Please bear with me.

I have made a lot of promises in the comments section to update this series that I am currently focusing on, and a lot of the questions and comments that have come up have shown me that I need to be a little more thoughtful in my approach to issues, particularly issues as controversial as this.

Unfortunately, I am being consumed by my dissertation at the moment, and I don't really have time to think right now. I started a draft of the next installment, and realized that it is not something that can be done in a hurry. So I apologize that it may take another week (or two!!) before part 3 and subsequent parts may appear. They will come, its just that at this point in my life, there is too much water in my gari!


So please, abeg, bear with me. I will be back (like the governator)!!!

Thankies

Ms Holyebony :)

Policy watch: Homosexuality II

So last time, we were talking about what to do about homosexuality in Africa in general, and in Nigeria in particular, and wondering what the national policy should be. The only real opinion I got in the comments was "live and let live".

In the interest of full disclosure, let me be clear : I am a born again, tongue talking, halleluia shouting, bible believing, faith living and word teaching christian. Totally unapologetic about it tooo! I do not understand or approve of homosexuality in any way, shape or form.

Having said that, I have a little problem with this criminalizing business. I have issues with it because of the hypocrisy involved. Are we saying that homosexuality is conceptually worse than adultery or fornication? Worse than child marriage? Worse than polygamy? We do not criminalize any of those things. Some of them we wink at, some we tolerate, some we actively encourage, but nobody goes to jail for any of those things. So why throw people in jail for homosexuality? Most of those casting stones are sexual perverts themselves - sleeping with their secretaries and househelps, molesting minors under their care! Does anyone remember the case of the woman who was supposed to be stoned to death for adultery in Northern Nigeria a few years ago? Whole bunch of articles about the case here to refresh your memory. Well in that case, only the woman was prosecuted - did she commit adultery by herself? And yet in that same culture, marriage of kids aged as young as 9, 10, 11 years is actively advocated and encouraged. Don't even get me started on this child marriage/child abuse of a thing - its another topic for another day. Just pointing out the hypocrisy of it all.

When it comes to this topic, this is my attitude - let him/her who is without sexual sin cast the first stone. If you are fornicating, hooking up with people at the club, engaging in one night stands, sleeping with somebody else's husband or wife, sleeping with the gardener, or the housegirl, generally expressing your sexual freedom,then please stop talking about homosexuality - because you are no better. Yes I said it. Thou art not better!!

In the US where they have figures, the statistics on sexuality are staggering. Over 90 percent of the population, christian or not, fornicate. Adultery is commonplace now. Most men, christian or not, watch porn. I believe that human beings are fundamentally the same, and the figures are not much different wherever you go - including our deceptively "conservative" African society.

What I am trying to say is this " Excuse me, there is a log in your eye! Abeg remove am before seeing the speck in ya gay brother's eye.

We act like there is a hierachy of sexual sin - that GOD overlooks fornication, while reserving all his rage for homosexuals. Fa fa fa foul!! Its all the same.

So, to answer the question - how should be as a matter of policy treat homosexuals, I say, how do you treat fornicators? When your dad was sleeping with his secretary, how did you treat him? How did you treat yourself, after that hot night of unbridled passion with that person you should not have been with? There you have your answer.

Do not be a hypocrite. That is why JESUS fought the pharisees so violently. Hypocrisy. He called them whitewashed sepulchers, clean on the outside, nasty on the inside. Hypocrites, judging others for the sins they themselves committed with relish.

Our policy as a society must be consistent. You do not go after one set of people just because they are soft targets. If we are going to criminalize illegal sexual activity, then start with the most rampant - fornication.

To close, a few days ago, Jon Stewart, one of my fav comedians, was speaking on this very issue. Dude is a hard core liberal proponent of gay rights, and all that, but I cannot deny truth when I see it. And he was speaking truth. The good stuff on Marion Barry is towards the end so don't give up in the first two minutes.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Gaywatch - Marion Barry
thedailyshow.com
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I liked the way he put it - oblivious to our own reality!! The guy called himself moral - and with a straight face too! We need to fight these moral battles, true, but we need to fight them all - equally. We need to fight from a position of truth and power, not of blatant hypocrisy!! Please do not be a whitewashed sepulcher. The opponent is not stupid. They will tear you apart. Remember Carrie Prejean, Miss California? See all the stuff that came out about her when she spoke out against gay marriage? Her nude pictures, her fake breasts, etc, etc? They totally tore into her. It is a lesson for us all.

As always, comments are welcome.

Thankies.

Oh, and if you are wondering what happened to Bisi Alimi, there is a wiki page on him here. Will be praying for this dude.

Policy Watch: Homosexuality I

Hi peeps!
Sun's shining - yaaaay!! I bought new running shoes, so I am really going to hit the road this summer. I will let y'all know how it goes.

Today's topic is kinda serious o. Because of the brouhaha with Ms. California and Perez Hilton over the past two weeks, the issue of gay rights has been front and center in the news here in the US once again. For anybody who does not know, the gay lobby in the United States - in most of the western world actually - is very vocal and aggressive. They want the gay lifestyle to be accorded the same status as the heterosexual lifestyle, and to be granted the same rights - as in marriage. And it looks as if they are winning - 5 states have legalized gay marriage in some form or another, and more states will soon follow.

In Africa in general however, we are not so amenable to this gay rights of a thing. First of all, it is culturally unacceptable, and secondly, it is prohibited in every religion we practice - and we all know that we are a religious people! With the gay rights chorus welling up in the West, it was inevitable that it would come our way. As far as I know the only country to be have legalized gay marriage in all of Africa would be South Africa, and I would attribute that to the strong Dutch influence in that country. The rest of us want to hear nothing of it. In fact, when the first rumblings of a gay rights movement were heard in Nigeria, the response from the government was to try to criminalize the practice - with penalties of up to 5 years in jail. Although I am not sure that bill became law, more recently, the national assembly was debating legislation to prohibit and criminalize same sex marriage - leading to this protest here. Actually, I was quite surprised by the number of groups, alliances, organizations that came out in favor of the gay community.

What that tells me of course is that it is just a matter of time before our society erupts in the war of culture and sexual orientation that the US is currently facing. When that happens, what should be the response? When Christians say hate the sin, love the sinner, what does that mean in the case of gay people? Should they be sent to jail?

As we dwell on this topic, here are a few videos to give you something more to chew on - the first three consist of interviews done by Funmi Iyanda (talk show hostess extraordinaire - does anybody know what she is doing now that her talk show has ended?) with Bisi Alimi - gay rights activist:







If I recall correctly, the dude had to flee the country after giving this interview. In fact, this is what Ms. Iyanda had to say of what happened after the interview aired:

How naïve I was, immediately after the interview aired, Bisi Alimi was thrown out of his home, beaten mercilessly and had to go into hiding. On my part, I got heckled and sent hate mail and letters for supporting homosexuality. My Friday edition was cancelled by the network, the rest of the show was taken off the live format, all my guests and shows from that time are screened and censored and l was banned from ever raising political or certain social issues up until now.

You can read the rest of her blog post on the issue here


The church in Nigeria is a huge proponent of this criminalization push, and I can only imagine their dismay at being faced with this pastor and his church:




Rev. Rowland Jide Macaulay heads up the House of Rainbow church located somewhere in Lagos I believe. CNN did a profile on the church last year, but unfortunately the video is no longer available.

Actually, I found something even better : although it looks like the publicity forced the church to close:




So, what is the answer to this gay rights issue in our society? Criminalization, live and let live, or acceptance? And the church in particular, what does LOVE mean in this situation? Please tell me what you think, I would really appreciate your comments on this matter.

Enjoy!

Gospel music spotlight : Infinity

One of my favorite Nigerian gospel acts ever. Looove their music, and their Olori Oko song is one of the most creative I have ever heard - in either secular or spiritual music. These guys are talented, they are creative, they totally rock! I am pretty sure that you have heard of them, but if not, This is Infinity!



Honestly, this song is very deep. Love it sooo much!




I listen to this one on tough days. Just gives so much peace.



Very funky, fun song of praise.



I cannot wait for their next album, as I am sure it will be off the charts like this one is. You can buy the cd here, and the vcd here

Get your praise on people!

Enjoy!

Summer plans, and Black-white adoption

Hiya!!

E don tey abi? I cannot believe how fast time flies - its been almost 2 weeks since my last post. Na wah o! Didn't I promise some serious writing the last time? I know I did, and I actually started it, but when you are thinking all day, the last thing you want to do in the evening is think, so for now, that serious stuff can wait. But it will come, eventually.

So anyways, Summer is basically aknocking, the weather is lovely and it is time to start to explore the outdoors. I have decided to start running seriously this summer. Yup - I am going to try and run at least 10 miles per week - more if I can manage it. I will let you know how well I am keeping that resolution sometime in June - LOL!!

Meanwhile, if you have been paying attention, you would have heard the noise about Madonna trying to adopt a Malawian child, about Angelina Jolie's multicultural family, and just how Americans and Europeans in general seem to enjoy multicultural adoption. However, the reverse is almost never the case - you just don't see an Asian couple with a white child, or a black couple with a Hispanic child etc, etc. Which is why I was really intrigued to read of this family's experience:

Raising Katie



Several pairs of eyes follow the girl as she pedals around the playground in an affluent suburb of Baltimore. But it isn't the redheaded fourth grader who seems to have moms and dads of the jungle gym nervous on this recent Saturday morning. It's the African-American man—six feet tall, bearded and wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt—watching the girl's every move. Approaching from behind, he grabs the back of her bicycle seat as she wobbles to a stop. "Nice riding," he says, as the fair-skinned girl turns to him, beaming. "Thanks, Daddy," she replies. The onlookers are clearly flummoxed.

As a black father and adopted white daughter, Mark Riding and Katie O'Dea-Smith are a sight at best surprising, and at worst so perplexing that people feel compelled to respond. Like the time at a Pocono Mountains flea market when Riding scolded Katie, attracting so many sharp glares that he and his wife, Terri, 37, and also African-American, thought "we might be lynched." And the time when well-intentioned shoppers followed Mark and Katie out of the mall to make sure she wasn't being kidnapped. Or when would-be heroes come up to Katie in the cereal aisle and ask, "Are you OK?"—even though Terri is standing right there.

Is it racism? The Ridings tend to think so, and it's hard to blame them. To shadow them for a day, as I recently did, is to feel the unease, notice the negative attention and realize that the same note of fear isn't in the air when they attend to their two biological children, who are 2 and 5 years old. It's fashionable to say that the election of Barack Obama has brought the dawn of a post-racial America. In the past few months alone, The Atlantic Monthly has declared "the end of white America," The Washington Post has profiled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's struggle for relevance in a changing world, and National Public Radio has led discussions questioning the necessity of the annual Black History Month. Perhaps not surprising, most white and black Americans no longer cite racism as a major social problem, according to recent polls.

But the Ridings' experience runs counter to these popular notions of harmony. And adoption between races is particularly fraught. So-called transracial adoptions have surged since 1994, when the Multiethnic Placement Act reversed decades of outright racial matching by banning discrimination against adoptive families on the basis of race. But the growth has been all one-sided. The number of white families adopting outside their race is growing and is now in the thousands, while cases like Katie's—of a black family adopting a nonblack child—remain frozen at near zero.

Decades after the racial integration of offices, buses and water fountains, persistent double standards mean that African-American parents are still largely viewed with unease as caretakers of any children other than their own—or those they are paid to look after. As Yale historian Matthew Frye Jacobson has asked: "Why is it that in the United States, a white woman can have black children but a black woman cannot have white children?"

That question hit home for the Ridings in 2003, when Terri's mother, Phyllis Smith, agreed to take in Katie, then 3, on a temporary basis. A retired social worker, Phyllis had long been giving needy children a home—and Katie was one of the hardest cases. The child of a local prostitute, her toddler tantrums were so disturbing that foster families simply refused to keep her. Twelve homes later, Katie was still being passed around. Phyllis was in many ways an unlikely savior. The former president of the Baltimore chapter of the National Association of Black Social Workers, she joined her colleagues in condemning the adoption of black children by white families as "cultural genocide"—a position she still holds in theory, if not in practice. She couldn't say no to the "charming, energetic" girl who ended up on her front doorstep.

Last November, after a grueling adoption process—"[adoption officials] pushed the envelope on every issue," says Mark—little Irish-Catholic Katie O'Dea, as pale as a communion wafer, became Katie O'Dea-Smith: a formally adopted member of the African-American Riding-Smith family. (Phyllis is her legal guardian, but Mark and Terri were also vetted as legal surrogates for Phyllis.)

To be sure, it's an unconventional arrangement. Katie spends weekdays with Phyllis, her legal guardian. But Mark and Terri, who live around the corner, are her de facto parents, too. They help out during the week, and welcome Katie over on weekends and holidays. As for titles: Katie calls Phyllis "Mommy" and Terri "Sister," since technically it's true. Mark has always been "Daddy" or "Mark."

Read the rest of the article here (there are three pages, so get them all).



Soo, what do you think of multicultural adoption? Would you do it? Adopt a white child and move to Africa with them? If that is too far out for you, how about adopting a child from a totally different tribe, or different African country? Or even from Jamaica or Haiti? Why don't we as a people do things like that and should we?