The Dish

The NYT has just discovered the Ugandan bill, inspired by key American Christianists, that will round up, jail and execute homosexuals. (Non-MSM readers would have been following this essential story for months on Box Turtle Bulletin). The multi-media page is superb. What's fascinating is that the rhetoric the Christianists use is the same in Africa as it is in America, but in Africa, the public consensus is so anti-gay already that the consequences of this demonization are felt much more immediately and brutally. Here's the American rhetoric:

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

If a movement is "evil" and trying to "defeat" all families, as evangelicals claim of gays (and Nazis and Communists said of gays), then of course some already predisposed against gays would believe it is essential to identify, round up, forcibly cure or execute this foul threat from within. And yet the Americans now claim they are shocked, shocked! by the results of their strategy. Maybe they are.

If so, they should have provided some smidgen of balance in their campaign to demonize a tiny minority of already persecuted people:

The Ugandan organizers of the conference admit helping draft the bill, and Mr. Lively has acknowledged meeting with Ugandan lawmakers to discuss it. He even wrote on his blog in March that someone had likened their campaign to “a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.” Later, when confronted with criticism, Mr. Lively said he was very disappointed that the legislation was so harsh.

So a nuclear bomb is fine as a metaphor, but actual executing gays is too far. (And remember that Lively has written a disgusting little book claiming that Nazism itself was a gay plot.) But wasn't Lively right in the first place? The Bible is absolutely clear that the death penalty applies to homosexuals. Why are these Christianists not following God's literal truth? Or now that they have unleashed a proto-fascist pogrom against gay, bi and trans people in Africa, have they finally come to terms with the actual consequences of what they actually believe? Here's hoping it's the latter.

But if you ever wondered what the ultimate fantasies of the Christianist right are with respect to gay people, just look at what they say when they think no American is listening.

(Photo: an execution of two young men accused of homosexuality in Iran three four and a half years ago. American evangelicals helped craft a Ugandan law that would replicate Iran's policy in Africa.)

Stephen Walt makes the case:

Ben-Ami has a revealing passage where he says something like Carter was a ‘rare bird’ among politicians, because he just wasn’t all that sensitive to domestic lobbies. He wasn’t connected to the American Jewish community, he came from Georgia, and he just didn’t care as much about placating them. And I think Bush Senior and Baker were operating from a world-view that said, ‘We’re just going to push the American national interest here, and this is going to be good for Israel too.’ They believed that in the aftermath of the first Gulf War that the US was in a very powerful position to make some progress, and they used that position effectively. Now, if you compare Carter and Bush Sr to both the Clinton administration and the more recent Bush administration, the latter two Presidents tended to be very deferential

to Israeli sensibilities.

The result, unfortunately, was a total of 16 years with virtually no genuine progress, except that the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank nearly doubled. The Clinton administration did try to make progress but, as Aaron Miller notes in his book, ‘too often the US acted as “Israel’s lawyer”’. That’s why Oslo failed, and that’s why the situation got even worse under George W Bush. And we are now in a much deeper hole.

Could they get any pettier? Reynolds feels better about torturing people because yours truly opposes it. And many Bushies have no problems with Obama's terror policies but won't say so because he ran against Bush's legacy and, er, David Addington would get mad at them.

Today is the day the US rejoins the civilized world on the matter of allowing people with HIV to travel freely and immigrate by the same rules as every other person with a serious illness. Thank you, president Obama, for getting this past the final hurdle.

Indeed:

To assert while drunk and belligerent at a party that you've become more hot for torture because people you dislike are against it is one thing, but to publish such feelings while sober, and with evident sincerity, is literally depraved.

Pareene pwnage here.

TSA watcher Bruce Schneier looks at the bright side:

[P]eople forget that airport security played an important role in foiling the plot. In order to get through airport security, Abdulmutallab — or, more precisely, whoever built the bomb — had to construct a far less reliable bomb than he would have otherwise; he had to resort to a much more ineffective detonation mechanism. And, as we've learned, detonating PETN is actually very hard.

Iran deplores French crackdown on protesters

A reader writes:

I received an email from a friend of mine earlier today, a student in Tehran. In among the pleasantries – and partly in replying to my potential travel plans for 2011- were the words:

“…. when the regime falls, it will be a better place to visit.”

Note the use of the word ‘when’, not ‘if’.

Analyzing Glenn Reynolds' body language.

Goldblog ponders it. He now sees Hamas as the victor of both the Gaza siege and Operation Cast Lead.