U.S. Conservatives, African Churches and Homophobia - Part II

Yesterday I wrote here about a new report, Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches and Homophobia, that looks at the toxic efforts of U.S. Christianists to export their hate based perversion of Christianity and homophobia to the third world and Africa in particular. The issue is important to American LGBT efforts for two reasons: (1) it shows Christianist like Rick Warren to be liars - something we in the LGBT community already knew, but which is lost on most voters - and (2) it provides religious Neanderthals in mainline Protestant denominations an ability to break away from the national churches in the USA and affiliate with truly nasty bigots within the African church hierarchies like Nigeria's Peter Akinola. Queerty has a piece that looks at the issue in great depth than I did yesterday and it is something readers should look at to better understand the agenda of our enemies and their goal of making the lives of LGBT individuals around the world a true Hell. Here are some highlights:

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Rick Warren . . . understands that subscription to Judeo-Christian faith in the West is on the decline, and that's a huge impediment to winning his (homophobic) culture war. At least here in America. But the rest of the world? It's fertile ground to the Saddleback Church leader and other religious conservatives. And they're making the African continent their own Ground Zero to persecute, and sometimes eliminate, queers.

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"Last Sunday there were more Christians who went to church in China than all of Europe combined," Warren, 55, told an audience this month at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
And Warren is right: The future of Catholicism lives not in North America or Western Europe, but in Asia and Africa. Which is why you should be even more concerned about American religious leaders working with their counterparts across the world to foster homophobic beliefs. It's not just Uganda
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U.S. conservatives have successfully recruited a significant number of prominent African religious leaders to a campaign seeking to restrict the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. The flagship issue … is the ordination of LGBT clergy by mainline Protestant denominations– particularly the Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches– in the United States….
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As [Project Director Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia now leading churches in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts] argues, the U.S. Right – once isolated in Africa for supporting pro-apartheid, White supremacist regimes – has successfully reinvented itself as the mainstream of U.S. evangelicalism. Through their extensive communications networks in Africa, social welfare projects, Bible schools, and educational materials, U.S. religious conservatives warn of the dangers of homosexuals and present themselves as the true representatives of U.S. evangelicalism, so helping to marginalize Africans’ relationships with mainline Protestant churches.
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“Just as the United States and other northern societies routinely dump our outlawed or expired chemicals, pharmaceuticals, machinery, and cultural detritus on African and other Third World countries, we now export a political discourse and public policies our own society has discarded as outdated and dangerous,” writes PRA executive director Tarso Luís Ramos in the report’s foreword. “Africa’s antigay campaigns are to a substantial degree made in the U.S.A.”
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The future of conservative-backed bigotry is not in the James Dobsons, Rick Warrens, or even Lou Dobbs, but in cross-continental crusades to encourage the persecution of LGBTs.
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This phenomenon demonstrates why it is so essential that Christianist extremist be shown for what they really are in this country. If they can be defeated here and shown to be the hate filled liars and extremist that we know them to be to the larger public, it may be possible to thin their ranks and ultimately hit them where it hurts them the most- money contributions to fund their foul activities.