Monday, October 26, 2009

On an Archbishop and Homosexuality



An African Archbishop has accused Western aid workers of sabotaging African values and leading young African men into homosexuality.

Anti-gay religious Web site LifeSiteNews has posted several articles about the claims made by various African Archbishops, who have accused the West of importing "moral relativism," encouraging promiscuity by promoting condom use to stem the African rate of HIV infection, and giving young men supplies of lubricants so that they might have gay sex.

An Oct. 21 article referenced an interview between a National Catholic Reporter reporter and Archbishop Charles Palmer-Buckle of Ghana, in which Palmer-Buckle, when asked whether "there really [is] a Western campaign to corrupt African values?" declared, "We don’t only suspect that there is a campaign, we think it’s deliberate." The Ghanian Archbishop went on to say that the so-called corrupting influence was emanating "from a particular lobby that sees African values on the family to be a danger to what’s called the ’new global ethic,’ which is being propounded by the UN, by the World Bank, by the IMF, and even by the European Union." The Archbishop cited marriage equality as one such "ethic" that powers from the West sought to impose.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

4 comments:

LoF said...

It's true. Aid workers are bringing really hot and safer forms of gay sex to the masses in a much more pleasurable way than the white Euporean Christian missionaries brought violence and the liturgy.

david said...

a couple of years ago i was in harare, zimbabwe and i had a little fling with a really HOT young african man. i must confess, condoms were used, lube was applied, and as the archbishop stated, it was indeed,"deliberate." shame on me for inflicting the new global ethic on his tight and muscular body! i think a 100 hail marys are in order.

Anonymous said...

What's the connection between violence and liturgy? Hello! does this betray a confusion of what liturgy is all about?

LoF said...

@anonymous: perhaps your question is better directed at eighteenth and nineteenth century European missionaries to African about their own confusion regarding what liturgy is or the seeming confusion of certain right-wing African bishops.

I have not been to and did not go to Africa to violently colonize it with one hand and while spreading the good news with the other hand. I also am not in a leadership position in those institutions that were the offspring of that most unusual and confusion-based union of violence and the Church(s).

The point I was attempting to make is that the "African values" that Palmer-Buckle of Ghana speaks of (in the Christian context) are only those values that survived the violent colonialism that broke the spiritual back of many communities throughout Africa. It seems to me that his paranoid and fanatical posture towards sexual variation and limiting exposure to HIV just is the function of internalized oppression (brought about when missionaries and traders methods changed from primarily guns and swords to chalkboards and sunday schools). On the other hand, his fanaticism belies a secret doubt, that a living, whole African values is still alive deep in the soul of even people like Palmer-Buckle.