Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Nigeria is Africa's most populous country and one of the most politically influential. If it passes a law that says human rights are not for every citizen, it will set a treacherous example for the region and the world.

The stakes are certainly high -- and ought to transcend "theological" differences over homosexuality. The time has come for the breakaway American Anglicans to decide whether they stand on the side of human dignity and human rights, or whether they choose to be agents and enablers of ancient bigotries, hatred and persecution. From this distance, I would say that these leaders are well aware of the stakes and have made their choices -- but I would be happy to be proven wrong.  But as it stands, the international religious right seems to be headed in a very ugly direction -- and Anglican Americans are going along for the ride.  

The Times editorial continues:

A poisonous piece of legislation is quickly making its way through the Nigerian National Assembly. Billed as an anti-gay-marriage act, it is a far-reaching assault on basic rights of association, assembly and expression. Chillingly, the legislation - proposed last year by the administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo - has the full and enthusiastic support of the leader of Nigeria's powerful Anglican church. Unless the international community speaks out quickly and forcefully against the bill, it is almost certain to become law.

Homosexual acts between consenting adults are already illegal in Nigeria under a penal code that dates to the colonial period. This new legislation would impose five-year sentences on same-sex couples who have wedding ceremonies - as well as on those who perform such services and on all who attend. The bill's vague and dangerous prohibition on any public or private show of a "same sex amorous relationship" - which could be construed to cover having dinner with someone of the same sex - would open any known or suspected gay man or lesbian to the threat of arrest at almost any time.

The bill also criminalizes all political organizing on behalf of gay rights. And in a country with a dauntingly high rate of H.I.V. and AIDS, the ban on holding any meetings related to gay rights could make it impossible for medical workers to counsel homosexuals on safe sex practices.

The blog Political Spaghetti which has followed the politics of all this over the past few years has much, much, more -- including the text of the bill.

All this is being played out in a way that could hardly be more symbolic.

Truro Church is the largest of a dozen Virginia churches to join Akinola's faction. The rector of Truro is Akinola's "missionary Bishop" in North America. Truro was once the church of George Washington and George Mason -- author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, a forerunner to the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution.

The Declaration, passed in 1776 on the eve of the American revolution, contributed greatly to the permanent disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Virginia -- which had long brutally repressed other religious groups, notably Baptists and Quakers. The Virginia Declaration was an early articulation of the ethos of religious freedom which has since become one of our most deeply held values as nation -- and  one of the vigorusly defended traditions in the democratic western world. Without the underlying freedom to believe as you will, there is no free speech or freedom to politically organize.

That members and leaders of the very church attented by George Mason would allign themselves with an advocate of monstrous persecution, would no doubt sadden, although probably not entirely surprise one of the architects of American ideas of the meaning of the rights of the individual. Mason, and all of the leaders of the time knew that rights were fragile and subject to backlash by authoritarian and theocratic elements that will always find ways of regrouping to drive for power, as we are seeing in our time on many fronts.

The Voice of America has an interview with Davis Mac-Iyalla, a leading Nigerian gay rights activist:  

"As long as that bill, same sex bill is on debate....if it is passed, many of us will go on exile. And I don't know why any government will want to send its people, harmless people, vulnerable people, on exile," he said. "So, I think everything should be done. That is why we are seeing it as a debate, but the government and the church are seeing it as a war and that is why we are worried. I am not comfortable in Nigeria. I'm into hiding.... What I want them [the international community] to do is to put pressure on the Nigerian government to withdraw that bill. And to advise the church leaders to seek advice. The church and government are in to rush, to wipe us out," he said. "The international community has to put more pressure on them."

There is probably much that the leaders of Truro and other Akinolaites could do to change the outcome. And Political Spaghetti has pointed out that some of them do differ on the criminalization of homosexuality. But this is a distinction without a real difference. Silence, as we all know, is complicity.

The implications for human rights, and more broadly, for democracy in Africa, as the Times observes, are profound.  If Nigeria, with the full-throated support of the Anglican Church, "passes a law that says human rights are not for every citizen, it will set a treacherous example for the region and the world."

Indeed.

And and the implications go beyond the Anglican-American protestants to other mainline Protestants (Methodists, Presbyterians, and the United Church of Christ) who are being induced into adversarial relationships with their own churches by schismatically inclined factions aligned with the neoconservative Institute on Religion and Democracy. They  may want to take a closer look at these groups and their leaders in light of  the current crisis that is drawing global concern and condemnation.

[Crossposted from Talk to Action]