In a strongly worded op-ed in the Washington Post published today, Nobel Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu condemned the anti-gay legislation under consideration in Uganda and Rwanda.

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people are part of so many families. They are part of the human family. They are part of God’s family. And of course they are part of the African family. But a wave of hate is spreading across my beloved continent. People are again being denied their fundamental rights and freedoms. Men have been falsely charged and imprisoned in Senegal, and health services for these men and their community have suffered. In Malawi, men have been jailed and humiliated for expressing their partnerships with other men. Just this month, mobs in Mtwapa Township, Kenya, attacked men they suspected of being gay. Kenyan religious leaders, I am ashamed to say, threatened an HIV clinic there for providing counseling services to all members of that community, because the clerics wanted gay men excluded.

Uganda’s parliament is debating legislation that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment, and more discriminatory legislation has been debated in Rwanda and Burundi.

These are terrible backward steps for human rights in Africa.

Our lesbian and gay brothers and sisters across Africa are living in fear.

And they are living in hiding — away from care, away from the protection the state should offer to every citizen and away from health care in the AIDS era, when all of us, especially Africans, need access to essential HIV services. That this pandering to intolerance is being done by politicians looking for scapegoats for their failures is not surprising. But it is a great wrong. An even larger offense is that it is being done in the name of God. Show me where Christ said “Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones.” Gay people, too, are made in my God’s image. I would never worship a homophobic God.

Archbishop Tutu has a long standing record supporting LGBT human rights. In 2008 he was honored in San Francisco by the International Gay and Lesbian Rights Commission for that support. Watch:

Philippine Health Secretary Esperanza Cabral has come under fire recently from the Roman Catholic Church for having government health workers hand out roses and condoms on Valentine’s Day.

Bishops issued angry statements slamming the Valentine’s Day distribution as immoral and called for the resignation of Health Secretary Esperanza Cabral, who ordered the campaign. One archbishop said that Cabral already “has one foot in hell.”

The bishops called for a ban on condom advertisements last week.

“The condom business is a multimillion dollar industry that heavily targets the adolescent market at the expense of morality and family life,” said Bishop Nereo Odchimar, president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines. He called fidelity and premarital chastity “the only effective way to curb the spread of AIDS.”

…

Cabral, the health secretary, said she doesn’t take the church’s word lightly. “They are very powerful and they can sometimes be vicious,” she said.

But the Harvard-trained cardiologist, who was reshuffled to the Health Department from the Social Welfare Department in January, shrugged off the flak as something that comes with the territory.
“I feel it is just a job that I have to do because as the secretary of health I know that it is going to be very difficult for our country if we let … (AIDS) become an epidemic,” she told The Associated Press.

The church is also opposed to a reproductive health bill introduced in 2008 which would permit the distribution of contraceptives in government hospitals and allow public schools to teach sex education classes. This bill has yet to leave the House of Representatives.

Spurred by an ant-gay comic strip which appeared in a student paper a few weeks ago, hundreds of students and some faculty members gathered on the Notre Dame campus to demand more equality for LGBT students. Watch:

The original comic strip which promoted gay-bashing below.

The depositions of Prop 8 witnesses Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young who may have withdrew out of fear for their own safety reveal today how damaging their statements could have been (and ultimately are) to their case. Watch:

Paul Nathanson a Canadian religious scholar who just happens to be gay (duh!) was also trotted out in Varnum v. Brien which ultimately led to the Iowa Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage. In the document Defending Faith, Family and Freedom by the Family Research Council Nathanson is quoted as saying that cultures can only survive and thrive via opposite-sex marriage.

“Because heterosexuality is directly related to both reproduction and survival … every human society has had to promote it actively … Heterosexuality is always fostered by a cultural norm” that limits marriage to unions of men and women. He adds that people “are wrong in assuming that any society can do without it.”

Not surprisingly marriage scholar Maggie Gallagher also surfaces in said document.

Nathanson and Young also co-authored  Marriage à la mode: Answering the Advocates of Gay Marriage in 2003 which attempts to dissect and tear down many marriage equality positions. Some of their arguments below.

Argument 7: Children would be no worse off with happily married gay parents than they are with unhappily married straight ones: This comparison is false, because it involves the best of one scenario with the worst of another. A legitimate comparison would compare either the best of both or the worst of both. Once again, we suggest that the best of marriage (providing at least one parent or other adult of each sex) is better than the best of gay marriage (which provides two parents of the same sex and none of the other one).

Argument 15: Anyone who opposes same-sex marriage is homophobic: This argument amounts to verbal terrorism. By “homophobic” is meant prejudice and hostility, although this word actually connotes the neuroticism of a phobia. The implication is that only evil or sick people can possibly disagree with any claim made by gay people. So much for the possibility of rational debate. (Never mind that not even all gay people are in favor of gay marriage.)

Moreover, this is an ad hominem argument. It is easy to trivialize arguments by attacking the personal integrity of those who make them. That way, you need not deal with the argument itself.

It’s a lengthy document but a good source for “verbal terrorists” such as myself in developing counter arguments.