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queer-ass folk
Wednesday, 1 July 2009 10:30 amBack at work, alas. On the upside, it's pretty dead, and I'm mostly cruising the internet and answering email backlogs in a desultory fashion. I can't work out if it's an upside or a downside that the Japanese Peace Lily in my office has produced two flowers while I was away: it seems a bit of a pointed commentary on my ineffectual druiding ("look! I do better without you!").
Making Light pointed me to today's happy dose of religious bigotry, now with bonus illogic and out-of-context references to Catullus. Apparently all men are actually latently gay and permitting gay marriage will only encourage them. Mostly this speaks volumes about the latent gay urges of the writer, don't you think? Homosexuality is never such a bugaboo as when you're trying to deny it in yourself. (He's righteously and rather entertainingly hacked to shreds in the comments, I'm pleased to say).
It's making me ponder, though, and alerting the Department of Logical Extrapolation. We're in South Africa, home of a liberal constitution I'm rather proud to live under, which explicitly states that discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation is not permitted. By this logic, surely it's not OK for a religious figure to stand up in a South African pulpit and denounce homosexuality as wrong? by doing this, don't they "discriminate directly or indirectly" against homosexuals, most importantly by teaching and encouraging discrimination?
And if this is the case, surely it's theoretically possible to take them to court? As far as I know the Bill of Rights's provisions on discrimination are only actually translated into law in the case of employment equity and right to marriage, but the Constitution is supposed to be binding on the courts. Point 8.3 of the Bill of Rights states that "When applying a provision of the Bill of Rights to a natural or juristic person in terms of subsection (2), a court ... in order to give effect to a right in the Bill, must apply, or if necessary develop, the common law to the extent that legislation does not give effect to that right". If someone tried to sue a church for frothing anti-gay sentiment, the court would be obliged to create a precedent based on the constitution in order to deem whether this was a crime.
So I'm interested in why this hasn't happened yet. Am I misreading the constitutional notion of "discrimination", so that saying that gays are evil isn't actually discrimination? because, ye gods, it really is. Or does no-one call them on it because of the usual failure of political will in the face of large-scale and dearly-held beliefs? I cannot sufficiently state how happy it would make me to have every narrow-minded fundamentalist church in this country slapped with the requirement to shut the fuck up with regard to their personal bigotries about homosexuality, because "it's my religion!" cannot trump "it's illegal". But that's going to happen like an academic post in science fiction is going to fall into my lap tomorrow. More's the pity.
Making Light pointed me to today's happy dose of religious bigotry, now with bonus illogic and out-of-context references to Catullus. Apparently all men are actually latently gay and permitting gay marriage will only encourage them. Mostly this speaks volumes about the latent gay urges of the writer, don't you think? Homosexuality is never such a bugaboo as when you're trying to deny it in yourself. (He's righteously and rather entertainingly hacked to shreds in the comments, I'm pleased to say).
It's making me ponder, though, and alerting the Department of Logical Extrapolation. We're in South Africa, home of a liberal constitution I'm rather proud to live under, which explicitly states that discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation is not permitted. By this logic, surely it's not OK for a religious figure to stand up in a South African pulpit and denounce homosexuality as wrong? by doing this, don't they "discriminate directly or indirectly" against homosexuals, most importantly by teaching and encouraging discrimination?
And if this is the case, surely it's theoretically possible to take them to court? As far as I know the Bill of Rights's provisions on discrimination are only actually translated into law in the case of employment equity and right to marriage, but the Constitution is supposed to be binding on the courts. Point 8.3 of the Bill of Rights states that "When applying a provision of the Bill of Rights to a natural or juristic person in terms of subsection (2), a court ... in order to give effect to a right in the Bill, must apply, or if necessary develop, the common law to the extent that legislation does not give effect to that right". If someone tried to sue a church for frothing anti-gay sentiment, the court would be obliged to create a precedent based on the constitution in order to deem whether this was a crime.
So I'm interested in why this hasn't happened yet. Am I misreading the constitutional notion of "discrimination", so that saying that gays are evil isn't actually discrimination? because, ye gods, it really is. Or does no-one call them on it because of the usual failure of political will in the face of large-scale and dearly-held beliefs? I cannot sufficiently state how happy it would make me to have every narrow-minded fundamentalist church in this country slapped with the requirement to shut the fuck up with regard to their personal bigotries about homosexuality, because "it's my religion!" cannot trump "it's illegal". But that's going to happen like an academic post in science fiction is going to fall into my lap tomorrow. More's the pity.
