Oh, don't. I read a long article on this and managed to avoid looking at the picture. It's just too much.
I just can't understand it. I can't understand, no matter what someone's religious or polemical beliefs are, how at a certain point their humanity wouldn't just kick in or something.
I worked on a neighbourhood regeneration programme in Stepney which was largely Bengali, or to be more precise Sylheti - it was run by the men, and let's just say the community is pretty religious. Well, they said the same thing: no one was gay.
I can understand it in the sense that I can understand how the people who worked in the camps gradually ceased, for reasons of convenience and fear and even ideology, to see the prisoners as their equals. After which they could do pretty much anything. The process isn't so much faith-based, though faiths play a wickedly large part in it, as one of all-encompassing institutionalisation and unquestioning subjection to authority. At that point, there's no room left for humanity.
Stepney? Just look at Africa. The 'no gays here' line has led to the massive Aids death toll, and looks set to split the Anglican church (no big deal, you might say) down the middle, with Bishop 'Arsehole' Akinola of Nigeria leading the homophobic hordes away from the faintest whiff of Sodom. I look forward to seeing chartered flights of Midwest evangelicals landing in Abuja for their weekly dose of vitriol. They probably don't even know where Nigeria is.
2 comments:
Oh, don't. I read a long article on this and managed to avoid looking at the picture. It's just too much.
I just can't understand it. I can't understand, no matter what someone's religious or polemical beliefs are, how at a certain point their humanity wouldn't just kick in or something.
I worked on a neighbourhood regeneration programme in Stepney which was largely Bengali, or to be more precise Sylheti - it was run by the men, and let's just say the community is pretty religious. Well, they said the same thing: no one was gay.
I can understand it in the sense that I can understand how the people who worked in the camps gradually ceased, for reasons of convenience and fear and even ideology, to see the prisoners as their equals. After which they could do pretty much anything. The process isn't so much faith-based, though faiths play a wickedly large part in it, as one of all-encompassing institutionalisation and unquestioning subjection to authority. At that point, there's no room left for humanity.
Stepney? Just look at Africa. The 'no gays here' line has led to the massive Aids death toll, and looks set to split the Anglican church (no big deal, you might say) down the middle, with Bishop 'Arsehole' Akinola of Nigeria leading the homophobic hordes away from the faintest whiff of Sodom. I look forward to seeing chartered flights of Midwest evangelicals landing in Abuja for their weekly dose of vitriol. They probably don't even know where Nigeria is.
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