• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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Well, tomorrow is the big day. Saddam goes on trial in a special court set up by the Americans with judges appointed by the Americans. As Chiggy put it to me today "there are marsupials in the building". I have to say I agree with him that this stinks of being a Kangaroo court rather than a fair trial.

Now, the simple fact is that I don’t believe for a second Saddam is NOT guilty of crimes against humanity, you just have to see what he did to the Kurds after they rebelled at the end of the last war and to what happens people who spoke out against Saddam in his Iraq.

However, if you are going to try the man to show how much your society has advanced since he was gone and to justify killing the man perhaps you should actually live up to the standards you claim to have now and give the man a fair trial rather than a trial orchestrated by the Americans.

The people of Iraq should be running this trial, not the Americans and the people of Iraq should have decided how they wanted the trial to operate, what charges they wish to bring and who the judges should be. Saddam should also be given all the same rights as any other person in the Iraqi justice system.

Now, do we CARE that this is a kangaroo court? The man is obviously and evil bastard so he doesn’t deserve a real trial. Perhaps but I would argue that NOT giving Saddam a fair trial cheapens the new Iraq and is an insult to the people of Iraq. I say give the man a fair trial, not because he deserves it but because the new Iraq deserves not to be cheapened and sullied by a kangaroo court.

I won’t lie and say that I’m surprised Arnie vetoed the first ever gay marriage bill to make it to a US governor’s desk but I am still very disappointed. Arnie has chosen to over-rule the democratically elected representatives of California because he is afraid of the extreme right.

Interesting how people who claim to be strong proponents of democracy show their true colours when a decision goes against them. What is also interesting is the nice little U-turn the republicans have just done. When Mass. was forced to allow gay marriage by a court ruling Bush said it should not be up to courts to decide such important issues but up to the elected representatives of the people, now that the elected representatives of the people have tried to legislate for gay marriage the new republican line is that it should be a matter for the courts. Pity Americans seem to have too short of an attention span to see what their ‘government’ is at.

All in all yet antoher sad day for America, good-bye democracy, good-bye tolerance, good-bye equality.

I read Dave’s post about the historic act of decommissioning by the IRA this week so this stuff was on my mind and when I saw that Hearts and Minds was on this evening on BBC I felt I just had to watch it to get a Northern Irish perspective on all this. What I was made me very sad indeed, Unionists are not being led by competent, driven leaders with a vision of a bright future for the north, the are being followed down a dark alley to despair by their so called leaders who are too busy bickering amongst themselves to notice the momentous things going on around them.

This week the IRA ‘put beyond use’ a ‘massive’ amount of weapons and was witnessed to do so by a retired general of internationally recognized integrity and two priests of exceptionally high standing within Northern Ireland who are near universally accepted as men of extreme integrity. Further more, we have been told that the amount of weapons disposed of was in line with both British and Irish intelligence estimates of how much weaponry the IRA had. I mean this was a serious bit of weapons dumping, it even included anti-aircraft missiles for goodness sake! Just think of how much less weapons there are on this island today than there were this time last week and ask your self, can that be a bad thing?

The one thing that was obvious from watching the Unionist politicians today is that they are not man enough to stand up and say that this is a positive step for the people of Northern Ireland. Instead Paisley and his guriers are slinging mud at General John de Chastelain and at the two priests who witnessed the decommissioning. How very big of them! These people are telling the Unionists what they have claimed to be waiting on for years yet they don’t want to hear it anymore. Their last big excuse for not moving forward is gone. They are frantically scrambling to make that not be the case and to come up with new excuses but all it is doing is showing them up as being too scared of moving forward to take so much as one positive step.

The IRA have swallowed their pride and handed in their guns, maybe it’s about time big Ian swallowed his and said YES for once in his life!

It would appear that my worst fears about Cardinal Ratzinger’s papacy are going to be realized and it has not taken that long. It looks almost certain now that there is going to be an organized and Vatican lead persecution of gay people in the Catholic Church which is about as un-catholic a thing as one can imagine.

This blog post has been threatening to be written since the news broke
a few weeks ago that the Vatican may officially ban gays from entering the
priest hood and has now been accelerated by the anti-gay witch hunt
that has been announced in the US today.

Up to now the Church’s (and that of dear Joe Ratzinger) position has been that there is nothing wrong with BEING gay, only with taking part in gay sexual acts, which are, according to the church, inherently sinful. I don’t believe that to be true and that is an issue that myself and the church disagree on quite strongly but for the purpose of this blog entry I am not going to argue with that view.

So what am I arguing with? Well, I am arguing with the churches move away from this apparently "compassionate" position to outright anti-gay witch hunting.

Catholic priests HAVE to be celibate so they cannot have ANY sex and are in fact supposed to be completely asexual beings. Hence their sexual orientation is irrelevant because they give up all sex. This is why there has been no problem with gay clerics in the past and this is a very sensible position. However, reports recently indicated that the Vatican was about to issue a policy that gays will be banned from the priest hood.

That would be bad and simply wrong. It would totally undermine the churches own position on homosexuality and would lead to increased discrimination against gays and would make the lives of gay people that little bit harder. However, what is MUCH worse is what has been announced in the American Catholic Church today. As part of their "apostolic visitations" to all seminaries they will try to find and remove all homosexuality. Literally a witch hunt. What makes this MUCH MUCH more dangerous is the apparent motivation for this, a claimed link between homosexuality and pedophilia.

This link is not supported by science or by observation but is being pushed by the church so it can wash it’s hands of the child sex abuse scandal by blaming it on the gays and not on the Bishops under who’s noses this all went on and was allowed continue. The church is trying to scapegoat all gays and that WILL result in direct hostility towards gays as well as an increase in discrimination and hate crimes against innocent gay people. The good honest people of the world can’t simply stand back and let this happen, they have to speak out against this for two reasons, firstly to protect innocent gay people from unfair and undeserved discrimination and secondly and more importantly to force the church to deal with the real causes of child sex abuse so that more innocent children are not hurt in the future!

Thankfully there are already some within the church speaking out against this, let us hope they are listened to! For example Planet Out reports Francis DeBernardo, director of a ministry which serves LGBT Catholics as saying that "the investigation US seminaries for ‘evidence of homosexuality’ continues the pattern of smoke-screening the church leaders have employed since the clergy child sex abuse crisis began" he went on to ask "why not look instead for evidence of cowardice, secrecy and dishonesty — the traits displayed by so many bishops who magnified the crisis into a public scandal?". All I can say is lets hope there are more catholics like Francis out there and less like Joe and his gay-bashing cronies.

Something that has confused me for a while now is how so called men of God can be so hate filled.“Thank God for the bombing of London’s subway today, wherein dozens were killed and hundreds seriously injured. Wish it was more”

Are these the words of Osama or of some other Islamic cleric? No, they are the words of a Christian reverend who goes by the name of Fred Phelps and he is an American.

How can people of God come out and say things like this?

Those of you who keep an eye on the more public hate mongers in the US should be familiar with Fred Phelps, he is the nice, loving man who pickets gay funerals with “God Hates Fags” signs, even funerals of the victims of hate crimes. He is also well known for his continued harassment of them memory of Matthew Sheppard, a gay teen beaten to death in the US a number of years ago. He picketed his funeral with signs saying “Matthew is in HELL” and tried to get a monument put up where he was killed with the words “Matthew Sheppard Entered Hell Here”.

This man thinks he is a Christian. I personally don’t see how he can be because it would appear that he is not living like Christ did. On the contrary, he is living in a way that Christ would have considered very bad in deed. Christ never excluded anyone, he spent his time with sinners and with people from other religions. He never treated them with intolerance, always tolerance and love. Jesus brought a message of love and told all his followers that they must “love one another as I have loved you”. I think Fred must have slept through that bit of the bible!

However, now that he has publicly supported murder and terrorism Phelps has gone yet further and proved that even the old testament passed him by as “thou shalt not kill” is also beyond his grasp of Christianity!

Mind you I have a feeling the man is a few cards short of a full deck because he blames the London bombings, not on the war in Iraq or Muslim extremism but on Homosexuals and on Britain’s support of civil unions for same sex couples! He said that Tony Blair and “his bitch barrister wife” are to blame because they have “led England to irreversible doom, pushing the fag agenda” and in so doing have turned England into the “island of the sodomite damned”. Did you know Cherie was in the cabinet? I sure didn’t!

Anyhow, the bottom line is that the man is speaking on behalf of Christians in the same sort of extreme and loony way that extremist Islamics do for Islam. We constantly hear in the news that ordinary Muslims must oppose and speak out against the extreme elements in their Religion, well, it would appear to me that Christians need to start heeding their own message and start speaking out against hate mongers like Phelps.