In India, hundreds chanted for gay rights in Calcutta, Bangalore and New Delhi in the largest display of gay pride in the deeply conservative country, where homosexual acts are illegal. The marches came days before the Delhi High Court is expected to hear arguments on overturning a law against homosexual sex that dates to the British colonial era.
As a Christian, I oppose violence and vengeance against homosexuals, even violence agreed upon "democratically" and meted out by uniformed officials of "the State." But these laws are not being changed out of obedience to Christ, but in rebellion.
More change is taking place than simply some legislative amendments. The change is cultural.
In 1992, Pat Buchanan received a prime time speech slot at the Republican National Convention, which is sometimes dubbed the "'culture war' speech." He said,
There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.
The legislative changes in San Francisco and those being discussed in India are not just minor statutory revisions, but they are rooted in rival religions, or what we might call a "world and life view," and the two sides are equally devout adherents of their cultural/religious views.
Adherents of a worldview can become more mature and more consistent with the fundamental presuppositions of that worldview, or they can become more and more inconsistent until they adopt a rival worldview.
Britain inconsistently claimed to be a Christian nation before the slave trade was abolished. Ridding Britain of slavery made it more Christian, at least on that issue. Britain abolished the practice of "thuggee" in the British colony of India, believing it to be contrary to Christian civilization, along with homosexuality. (Indian thugs were worshippers of Kali, goddess of chaos and destruction, who demonstrated their piety by attacking travelers and robbing or decapitating them.) Whether British criminal sentences were consistently Christian or not, their goal was to make the colony of India more Christian, not less.The rejection of "colonialism" after World War II was based primarily on an anti-Christian worldview. Anti-colonial leaders were communist or socialist, and rejected the capitalist morality ("the Protestant work ethic") of Britain and other colonial nations with at least a Christian background.
Steven Yates has made these Ruminations on the Road:
That evening, Rev. Robert Slimp of Columbia’s Red Shirt Reading Circle, a discussion group that has met in a downtown restaurant once a month for years now, presented the most comprehensive account I’ve encountered of how political correctness has destroyed the entire Southern African region. Rev. Slimp is more than qualified to present on the topic, because he spent time there and knows (or knew) some of the major players personally. He covered much of the past 400 years of the region’s history. Those attending were able to review the founding of Capetown and eventually the settling of regions such as Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Rev. Slimp observed, among other things, that the geological and mineralogical riches that made Cecil Rhodes billions in diamonds were discovered not by African tribesmen who had lived there all along but by the white settlers. The region was well on its way to becoming one of the most prosperous in the world. Everyone – the British, the Dutch-derived Afrikaaners, and the native black populations – was benefiting.
Not anymore.
Rhodesia has become Zimbabwe. The South Africa of "white minority rule" has become the South Africa of Nelson Mandela’s socialist African National Congress (ANC).
Today, of course, the region is on a downward spiral. Zimbabwe is now a place where whites who have not already fled are driven from their land. More than 200 white farmers have been jailed for resisting, even though the country’s own courts have called the seizures of their farms illegal. Many of these people hold British passports, but Britain’s Tony Blair has done nothing. The global forces of political correctness have seen to it that little of this makes it into the mainstream Western media. Meanwhile, official calls for ethnic cleansing have spread to South Africa, where one can hear chants of "Kill the Boer, kill the Farmer!" These, by the way, are not considered instances of "hate speech." Since 1994, the year the ANC took power, over 1,400 white farmers and their families have lost their lives to gangs of thugs. "Interestingly," writes Slimp,
"in 85 percent of the killings, not one item was stolen from the farms and farm houses."
Over half the remaining commercial farmers have fled the country. The region is now threatened with a massive famine. Whites live behind the walls of gated communities protected by militia-like units. They dare not go out at night. Again, there is a near-blackout on the situation in the mainstream Western media.
And apartheid was supposed to have been the evil.
Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s strongman, is also waging war on other blacks. Their crime: being members of the wrong tribe.
It should be obvious that Mugabe is a more brutal tyrant than Saddam Hussein ever thought of being. But instead of threatening him and working to oust him from power, the U.S. government (i.e., the U.S. taxpayer) is funding him! Rev. Slimp reported last year that in 1999 Mugabe’s genocidal regime got $9.3 million in foreign aid, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. In 2000 he received $12.6 million. In 2001, he was given $13.7 million.
But then again, lest we forget, Robert Mugabe isn’t sitting on top of one of the world’s largest oil reserves.
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Gary North wrote
That Western capital should wind up in the treasuries of the [Zimbabwes] of the world is preposterous. To subsidize the demonic systems that have kept most of the world in spiritual darkness and economic poverty is to erode Christian capital that much faster. It is masochism — multi-billion-dollar masochism — yet the practice has gone on for a generation. We think that Western money and Western secular educations can convert savages into modernism. What we see before our eyes is one set of savages, bearing Ph.D.’s from Harvard and D. Phil.s from Oxford, subsidizing the savages in the Third World (who sometimes have degrees from the same universities) with the earnings of less sophisticated men who have been made to feel guilty
Notice that every worldview has its own version of "hate speech." "Kill the Boers [Dutch farmers]" is not "hate-speech" for the anti-colonialists, while "homosexuality is a sin" is "hate-speech."
"Gay bashing" is nothing compared to "Boer bashing." In the current milieu, "gay rights" means "sanctions against Christians."The use of government force to civilize African tribesmen is just as wrong as the use of government force to abolish homosexuality or thuggism. These government laws should be abolished. What's important is the motivation or cultural direction of the change.
Barack "Change We Can Believe In" Obama is carrying on the agenda of the Clintons, which is not fundamentally different from the change of the Bushes or McCain, despite media portrayals of Republicans as being in the hip pocket of "the Religious Right."Buchanan warned in 1992:
The agenda Clinton & Clinton would impose on America--abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat--that's change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God's country.
The change which both Republicans and Democrats have pursued for decades is the kind of change that will turn a productive capitalist economy into an impoverished, chaotic, "post-colonial" dictatorship.
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