Gays can certainly do what they like, but don’t shove them in our faces

Members of the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya and Human Rights Activists protest at the KICC in Nairobi on December 01, 2010 during the World Aids Day PHOTO | SULEIMAN MBATIAH | FILE  

In Summary

• Much as Kenya has existing laws to prosecute extortionists, conmen, prostitutes and perverts, we have not gone the whole hog like Uganda to legislate life imprisonment for perceived deviants.
• I can’t help but feel that the local pro-gay commentariat (which decidedly my good cousin is not part of) are into the thing because it sounds trendy, and it opens donor wallets.

By Gitau Warigi
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Barack Obama, as is his genteel fashion, used very measured words to express his concern over the continuing killings in South Sudan and the Central African Republic.

The tone was different when he reacted to last month’s passage by Uganda’s parliament of an anti-homosexuality law. He immediately slammed it as “odious

.

Not even when Obama’s Republican Party enemies were pushing the US government to the brink of fiscal shutdown, and a global financial fallout as a consequence, did he sound so vexed.

I have nothing really fundamental against gays, the same as I don’t hold violent feelings against M-Pesa pastors or K-street harlots.

I am not much of a moralist, so I leave them to their devices. It’s another thing, though, to force me to shower them with boundless love, the kind Obama’s political constituency goads him to profess – and is now decreeing the world follow in lockstep.

Much as Kenya has existing laws to prosecute extortionists, conmen, prostitutes and perverts, we have not gone the whole hog like Uganda to legislate life imprisonment for perceived deviants.

We rarely even prosecute gays these days. I am quite OK with that. They can even get married for all I care. Just don’t push it into my face.

However, I feel thoroughly abused (pun intended) when I am forever bombarded by foreigners whose sensibilities are different from mine with the message that my humanity will be judged according to how open-hearted I am to gays.

You simply can’t force somebody’s affection by fiat. It’s enough that I’m not on the bandwagon that insists gays belong in jail.

During her last visit to Africa as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton famously announced that “gay rights are human rights”. Tony Blair’s successor as lapdog-in-chief, one David Cameron, followed up with the declaration that Western donor aid would henceforth be tied to how Africans treated homosexuals.

(I can’t be sure who spoke first. Quite often lapdogs can sense what the master wants and do the necessary before s/he speaks. And before I am accused of being tasteless, let me hasten to add that the term lapdog in reference to so-and-so was coined by the British media itself).

Aside from the general lack of subtlety Clinton’s and Cameron’s comments displayed, I have a much bigger problem with them.

Are gay rights being conflated with epic African struggles like the fight against colonialism, or apartheid? I have trouble imagining the local gay chapter (the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya) or its very appropriately acronymed Ugandan partner SMUG (Sexual Minorities of Uganda) being equated with something like the lifelong work of Nelson Mandela, or Kwame Nkrumah. Wow!

Surely we must have come an incredibly long way as humankind when sexual preference gets top billing on par with existential questions of history like the right to vote or the right not to be colonised.

Once, I had a discussion on this matter with a cousin of mine who has done heavy duty in the upper echelons of the local NGO world. She quickly brought me up to speed on why there was all of a sudden a lot of local advocacy on gay rights.

This is the new and lucrative frontier of donor funding, she told me. Still, who in the world can imagine the likes of Mandela or Nkrumah taking up their causes because of donor money inducements?

I can’t help but feel that the local pro-gay commentariat (which decidedly my good cousin is not part of) are into the thing because it sounds trendy, and it opens donor wallets.

Which reminds me: one of the reasons Time magazine chose Pope Francis as its 2013 “Person of the Year’, or so it reverently wrote last month, was the “compassion” he is showing to gays.

It all boiled down to an offhand quote he gave to a reporter that it was not up to anybody but God to judge whether homosexual lifestyles were right or wrong.

A perfectly ordinary remark, I think, which can apply to everybody under the sun, from presidents to bank robbers.

The magazine even went into a frenzy suggesting that Francis’s papacy may be the game-changer in winning over “homophobic” Africa to the modern civilised world of gay tolerance. Jesus Christ have mercy on us!