Thursday, December 1, 2011

Human Rights in Africa

Nigeria has just passed legislation making homosexual marriage illegal.  However, Nigerians are aware this doesn't go down well in the West.  Hence this article by Willie-Nwobu in 'Leadership', a magazine published in Abuja, attacking David Cameron's threat to cut aid to countries which do not respect human rights: 



This was my reply to the article:
I understand your outrage at the British Prime Minister's insensitive attitude at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. Britons often display a patronising attitude towards Africa, which will probably continue until Africa attains greater political and economic strength. However, this in turn depends upon African nations developing a more science-based society. This also applies to attitudes regarding sexuality, where prejudice unfortunately carries more weight than what your own scientists and medical researchers have to say on the subject: to the best of my knowledge none of them are telling you that on the basis of their research homosexuality is evil. Nor do ours - rather what they tell us is that human sexuality, like intelligence and many other human phenomena such as how we perform in examinations, can be seen as a bell curve. This means that while most people might agree with what you are saying, from their own experience, a minority will not. This is where human rights come in, and the ability of a society to tolerate minority views. You don't have to agree with homosexuality: but it is highly important in modern society to allow rights to those with whom you disagree. There is a good deal of evidence that social and economic progress go hand-in-hand with how tolerant a society is: with most European countries this is axiomatic, and this may explain David Cameron's apparent insensitivity (and, perhaps ironically, a lack of tolerance to a widely held African belief.)
Referring to the Bible to underpin anti-homosexuality legislation is highly questionable. Taking the Bible as a whole as our authority it now seems that our ideas about slavery and about the status of women were wrong in the light of freedom in Christ. Many bible experts are telling us that we may be wrong in judging homosexuality as evil.

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