For a while now, a certain homophobe from Uganda called Maazi NCO (an alias) has been trolling the blog of an American psychologist called Warren Throckmorton, spewing nonsense and hateful garbage. I am a frequent visitor of Throckmorton’s blog because it usually has nice updates on the status of the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009 – a bill I am 100% opposed to.
I had observed this particular Ugandan internet troll at work on Throckmorton’s blog for some time but last week I decided to engage him, after I reading one of his recent rants that annoyed me greatly.
For a test case in lack of logic and rationality as you’d expect from a homophobic person who thinks he’s smart, I invite you to take a look at our exchange. In this exchange, I logically, and step-by-step, decimate all of the frequent excuses for bigotry that are put forward by homophobic Ugandans.
The exchange occurs in the comments section of this post.
Freethought Kampala 
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January 3, 2011 at 2:34 am
John Powers
Happy New Year.
Mostly I read your blog in a feedreader. People like me probably mess up your site stats. I mention it also because “reading” blogs this way more often than not is just skimming. Clearly your debate requires more than skimming.
Something I seem to see following the Ugandan blogosphere for a few years–me a middle-aged white guy in the USA–is Ugandans are more ready to debate and not just skim like Americans do. There’s a lesson making privilege visible in that I suspect.
I hope you’ll excuse my being a little off-topic but your exchange with Maazi NCO brought some thoughts to mind a little orthogonal to it.
First of all Throckmorton is at Grove City College which is not too far from where I live. Grove City College is known nationally over a legal case that went to the highest court here in the 1980’s. The case had to with Title IX a provision intended forbid discrimination on the basis of sex in schools. The enforcement of Title IX came down to the US government prohibiting Federal funds to institutions not abiding with the provisions.
The significant thing about Grove City College fighting the government on this is that it secured for itself a very conservative reputation. So when I first came upon Throckmorton I was surprised that he was at Grove City and taking the positions he does. It’s also interesting how he arrives at his positions; that is from a conservative Christian perspective.
Really orthogonal, Clay Shirky in a recent post about WikiLeaks made a distinction between international and global. I hadn’t thought about it before, but seems really important.
“Let me propose, for the sake of argument, two labels for action that spans more than one country: international, and global. International actors are actors rooted in a nation, even when they are able to participate in activities all over the world, while global actors are unrooted; global actors have, as their home environment, the globe.”
There’s very legitimate criticism about foreigners meddling in domestic politics. But Shirky’s distinction points out how we get confused about global actions because they’re something new.
Throckmorton’s posting about Ugandan politics and the comments his posts generate feel to me from a more global than international perspective.
Logic and reason knows no political boundary. Still on the issue of Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009 there’s very often a rhetorical thread connected to the national and international perspective. In other venues in re the subject the construct of universal human rights has been opposed, precisely I think to root the issue in a national context.
What I think about my perspective, which I know is positioned in unconscious white-western privilege , is that I’m approaching the issue from a global rather than international perspective. I’m not sure really, but Shirky’s distinction seems to have a kernel in it useful for getting at a meta layer of the debates going on about the legal status of human sexuality in Uganda.
All over the world people are feeling both citizens of a country as well as feeling citizens of the world. Often it seems to me that this cosmopolitan perspective isn’t explicit. Sometimes the lack of explicit acknowledgement is used to cheat in debates.
I’m not sure how to make a global perspective more explicit and it may be I’m really OT and off track about it all. Anyhow I wanted to share my reaction to your post.
Thanks for your good work and engagement.
January 3, 2011 at 1:12 pm
James Onen
Thanks for stopping by John, and happy new year to you too!
The Uganda Anti-homosexuality bill 2009 is, by all accounts, a ‘global’ phenomenon, given that the intense homophobia that led to the creation of the bill was largely fueled by evangelical Christians from America, who brought their culture war into Africa. American evangelicals are said to have, for years, heavily courted the Anglican clergy from Africa hoping to use them to upset the balance in the global Anglican communion by having them champion conservative views on a wide range of issues, particularly gay rights. Conservatives in America don’t seem to be such big fans of liberal Episcopalians who they blame for many of the concessions Christianity has made to secularism in America. I read about this in a very interesting report here.
The rhetoric employed by homophobic Ugandans to vilify homosexuals have come straight from the mouths of American anti-gay evangelical activists such as Scott Lively, and the other bigots at groups like Focus on the Family. At the March 2009 anti-homosexuality conference, the main organiser can be seen quoting from Richard Cohen, a quack who advocates for the most bizarre forms of ‘reparative’ therapy for homosexuals.
This is not to absolve Ugandans from their ignorance and prejudices, for which they are to blame. But without conservative American evangelical views acting as the catalyst, and chief source of misinformation about LGBT people, it is highly doubtful that homophobia would have escalated to this extent in Uganda. Ugandans have been convinced by their evangelical leaders that they are doing this for ‘God’. They have been convinced that they are doing this to save their children.
From this stand-point, I can see concerned Americans treating the situation in Uganda very much as a problem of their making, hence their interest in intervening.
We are all truly citizens of the globe now.
January 7, 2011 at 3:33 am
Michael
If we had such a static idea of the world,meaning to stick to cultural practices for the sake of sticking to them, we’d all be illiterate and dying en masse from pestilence which modern medicine keeps at bay(I’m speaking relatively here). If the rest of the world had such an idea of keeping to their practices, then Europeans and peoples of the Arabic Peninsula would still be abducting slaves from Africa-Change is good.