Posted on 02/16/2014 2:27:30 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. — President Obama warned Sunday that a harsh new anti-gay law in Uganda would “complicate our valued relationship” with the east African country, which receives hundreds of millions of dollars a year in U.S. aid.
In a last-ditch effort to derail the measure, national security advisor Susan Rice called Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni over the weekend and urged him not to sign the measure. The law includes a provision of life in prison for “aggravated homosexuality.”
But amid news reports that Museveni was intent on pressing forward, Obama said Sunday that the move would be “a step backward for all Ugandans” and would reflect poorly on the country’s commitment to protecting the human rights of its people.
“As we have conveyed to President Museveni, enacting this legislation will complicate our valued relationship with Uganda,” Obama said in a written statement released Sunday. “At a time when, tragically, we are seeing an increase in reports of violence and harassment targeting members of the LGBT community from Russia to Nigeria, I salute all those in Uganda and around the world who remain committed to respecting the human rights and fundamental human dignity of all persons.”(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
He went from “evolving” to full fledged butt boy.
Well, it’s pretty obvious that this would complicate
things for Obama, where would he find a straight
ambassador? Plus, he could never go there himself...
The upshot is that the treatment of homosexuals in Islamic sharia states as well as African and Asian dictatorships is forcing the left into insane amounts of inner turmoil over their love affairs with these kind of nations. And that is always highly entertaining.
By the way, what do Uganda’s new anti gay laws say exactly? Does anyone have a link to the facts as opposed to MSNB-esqe hysteria on it?
What a surprise. This guy actually found time away from golf with his three Oahu high school buddies to say something stupid to another world leader. Saturday, he was playing the 9 hole course at the late Walter Annenberg’s Sunnylands estate in Rancho Mirage where he is spending the weekend. Today, Sunday, he played the private 18 hole course in Porcupine Creek, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s estate in Palm Desert.
I hope all of you US taxpayers are appreciating paying for this trip ostensibly in order to meet with Jordan’s King Abdullah in Rancho Mirage on Friday. Funny thing is that Abdullah will be in Washington this week. Of course, he just happened to get in a Dem fund raiser in Fresno as well.
And all along I thought that Commies like Obama were all about “self-determination” for other nations and vehemently against “Western cultural imperialism”.
Silly me, I must have been mistaken.
Uganda should pre-empt homObama’s threat and immediately cut relationships with the U.S. I’m sure other moral nations would do what they could to help them with any shortfall.
I know that they are behavior-based laws (as every law is,) so everyone is easily capable of avoiding a violation.
Is it only for public behavior or does it allow the authorities to arrest people for homosexuality in their homes or in other non-public areas? That is what I was wondering. Does it allow for the police to break into someone’s home if they are suspected of being homosexual and arrest them for homosexual acts if they see evidence of it upon breaking in?
In a last-ditch effort to derail the measure, national security advisor Susan Rice called Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni over the weekend and urged him not to sign the measure. The law includes a provision of life in prison for “aggravated homosexuality.”
Sorry, but I am just pulling this info out of my memory from something I read about the law in the past year. I don't have the source readily available. We have to be very wary of media propaganda regarding what this law does - they will falsely depict this as a bloody pogrom against all suspected homosexuals.
Well I am not gonna advocate for the US trying to dictate to Ugandans how to run their nation just because gay rights activists in the US might be screaming and yelling for that, this is a given. But I am not on board with laws outlawing unapproved sexual acts in private either. Lawrence v Texas and Bowers v. Hardwick showed how impractical such laws against private sexual acts are. I know that is an extremely unpopular opinion for some groups around here, but I just don’t think it is a coincidence that countries which try to outlaw certain private sexual acts between consenting adults are typically also the least free and most totalitarian places in the world as well.
The meme that “consent” should be the only operative criterion that should determine legality is a ruse that we fall for at our own peril. For many centuries homosexual acts were properly criminalized universally by societies worldwide. Only with the legalization of homosexual sodomy in the very thin sliver of recent history has the very rapid exponential loss of freedom occurred for anyone who opposes this, even privately.
Please read this excellent treatise on the reasonableness of legislating on substantive (moral) as well as procedural (consent) norms.
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2014/01/11987/
How about consent and whether or not it is public or private? If sexual acts fall under consent and private, what is wrong with eliminating any laws against them? Using societies around the world in centuries past is not a good enough explanation either. Societies of the past were also often unfree, totalitarian and placed little if any value at all on individual human lives. Lawrence v Texas was about the issue that if two adults commit a sexual act with consent in a private area, then why do we need laws against it? The failure for anyone to come up with a satisfactory explanation is the reason why such laws have been scrapped in America and in the West at large over the years while remaining in nations ruled by totalitarian despots. This is about the issue of acts that fall under private and consensual. I don’t take issue with any public sexual acts being outlawed regardless of their nature.
And the author of that write up fails to note the fact that conservatives failed to even show up for the cultural war that was fought during the sexual revolution. Perhaps it was because some of them presumed the gov’t was gonna do all the fighting before them and did not realize until it was too late that relying on police and military to do this was eventually gonna backfire. And that is what happened with Lawrence v Texas and Bowers v Hardwick.
Are you advocating for legalizing prostitution? For Any recreational drugs taken in private?
The problem with your suggestion is that the strong penchant of the legalization advocates is to cast the legalization of the illicit as making it licit. The sodomy lobby has done exactly this; in fact, they are now criminalizing those who don’t agree that sodomy is not only licit, but worthy of celebration!
You may not like the sound of this - and I suspect that you won’t - but the law serves as instructive to members of a society when it reflects society’s moral values. Having anti-sodomy laws on the books is society collectively condemning it. Not having a codified prohibition of it, or suddenly lifting a long-standing and universally accepted prohibition, creates the effect of societal approval.
When states were allowed to criminalize homosexual acts, there was a suppression effect even though these laws may have seldom, if ever, been enforced. Public sexual acts are technically illegal anyway, so it was a non-starter that no one would even know that homosexuals were engaging in such acts in private, where all sexual acts belong. In other words, these acts were virtually unenforceable unless a law enforcement official observed them, and if performed in private, that wasn’t going to happen. This helped keep homosexuality a private subculture in all but the most progressive urban areas. So what if the law was never enforced? It accomplished a desirable effect regardless.
By the way, I found a write up on the new Uganda law. Though homosexual acts are already illegal in that country, this law enhances the penalties (to life in prison) for the most dangerous and undeniably immoral instance of this behavior, deemed “aggravated homosexuality.” This is defined as exposing another sex partner to HIV, sex with minors or the disabled (homosexual rape), or repeat offenders among consenting adults.
The problem is that having the laws allowed for potential violations of people’s private rights even if you suspected they were doing something that was technically outlawed. And the tradeoff was never worth it; having laws in the books by itself was never going to be able to do much of anything to turn the tide unless there was a cultural understanding of what should be encouraged and approved of as normal and moral. As far as anti sodomy laws go, even if they could be brought back in some states, it is most likely that the cultural battles over the validity of anti sodomy laws would be lost by those who advocated for them. Indeed, they would probably not even show up to fight these cultural wars, just like they never showed up to fight the cultural battles when anti sodomy laws were being debated and when legalized same sex marriage was debated in some states and is being debated in other states right now. It is one of those things where the culture has to be won before any progress is made, and that involves getting off of our collective asses to do it.Having laws in the books won’t accomplish it and would ultimately be more effective in allowing for unreasonable privacy invasions and 4th Amendment violations.
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