“Prosecuting and imprisoning people for homosexual conduct are flagrant human rights violations…Subjecting the victims to floggings is torture, pure and simple.”

— Scott Long, director of the Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch, condemning the recent sentencing by a court in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, of over 100 men to jail terms and flogging for alleged homosexual conduct.  The men were arrested last month at a private party and, according to a Saudi newspaper, were accused of dancing and “behaving like women.”  

Mimi Hanaoka

But I couldn’t let them do that to me and humiliate me anymore. I couldn’t let them win just because they think it’s their duty to rid the world of lesbians.

Mary Stephens, a women’s basketball coach from a small town in rural Texas,was fired from her position because of her sexual orientation. Parents within the community accused of her of ‘converting’ their daughter and suggested that while they might like her as a person, supporting one lesbian would be tantamount to endorsing a larger homosexual agenda, including gay adoption.

Stephens’ case has been settled out of court and parents in Bloomburg, Texas, can sleep easily at night, knowing that their daughters are safe from the ever dangerous gay missionaries.  But her case demonstrates how effectively the conservative right has coopted the feminist movement’s “personal is political” doctrine.  

Conservatives have effectively positioned individuals as symbolic of and responsible for larger political agendas.  It becomes impossible to support one woman, who coached a small-town team to regional championships — the stuff Hollywood movies and President Bush’s favorite book, are made of — because to do so would be to also support what has been painted as anti-Christian, anti-family, and anti-American.   The only connection existing between a high school basketball coach and gay adoption is one of political punditry. While fear of homosexuals in schools has often been an undercurrent in American education, historically that fear was based more in fears of predation, rather than perceived support of a liberal political agenda.

Seeing people not as individuals but symbols of ideology is a dangerous and limited line of sight.  This is nowhere more evident than in the current political fracas surrounding President Bush’s judicial nominees.  Senator Bill Frist is currently preparing for Justice Sunday, a telecast depicting the Democrats’ threatened filibuster as a campaign against people of faith.  While Senator Frist has previously appealed to the Democrats for compromise, appearing in an evangelical broadcast alongside Chuck Colson and Dr. James Dobson casts a new light on his willingness to promote dialogue.

As a society, we are slowly moving towards an understanding of racial and ethnic identity as multi-hued.  Our understanding of religion, instead, has grown ever more narrow and sharply defined and politically based.  Without a willingness to see individuals within both the “the people of faith” and those outside of that group (The people without faith? The faithless?), we cannot move forward in the Senate, the judiciary, or our communities.

llouison

“The worldwide campaign against terrorism has given Beijing the perfect excuse to crack down harder than ever in Xinjiang. Other Chinese enjoy a growing freedom to worship, but the Uighurs, like the Tibetans, find that their religion is being used as a tool of control.”

— Brad Adams, Human Rights Watch’s Asia Director, speaking about China’s suppression of the ethnic Uighur minority, who live in the oil-soaked northwestern section of the country.

The Uighurs comprise eight million of the 19 million people in the Xinjiang province. They are Turkic Muslims, speak a Turkic dialect — most speak little or no Chinese — and desire a greater level of autonomy from China. Uighurs are now becoming even more of a minority in their home region; largely due to the influx of Chinese Han settlers, the Uighur population in Xinjiang has plummeted from 90 percent in 1949 to 45 percent today.  

Sharon Hom, Human Rights in China executive director, emphasized that the Chinese government is using the war against terror as a guise under which to suppress the Uighurs, who lie on the geographic, linguistic, and cultural fringes of China. “As Islam is perceived as underpinning Uighur ethnic identity, China has taken draconian steps to smother Islam as a means of subordinating Uighur nationalist sentiment,” states Hom.

The repression that she refers to runs the gambit from the scrutinization of imams and mosque closures to detentions and executions.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Chinese protesters — about 10,000 in Beijing and 3,000 at the Japanese consulate in Guangzhou, which is located in the south — marched and chanted to protest a new Japanese history textbook that glosses over Japan’s wartime atrocities that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s. Some of the most notable editorial revisions to Japan’s wartime history include referring to the Nanking Massacre, during which anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 Chinese civilians were killed by Japanese troops between December of 1937 and March of 1938, as an “incident” and neglecting to mention any numbers of civilians murdered during that massacre, as well as the textbook’s failure to thoroughly explain Japan’s use of Chinese and Korean women as sex slaves, or “comfort women.”

Like an open sore that is constantly chafing against history, the Sino-Japanese rift is constantly being agitated. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s and other ministers’ repeated visits to Yasukuni shrine, where Japan’s war dead are enshrined — including class A war criminals — are frustrating Japan’s Asian neighbors. The ministers who visit Yasukuni state that they are paying their respects to the Japanese war dead, while many Chinese insist that they are glorifying war criminals, such as General Hideki Tojo, who is enshrined at Yasukuni.

Japan’s revisions of history and refusal, unlike Germany, to apologize for its atrocities perpetrated during the war years, have very concrete ramifications on Japan’s relations with its Asian neighbors. The Chinese are protesting Japan’s bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and Kim Sam-hoon, South Korean Ambassador to the UN, recently fumed that “a country that does not have the trust of its neighboring countries because of its lack of reflection on the past” cannot fulfill the “role of a world leader.”

Mimi Hanaoka

Voter turnout for Italy’s regional elections has surpassed all expectations. And as a result, Italy’s current prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has more to mourn than the passing of Pope John Paul II in the Vatican. While millions of people waited in line to view the Pope, enough Italians went to the polls this past Sunday and Monday to liberate six of the eight governorships previously controlled by Berlusconi’s coalition, the House of Freedoms.

The Economist reported on April 6 that Berlusconi’s recent efforts to attract voter support with tax cuts and promises to bring Italian troops home from Iraq have failed to gather even the support which has granted him the honor of being “the longest-serving Italian leader since the 1922-43 dictatorship of Benito Mussolini.”

Berlusconi’s unpopularity suggests that former President of the European Commission Romano Prodi may have a shot at taking over Italy’s reins. Prodi’s coalition, known as the Union, finds fault with Berlusconi’s unapologetic efforts to increase his personal control over the Italian media and does not support a current reform which aims to strengthen the power of the prime minister and weaken those of the president and the constitutional court.

Joni Mitchell’s words illuminate the passing of Pope John Paul II in a way which we have failed to note on this side of the Atlantic: “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Regardless of how people view Catholicism and religion, the role Karol Wojtyla played in the world over the last decades held such influence that finally, his absence will be felt in ways his presence may not have been.  

Pieces published in the News.Scotsman.com, Allafrica.com, and the Timesonline.co.uk draw attention to the impact this man has had upon the world beyond the religious sphere.

“He was not only for Catholics, but all religions and the world at large,” said Monsignor Sladan Cosic of the Vatican Embassy in Zambia.

Stefan Chwin wrote, in an article translated by Philip Boehm, that while Wojtyla was loved by the Poles for many reasons, they loved him most for “his visible respect for people from all corners of the earth.”

Amnesty International reports today that there were a minimum of 3,797 people who were executed last year in 25 countries; 97 percent of those executions occurred in China, Iran, Vietnam, and America.

In 2004, Bhutan, Greece, Samoa, Senegal, and Turkey joined the list of 115 other nations that have abolished the death penalty.  

Mimi Hanaoka