[The E]

I think the most important in this case, the fact that people in both Uganda and Nigeria have more significant problems, gays or not.
At least here in Russia, we do have 
So... Let's say it's not the worst issue.

I'm gonna agree here. Gay rights are one thing, but those countries have a lot of problems which affect all people, gay or not. What's the point talking about gay rights if they can't even get human rights right? There's also hunger, poverty, government corruption, thinly veiled totalitarianism and enormous crime rates. I'd say, those all take precedence over any equality issues. If you gave a gay man a choice between a law that will give him sexual freedom and a law that will give him bread, I think the choice is obvious. So let's make sure a common Ugandan or Nigerian man has basic freedoms, food and shelter before fighting for minority rights.

You're talking as if sexual orientation is something that is somehow not vital to a person's being, or somehting that can just be put aside.

You're very much wrong. The right to not be persecuted for something you simply cannot change is as fundamental as the right to not get stabbed in the night.

[Herra Tohtori]

What the ****?

Gay rights ARE human rights. Minority rights ARE human rights. They ARE basic freedoms.


You're not thinking this through either. Human rights issues have no relation on whatever problems of wellbeing a country in general is suffering.

In fact, if a country is starving and they decide that it's OK to legally persecute a certain part of population, do you expect food to be distributed in a fair and equal manner?


If a country has issues of food and water and shelter availability, that's bad.

If a country has issues with basic human rights, that's worse.

If it has both, we're going to be looking at a damn genocide pretty soon. Or whatever you want to call it.

[666maslo666]

I'm gonna agree here. Gay rights are one thing, but those countries have a lot of problems which affect all people, gay or not. What's the point talking about gay rights if they can't even get human rights right? There's also hunger, poverty, government corruption, thinly veiled totalitarianism and enormous crime rates. I'd say, those all take precedence over any equality issues. If you gave a gay man a choice between a law that will give him sexual freedom and a law that will give him bread, I think the choice is obvious.

So let's make sure a common Ugandan or Nigerian man has basic freedoms, food and shelter before fighting for minority rights.

How about no. There is no such choice to be made. Gay rights and other issues are orthogonal, they dont "take precedence" over each other and the right approach is to try to solve all of them simultaneously. Just because country is poor doesnt excuse other human right abuses in any way.

Not to mention that hunger and crime is quite hard to solve while this particular issue could be simply solved by NOT MAKING THIS STUPID LAW IN THE FIRST PLACE. So it is a low hanging fruit and if anything should be top priority because of that.

[Scotty]

It frankly boggles my mind that this is even an issue.  This does not take time and significant expenditure of resources to reverse.  The solution to this does not take away in any way, shape, or form from any other problem's solution that might arise.

It is, quite simply, the act of assembling a group of people who are already assembled for the purpose of enacting laws, and getting them to agree that this is not an issue and saying so on paper.

Apparently we're still not quite at that stage yet.

[An4ximandros]

 When a government is such a complete and utter failure, they start prosecutions in a ditch attempt at redirecting the hate of the populace from the government to the Minority of Choice. It has happened a thousand times and it will happen a thousand more. It is the populace that needs to see through the lies they are fed and know who to hate and act against. But who is going to do that when you live in fear of a gullible public being told your existence is a sin against mankind?

[Dragon]

How about no. There is no such choice to be made. Gay rights and other issues are orthogonal, they dont "take precedence" over each other and the right approach is to try to solve all of them simultaneously. Just because country is poor doesnt excuse other human right abuses in any way.

Not to mention that hunger and crime is quite hard to solve while this particular issue could be simply solved by NOT MAKING THIS STUPID LAW IN THE FIRST PLACE. So it is a low hanging fruit and if anything should be top priority because of that.

I'm not saying it excuses them of anything. Quite the contrary, it's just a symptom of how rotten this place has become. My point was, focusing on gay rights pretty much amounts to ignoring the bigger picture. And there is a much bigger picture.

You're very much wrong. The right to not be persecuted for something you simply cannot change is as fundamental as the right to not get stabbed in the night.

Well, I'm going to tell you, the records about "right not to get stabbed in the night" (or broad daylight, for that matter) are not stellar in those places, either. And what I was talking about is that this one affects a whole lot more people than gay rights. The way I see it, we're discussing gay rights, but hardly mention other, larger scale issues. The people there are hungry, poor and oppressed, but the moment gays (a comparatively small minority) start being discriminated, we suddenly scream bloody murder. What we should be discussing is government corruption and destitute state of those countries, which is the reason they passed this stupid law, and countless others noone bothered mentioning. And if this was the "last straw", then it shouldn't have been, because the line was crossed long ago. Also, access to food and water is definitely more important than ability to proclaim your sexual orientation. Simply because you'll die a horrible death without the former, and the latter can be lived without (however miserable such life might be, at least you're not starving to death or dying from drinking what amounts to  sewage).

[General Battuta]

Your argument is a subcase of the 'oppression olympics' fallacy in which no problem should be addressed so long as 'larger' problems are extant. It's predicated on the fundamentally erroneous belief that attacking these problems is a zero-sum game. You use or when you should be using and.

Moreover, your argument implies a shared etiology between these problems in which economic scarcity or failure of rule of law are somehow superordinate to brutal oppression of gay people and stem from the same root issue. This is logically and factually false - like saying that a man bleeding to death from a bullet wound cannot be treated until the fire in his house has been put out.

Combating and reversing this homophobic, oppressive legislation is an independent effort from fixing other structural issues. You call this 'ignoring the bigger picture'. It's not. It's looking at another picture, one with its own etiology and its own solutions. Your framing of the matter marginalizes and ignores both the suffering here and the way to solve it.

[Phantom Hoover]

can i just point out that in this case the ugandan government is actively dedicating resources to persecuting gays, so all the 'bigger problems' arguments here really don't make any actual sense

[General Battuta]

Yeah, I think it's very hard to support an argument that combating homophobic oppression detracts from the larger picture. There's no fixed reserve of outrage or pressure that has to be spent like points, and the Ugandan government didn't decide to **** over hundreds of thousands of its own citizens because the economy was rough or they had a crop failure. This kind of concern-caveat 'but what about the REAL PROBLEM' argument comes up in nearly every class of humanitarian crisis and it fundamentally misunderstands where this kind of problem comes from: an oppressive government making an actively oppressive, malicious decision.

The solutions that will fix [mass starvation] or [political instability] or [structural issue] are not the solutions that will fix 'we should jail gay people'.

[StarSlayer]

Heart disease is the biggest killer of humans.  Therefore all medical resources should be dedicated to this problem at the exclusion of all others.

[karajorma]

I'm gonna agree here. Gay rights are one thing, but those countries have a lot of problems which affect all people, gay or not. What's the point talking about gay rights if they can't even get human rights right? There's also hunger, poverty, government corruption, thinly veiled totalitarianism and enormous crime rates. I'd say, those all take precedence over any equality issues. If you gave a gay man a choice between a law that will give him sexual freedom and a law that will give him bread, I think the choice is obvious. So let's make sure a common Ugandan or Nigerian man has basic freedoms, food and shelter before fighting for minority rights.

Or you could argue that since food and shelter is so scarce, why are the governments of these countries wasting time on laws against gay people when they have bigger problems. You could argue that making a stink about what you claim are minority issues is a way of saying "Stop dealing with the bull**** small issues and fix your ****ing country!"

[Scourge of Ages]

can i just point out that in this case the ugandan government is actively dedicating resources to persecuting gays, so all the 'bigger problems' arguments here really don't make any actual sense

Gay rights ARE human rights. Minority rights ARE human rights. They ARE basic freedoms.

I'm just going to quote these for truth real quick and duck back out.

[Familiar]

O'k. Looks like I need to be perfectly clear on my statements:

1) I don't want to insult any HLP gay from Uganda or Nigeria. Are there any, btw? I mean are there any HLP members from Uganda or Nigeria?
2) I don't want to insult any HLP gay member.
Frankly, even the whole HLP were consist of gays only (!) I still would love you guys for what you have done for FSO.
So feel free to be a gay if you're gay.
3) Yes, gays are not being gays by their free will. However nobody knows exactly what causes gay people to be gay.
4) Nigeria and Uganda have more important issues then gay rights, remember HIV rates, poverty and the fact that it is third world countries.
I doubt that many those peole can have a computer, internet connection or play FSO or be insulted by my posts.
5) I never hated or insulted any gay, and I don't have anything against them. Just I don't care about gay problems at all.
There are always bigger problems, after all.

And that's it.
If my post seems to be insulting, then please re-read carefully. And I'm really sorry if my words hurted someone.
In this case you can read my first post as "gays, please don't go to Nigeria or Uganda for your safety"

You can ban me, if this can do you happier, this won't stop me from playing FSO (11 campaigns so far, and I hunger for more...  )

But... If I get banned, then it means that there's some prosecution on HLP

P.S. Looks like used "gay" word in this post more then I used to say it during my whole life before

[Grizzly]

In this case you can read my first post as "gays, please don't go to Nigeria or Uganda for your safety"

Your wording was rather off, but fair enough IMO.
-

THis shizzle has been going on for a while already. Half a year ago I fixed the laptop of an Ugandese refugee who was forced to flee the country, after he had been accused of being gay - he was part of an HIV-Awereness campaign (Because some idiot decided to link HIV to gayness *sigh*). In light of recent events, the dutch have opened their borders for gay refugees from these countries (Although I am not very sure how they tell).

[Herra Tohtori]

Like has been discussed, the material, physical issues like lack of resources or general ****tyness of things does not have any relevance to issues like minority rights.


I'll grant that there are "more important" things than legislation that legalizes persecution of homosexuals or other minorities.

The bigger problem is the pervasive attitudes that exist not only in Uganda and Nigeria, but most of sub-saharan Africa in general. Legislation or not, it is unfortunately a very, very bad place to be openly homosexual in because the risk of getting lynched, burned to death with your house, or just crippled if you're lucky, is staggeringly high.

This lynching mentality is the real problem for improving minority rights, and that will consume some amount of human resources and funding because the best way to fix that is education. General education, mind you, not some kind of "gay propaganda" as the Russian legislators are keen to use the term.

However, making more laws to discriminate against gay people is a made up problem and takes resources to implement. It's true that the legislators have wide support to this law. But that doesn't mean they should be enacting it. They are still responsible to international courts about committing crimes against humanity. Sadly, far too few countries actually acknowledge the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and choose to act in accordance with that document... and enforcing it would  not actually affect the underlying problem.


The problem of getting Ugandans educated enough to reduce homophobic attitudes is made more difficult by certain religious organizations in the area who are determined to prevent education from polluting the minds of their recruiting pool. Groups like Boko Haram are a stellar example of this. Their terror campaign is specifically against western education. Even the name of the group means "Books are Forbidden", where "book" is symbolic for western or non-islamic education.

They are literally murdering school children who dare educate themselves with materials that aren't from the 7th century CE (or otherwise authorized by the local medicine man).

So yes, there are problems that affect more people than just gay population of Uganda, Nigeria, and nearly the whole sub-saharan pit of despair.


But consider this - if you happened to be a member of a persecuted minority, would other issues in your country be more or less important than that? Like... if you can get killed or imprisoned for making a public appearance, is that higher or lower on your list of concerns than where you might get food today?

It is quite insulting to say that solving food problems or water problems or shelter problems before trying to improve the rights of minorities.

"gays, please don't go to Nigeria or Uganda for your safety"

This is a more sensible statement and I definitely agree with it. Not that it isn't some supreme Captain Obvious material, but still.



Also, the point -Joshua- brought up is also very much relevant. How do you tell if someone's a gay or not?

This kind of legislation is not only dangerous for homosexuals, but anyone in the population that somehow stands out or makes enemies with wrong people.

There are also larger issues such as having to prove your innocence rather than the prosecution proving your guilt. Because, y'know, how do you prove someone to be homosexual, or how do you prove you're not homosexual? It's always easy enough to get eyewitnesses for witch hunt trials, and they're always fixed so that once you get accused, your life is basically ruined forever.

Which, by the way, is a real problem too in sub-saharan Africa. Witch hunts in the 21st century. God damn, get some education to these people already...

[Luis Dias]

So feel free to be a gay if you're gay.

WELL GEE THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH YOU'RE OH SO GENEROUS!

3) Yes, gays are not being gays by their free will. However nobody knows exactly what causes gay people to be gay.

Why is this even remotely relevant for any of this? Who cares what "causes" people to be gay if we all agree it's not their "choice"?

4) Nigeria and Uganda have more important issues then gay rights, remember HIV rates, poverty and the fact that it is third world countries.

This is an insanely irrelevant remark. So there are more important, pressing issues. Guess what, YOU are RIGHT! So why the ****, why the **** does this government think this is a pressing issue in order to make a ****ing despicable law against gays?

I'll tell you why. Because it's a very homophobic country, the law is actually *popular*, it deflects people from discussing the real issues that the gov doesn't fix and makes a scapegoat out-group to which you can blame the country's problems (oh the bad morality of these people have degraded our country!). It also is the perfect law to oppress, persecute anyone the Power doesn't like.

I doubt that many those peole can have a computer, internet connection or play FSO or be insulted by my posts.

Irrelevant. Your posts bother me for I am a human being part of this thing called humanity.

5) I never hated or insulted any gay, and I don't have anything against them. Just I don't care about gay problems at all.
There are always bigger problems, after all.

So why are you here discussing a problem that you don't care for?

But... If I get banned, then it means that there's some prosecution on HLP

You mean persecution? I hope you don't get banned, but if you would be don't take it as persecution. HLP has little patience for bigotry, that's all.

[Phantom Hoover]

4) Nigeria and Uganda have more important issues then gay rights, remember HIV rates, poverty and the fact that it is third world countries.

And yet they are spending money and tying up their law enforcement on persecuting gays. Simply stop doing that and bam, they're closer to solving these 'more important issues', and they're making progress on gay rights.

[StarSlayer]

Larceny is the biggest percentage of crime.  Therefore all law enforcement resources should be dedicated to this problem at the exclusion of all others.

[MP-Ryan]

3) Yes, gays are not being gays by their free will. However nobody knows exactly what causes gay people to be gay.

The evidence that sexual orientation is biologically-determined (as opposed to learned) is pretty conclusive.  It's also fairly well-established that sexual orientation and identity are not hereditary, which limits the role that genetics plays in that determination.  The most convincing evidence seems to point to epigenetic modification (the changes that everyone's DNA undergoes at the point of gamete fusion) and/or hormone dosage in utero.

4) Nigeria and Uganda have more important issues then gay rights, remember HIV rates, poverty and the fact that it is third world countries.
I doubt that many those peole can have a computer, internet connection or play FSO or be insulted by my posts.

Important issues, yes.  More important... well even if this were true, if anything that speaks to the insanity of passing a law and dedicating public attention and resources to the persecution of a minority based on the genitalia of the consenting adults they want to sleep with.  That's idiotic.

5) I never hated or insulted any gay, and I don't have anything against them. Just I don't care about gay problems at all.
There are always bigger problems, after all.

The trouble with not caring about the legal and unjustified persecution of one minority is that, from a purely selfish perspective, you can always be part of another minority that the majority suddenly describes to persecute too.  This is why human rights are so important - if anything, standing up for the rights of someone with whom you don't agree is MORE important than standing up for the people you do agree with.

[General Battuta]

I've become a little uncomfortable with the biological argument for gay rights - even if it were purely a matter of choice, being gay is so harmless it shouldn't matter - but it seems to connect with a lot of people who otherwise won't listen, so it's at least tactically useful.