahia have refused arraigning Edward and Ethelbert for misinforming the police. The police in Zone 9 have yet to publish the outcome of the investigation of the murder charge brought by Ethelbert Ugwu and Edward Uwa for which they arrested me in January. Right now the prosecution of Edward for indecent assault is stalled because the Assistant Inspector General of Police in Umuahia, Abubakar Ringim has refused releasing the case file to Imo state prosecutor despite several applications to that respect.

The state prosecutor decided to take over the prosecution after Ethelbert Ugwu got a fraudulent fiat through a local lawyer to take over the case. The police prosecutor is no longer coming to the court and the local magistrate has threatened to strike out the case in October. Ethelbert and Edward have filed five civil suits against me, my family members and witnesses. In March, the court ruled against us in one of the suits brought by Edward for police harassment because the police did not appear in court. We are currently appealing the ruling. Since 2007 members of my family and other innocent people in my community have suffered and endured attacks, harassment and intimidation by Edward, Ethelbert and their police, soldiers and thugs.

And the state authorities have done little or nothing to address the situation.

WHAT WE CAN DO

These issues must be raised with the Nigerian authorities at the highest level. They should be kept on the front burner of international relations and human rights advocacy until the Nigerian authorities take appropriate actions. The Nigerian government must be made to understand that the international community is aware of the facts of this case. And that the world is outraged at the way they are handling it. The human rights community should join hands with the IHEU [International Humanist and Ethical Union] in bringing this disturbing trend to the attention of the world.

You can go to this page and copy a URL to paste into anything you might post to other discussion groups, and try to get the word around.
__________
Related links:
PTT speaks out on Igwe Arrest
More concern for Igwe

Better late than never . . .

“A defiant pensioner is rallying Irish women to boycott Sunday Mass for one day because she feels the Catholic hierarchy is treating them like second-class citizens,” reports Yahoo! News.

Has she only just noticed?

Still, better late than never, I suppose.

Justice – Iranian Islamic style

A judge in Iran can just decide a person is guilty if there isn’t enough evidence to convict him.

At least this seems to be the case with 18-year-old Emrahim Hamidi, who is accused of the heinous life-threatening crime of sodomy. This chap faces execution. Well, he deserves it, obviously. Even being suspected of such a disgraceful act of this utter depravity deserves the ultimate punishment. A judge says so. It’s got to be true.

Hamidi was convicted on the strength of something called “judge’s knowledge”, which is some kind of legal loophole that allows for subjective rulings. This is the sort of “justice” you expect in a Kafka story, not a twenty-first-century state. Oh, but it’s an Islamic state. Mustn’t forget that. “Justice” is meted out by nutcases who believe in creationism and sky fairies and all kinds of hogwash and baloney and like to run their state in accordance therewith.

Add to this that the alleged victim of this “crime” has said he was coerced into making the accusation by his parents, and Hamidi is said to have confessed under torture. You know, when you want something to stop badly enough that you’ll say your mother was a monkey and your father was a giraffe. Bound to get the truth out of a person, that kind of thing, innit? Sort of thing Christians used to do to each other with the Inquisition. You know, Christians, love your neighbour and all that.

Anyway, Iain Stewart (pictured), Conservative MP for Milton Keynes South in England, has now called on the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, to ask the Iranian authorities to halt the execution.

Openly gay Stewart is also the deputy chairman of Conservative LGBT group, LGBTory, and he’s quoted in the link above as saying, “It is an outrage that this young man faces execution. In the first place it is utterly abhorrent that homosexual acts are illegal and carry draconian penalties in Iran. That, plus the fact that there is considerable doubt as to whether the event actually took place, makes it unthinkable that Ebrahim should lose his life.

“I am calling on the Foreign Office to do whatever it can to exert diplomatic pressure on Iran to show some human compassion and free this young man, or at very least commute the death penalty. In the meantime, my heart goes out to Ebrahim and his family at this dreadful time”.

And Matthew Sephton, chairman of LGBTory, said, ”This is a dreadful state of affairs.  I am horrified that, in this day and age, there are still so many countries were homosexuality is illegal and have penalties including life imprisonment and even execution in some cases . . . I just hope that Mr Hague is able to speak to the Iranian Government and that Ebrahim is saved from such barbaric treatment from his own country.”

Christianity: the death throes

And now congregation, put your hands together and give thanks, for I come bearing Good News. My country, Britain, is now the most irreligious country on earth. This island has shed superstition faster and more completely than anywhere else. Some 63 percent of us are non-believers, according to an ICM study, while 82 percent say religion is a cause of harmful division. Now, let us stand and sing our new national hymn: Jerusalem was dismantled here/ in England's green and pleasant land.

So writes Johan Hari. No point in reproducing any more here, or else you might not go and read the article yourself, and you should. He’s always worth a read.

Are some more equal than others?

The judgment from the Supreme Court in California last week raises interesting points, the chief of which is, “Should the wishes of the majority take precedence?”

It is Judge Vaugn Walker’s assertion that the ballot-led Proposition 8 in the state, which outlawed gay marriage, “was premised on the belief that same-sex couples simply are not as good as opposite-sex couples”.

“One of the biggest outcries over Prop 8 was that the fundamental rights of a minority group could be taken away by popular vote – which isn't supposed to happen in America, land of the free,” says an opinion piece by Joel P. Engardio in USA Today.

Engardio says that the Jehovah’s Witnesses helped Walker to form his judgment, and you’ll need to click on the link to see how – but it’s an interesting read, going back to an incident when JW kids were expelled from public (state) schools for not saluting the American flag and how a judge at the time, Robert Jackson, talked of the “tyranny of the masses” – a phrase immortalised by Alex de Tocqueville in his 19th-century book Democracy in America.

A subhead in the USA Today story says “Rights trump elections”, and this is the basis of Walker’s judgment: if the will of the majority could be trumped in the JWs’ case, it can be trumped here. The rights of what was an unpopular religion were protected – minority rights – so they should be protected here.

It’s noteworthy that, while the Mormons helped to swing the Proposition 8 vote against gay marriage, the JWs, although they’re as against same-sex unions as the Mormons are, didn’t vote. They’re apolitical. “Rather than forcing their beliefs through legislation, they prefer to find converts by sharing a message,” says the paper.

Unfortunately, they share the message by knocking on your door at the most inconvenient times and are often hard to get rid of. On one occasion, I just started pointedly eyeing up the younger of two men who called. They soon left.

Marriage for all, say Lib Dems

“There will undoubtedly be some people that will speak against it, especially from the various religious groups. But this is something that the party as a whole has been calling for. It will be a key issue for us in defining ourselves against the Tories.”

Thus speaks a Liberal Democrat on the proposal to be put before their conference next month of allowing proper marriage for gay couples, converting existing civil partnerships into marriage, and allowing the status of marriage to remain even if one partner undergoes a sex change.

I suppose it’s good to see that religion is being singled out by a political party as a potential wrecker of social progress. They can often be so coy about apportioning blame when it comes to cuddly-wuddly “faith”.

Stampede deaths are God’s punishment? Yeah, right!

Enjoying a music festival is sinful, and God punishes participants by killing some of them and injuring hundreds of others. Hmm. Sounds like something right out of the Old Testament – think plagues of boils, deaths of firstborn, that kind of thing.

But it’s hardly surprising, really, because this idea comes from the pen of Bishop Andreas Laun of Salzburg, commenting on a Love Parade held in Duisburg on 24 July, and he’s a Catholic, and Catholics believe in all kinds of . . . But I needn’t go on.

Twenty-one people died in this “sinful event”, which, says this man of questionable sanity, is “a rebellion against creation and against God’s order, [which] are sins and an invitation to sin”.

More than 500 people were injured, too, when a bottleneck formed as revellers tried to get into the festival.

“Writing on the German-language website Kath.net,” says the story linked to above, “Mr Laun warned against judging the dead. At the same time, he indirectly linked the deaths to God’s right to punish apostates – those who turn their back on the true faith.

“The provocative comments are expected to draw outrage from victims’ families and survivors. The remarks from such a senior member of the clergy are also feared to draw the embattled church hierarchy into further criticism of its rigid attitude to modern society.

“In recent months the church has tried to weather storms over successive child abuse claims, a lack of sympathy to predator priests’ victims and a crisis of legitimacy.

“A memorial service was attended by the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, amid assertions that the parade would never be held again.”

How dare this woman criticise Christian bigotry? Disgusting!

The rabidly homophobic Christian Institute seems to think there’s something wrong in the fact that one of the UK Labour leadership contenders, Diane Abbott, has dared to criticise Lillian Ladele, the Islington registrar who wouldn’t splice gay couples.

Lillian Ladele

This nutty organisation says that Ladele “was bullied at work and disciplined for her religious stance on homosexual civil partnerships”.

No, no, no. Whether she was bullied or not I don’t know, but she was disciplined not for her religious stance on homosexual civil partnerships, but for her stance on homosexual civil partnerships. The stance itself, not the religious stance. The fact that she saw it as a religious stance is neither here nor there; it’s a matter between her and her religion. It’s not important. It makes her refusal to do people’s nuptials no better – in fact, if anything, worse, because she was allowing belief in fairies to come before people’s dignity and equality.

The disciplining of Lillian Ladele was because she wouldn’t do the job she was being paid to do.

Abbott says, “You cannot use religion as an excuse for discrimination.” Giving Ladele the benefit of the doubt and saying she wasn’t using it as an excuse, but that she genuinely acted from a religious standpoint, I’d say that was still no reason for treating gays differently from straights, whether she believed she was acting against the Bible or not. And that is simply because the Bible should not be used as an arbiter in such matters, it being largely a collection of folk tales.

Anyway, as we saw, she lost her case. Bad for her, and she seemed by all accounts to have given good service as a registrar. But the signal has to be sent: religion has no place in the public square. No, I don’t mean we should ban all sight of its manifestations, because that would mean demolishing churches and not having a few angels around at Christmas. By “public square” we mean where it can influence policy, where it can influence people’s actions against other people against the latter’s wishes.

_______
Related links:
Lillian’s ping-pong pantomime of prejudice

Lillian’s lost cause

Proposition Hate

Oh, wouldn’t it be just delicious if this biz about Proposition 8 and the ruling that it violates equal-protection clauses actually went federal, and the filthy thing were kicked out for ever? The ruling seems to be saying that moral disapproval is no reason to oppose equality of marriage opportunity.

If the whole the USA found itself a gay-marriage zone, wouldn’t that be one in the eye for the swivel-eyed loons who oppose gay marriage on biblical grounds?

Whatever you may think about marriage per se and about whether gays ought to have any truck with it, you have to agree that, if it’s there for one section of the community, it should be there for others, in the hope that one day we won’t be seeing gays and straights as two sections of the community but just as the community. But, while there’s one law for one lot and one for the other lot, this divide will always be a big ugly one.

__________

Relevant links:

How to rub it in

Proposition Hate – it’s here to stay

Bewitched!

The head of a charity is calling on the UK government to criminalise the branding of kids as witches. It happens; oh, yes, it happens. And it’s all down to religion. Not just vicarage-tea-party religion, but full-on lunatic-fringe religion of the worst kind.

Voice quotes Debbie Ariyo, of AFRUCA (Africans Unite Against Child Abuse) as saying that a screening last week (mentioned in the first link above) of a Channel 4 Dispatches programme called Britain’s Witch Children was a wake-up call.

“I think most people know that we do have some terrible practices going on in some churches,” says Ariyo, whose organisation dealt with 10 cases of child branding in the past year. “ . . . It is a wake-up call for us to do something and do it very quickly.”

Of course, any assault against the person should be dealt with as a criminal act, but perhaps we should deal more harshly with those who do it having first conned a person into believing that he or she is a witch or possessed by a demon. And they do the conning through the power of others’ misguided belief in their sky fairy.

Churchill and the little green men

You may have read the story now about how Winston Churchill covered up an alleged sighting of an alien craft – well, a UFO, at any rate – because it might cause mass panic.

But get this: it might also have “destroy[ed] one’s belief in the Church”. Ooh! Can’t have that, can we?

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.