Stop Uganda's gay death law

Uganda’s parliament is preparing to pass a brutal new law that would punish gay people with prison, even death.

Initial international criticism drove the president to call for a review. But after a well-funded and vicious lobbying effort by extremists, the bill looks set to be passed - threatening widespread persecution and bloodshed.

Opposition to the bill is rising, including from the Anglican church. Ugandan gay rights advocate Frank Mugisha writes: 'This law will put us in serious danger. Please sign the petition and tell others to stand with us – if there’s a huge global response, our government will see that Uganda will be internationally isolated by the proposed law, and strike it down.

With the decision expected in days, only an irresistible wave of worldwide pressure will be enough to save Frank's life and many others. At the very least we can all sign this petition, and then forward this appeal:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/uganda_rights/?vl

The petition will be delivered to Uganda's President Museveni, members of the review committee and Ugandan embassies worldwide this week, before it’s too late, as well as to key donor governments.

The bill proposes life imprisonment for anyone convicted of having same-sex relations and imposes the death penalty for 'serial offenders'. NGOs working to prevent the spread of HIV could see their employees imprisoned for up to seven years for 'promoting homosexuality'. Even members of the public face up to three years in jail if they fail to report homosexual activity to the police within 24 hours!

The bill’s advocates claim that it defends national culture, but some of its strongest critics come from within Uganda. The Reverend Canon Gideon Byamugisha is one of many. He says: 'It is violating our cultures, traditions and religious values that teach against intolerance, injustice, hatred and violence. We need laws to protect people -- not ones that will humiliate, ridicule, persecute and kill them en masse.'

http://www.avaaz.org/en/uganda_rights/?vl

Cricket: better than sex?

First day of the last Ashes Test and those ever-imaginative people at Philosophy Football have diversified into cricket. This means that you can now add this t-shirt, inspired by the late cricket fanatic and Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, to your whites - or ritually burn it, as the mood takes you, when England's batting again collapses at the crucial moment.

Cricket has drawn a surprising number of left-wing writers to the crease over the years, from CLR James to Mike Marqusee and ex-New Statesman editor Peter Wilby. But cricketers themselves often lack the same way with words. Former England captain Mike Gatting was once asked if he felt vindicated when a test victory followed a period of press criticism. 'I don't think the press are vindictive,' he replied. 'They can write what they want.'

Second sex

‘It isn’t only about sex, you know.’ I’ve heard the refrain so often that it’s almost become convincing. And now there’s even a brave new virtual world of political activism and protest being built in online fantasy worlds such as Second Life to justify spending all those hours in front of a computer screen.

Second Life, if you haven’t come across it yet, is a free 3D virtual world where people who have enough time left over from their first life can reinvent themselves and interact with other people via avatars. Once you’ve set up your avatar, you can do all sorts of things that aren’t only about sex – like selling Red Pepper, attending online protest meetings or picketing SL’s digital Israeli embassy, if you’re so inclined, although it has to be said that most of SL’s avatars seem to have other inclinations.

As a hardcore online junkie, old enough to remember rooting around on something called the Undernet and communicating via Internet Relay Chat, and a recovering SimCity and Civilisation addict, I had successfully steered clear of SL since its foundation in 2003. My willpower cracked, though, when a friend insisted that I accompany her on a sort of Motorcycle Diaries-style trip to check out the revolutionary potential.

Let’s say I got distracted.

It started with an invitation to the BadGirlz Club, progressed via a beach resort and continued into a castle occupied by, inter alia, vampires, zombies and aficionados of the cult of Gor (a kind of medieval BDSM fantasy world in which stepping out of character to have a quick laugh at the absurdity of it all gets you kicked out of the club faster than you can say ‘Yes Master’). Before I knew it, my avatar had acquired a shaved head, some very fetching skull tattoos, a single ‘elf gauntlet’ and the tightest pair of gay of gayboi pants you could ever imagine squeezing your bum into. Oh yes, and erm, a box of nine penises.

What do you do with a box of nine penises, I’m sure you’re asking. The answer is: you wear them. Not all at once, of course, and you do have to use a bit of virtual jiggerypokery to unpack them from the box first – as I only discovered after walking around SL with a box labelled ‘Nine Penises’ attached to my avatar’s pelvis for the next couple of days.

My friend, meanwhile, had decided she was up for a sex-change operation. This was after she had refused an offer to spend 155 Linden dollars (SL’s very own currency) on something called ‘seclix rave pacifier’, which supposedly ‘simulates real life pacifier dipped in MDMA’ and is advertised in SL as ‘drugs without the crash’. She spent the money instead on a special, just-like-real-life penis, which came with handy instruction manual.

‘How to adjust the penis size?’ was one of the Q&As, to which the answer is: ‘Wear the penis. Right click it and select “edit”. Click the button “Stretch”. Now use the white blocks to adjust the size. Note that the penis can be made bigger, but not smaller.’

Neither of us has got very far in fomenting a Second Life revolution just yet. But we have a fine collection of penises, if anyone is interested.

Polygamy, oral sex and the imam

There’s been a minor furore in Holland about the controversial Hague imam Jneid Fawaz, who has a Q&A column on his mosque’s website advising Dutch Muslims about what they can and cannot do. The furore arose over his advice regarding polygamy.

‘It is not obligatory to ask permission from the first wife and it's not one of the requirements that the first wife gives her permission,’ Fawaz wrote, apparently ignoring the fact that having more than one wife is illegal in Holland.

Fawaz would have been on sounder legal ground if he’d suggested making use of the Dutch samenlevingscontract or ‘cohabitation contract’, which is available to multiple partners (of either or both sexes). It does, however, require the consent of those entering into it.

Meanwhile, for Islamophobes who may be concerned that Muslims’ use of the worldwide web is limited to hard-line propaganda and terrorist networking, there is possibly reassuring news from Fawaz’s website statistics. These show that what drives web traffic among Muslims is no different from among non-believers. The most-read of Fawaz’s Q&As all concern sex, with the top two concerning the imam’s opinion on whether oral sex (15,000 hits) and sucking a woman’s breast (12,000) are permitted under Islam.

Earlobe creases, Hadrian, my nephew and me

I have just discovered that I have creases in my ear lobes. Big deal, you might say, except that diagonal ear-lobe creases are, to quote one recent medical study on the subject, ‘significantly associated with coronary artery disease and coronary risk factors’. How significantly? Creases in both lobes have a ‘positive predictive value’ of 89.4%, according to the study. Or, to put it another way, they mean a 77% increased risk of heart attack (33% if only in one lobe), according to another report.

I wouldn’t have known any of this if it hadn’t been for the Hadrian exhibition at the British Museum, where the combination of my historical/archaeological expertise and, more importantly, museum membership (I can take a guest in free) means I’ve been acting as an unofficial guide to every friend or family member with half an interest in things Roman. My last visit before the exhibition closes tomorrow was to take my 11-year-old nephew, recently back from a holiday in Rome and interested enough in Hadrian to know that he built the Pantheon and that his mausoleum is now the Castel Sant’Angelo.

For the umpteenth time, I did my by-now pat routine about Hadrian and his empire, Hadrian and his architecture, Hadrian and his statues, Hadrian and his wall. I curtailed my usual extensive discourse about Hadrian and his sex life, and opted against pointing out all the detail of the homoerotic sex scenes on the Warren Cup. (‘£1.8 million for a mug?’ ‘Bugger me!’ as the Private Eye cover had it when the silver goblet became the museum’s most expensive acquisition a decade ago.)

But I got enough interest from the nephew to keep me going with the Vindolanda tablets (two-millenia-old letters dealing with everything from requests for clean underwear to complaints about the ‘wretched little Brits’), the keys that the Jews took into the desert in the expectation of returning home during the revolt of 132-35, the hobnailed sandal imprint of a Roman soldier preserved on an ancient paving stone – and the diagonal creases on Hadrian’s earlobes.

These were first noticed on statues of Hadrian by Nicholas L Petrakis, a San Francisco MD, who published a paper in 1980 linking the creases to classical writings suggesting that Hadrian died from congestive heart failure resulting from hypertension and coronary atherosclerosis. I pointed out the creases to my nephew on some of the busts of Hadrian in the BM exhibition and told him about the link with heart disease. ‘Are they the same as you’ve got?’ he said.

I must have told this story about Hadrian and his earlobe creases a dozen times since the exhibition opened and no one, least of all me, had ever noticed any creases in my earlobes before now. Have they only just appeared? Old photos are inconclusive. Is my nephew imagining it? The mirror says no. Should I be worried? Medical opinion seems to be divided.

Both earlobe creases and heart disease become more common with age, so the studies may simply be reflecting this fact. (I wish.) And anyway, there’s just as strong a correlation, according to one of these studies, between heart disease and hairy ears, which I don’t have (or didn’t the last time I looked), so I’m taking the usual male approach to personal health issues, putting my fingers in both ears and pretending I never heard my nephew’s question in the first place.

Left blogs: the 'top 25' revisited

Every year, for at least two years, Iain Dale, the original Stakhanovite of Tory bloggers, has produced a Guide to Political Blogging. It includes his Top 100 Left of Centre Blogs. It’s a semi-randomly assembled selection of the good, the bad and Iain’s mates, in large part, and it seems to be based on an assumption that left of centre politics begins and ends with the Labour Party. But we all love lists, don’t we, and with a new one due out from Iain this autumn I thought I'd get my retaliation in first and do a mid-term review of the Top 25 he listed the last time around. I might get around to reviewing the other 75 if I don’t make too many enemies from the first lot.

Note that the second number against the blogs on the list here denotes their 2006 position. Two dashes means the blog was a new entry.

1-- Recess Monkey
It was an exclusive poll of Recess Monkey readers that uncovered 154 people who claim to have had full sexual intercourse with Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg (not counting the 28 who indicated they had partaken of oral sex with him and the further 31 who insisted their involvement was limited to ‘heavy petting and frottage’). That’s more than five times as many as Clegg claimed in his interview with Q magazine – a revelation that makes the mucky Monkey wildly popular with the search engines.

2-7 Tom Watson MP
Tom Watson’s blogging style is concise comment and lots of links. I like it.

3-1 Kerron Cross
The ‘voice of the delectable left’, Kerron Cross reckons he’s ‘Labour’s Iain Dale but funnier’. I’m not convinced. Anyway, he recently got married and stood down as leader of the Labour group on Three Rivers District Council in order to spend more time with his family-to-be. The blog will probably go next.

4-2 Bob Piper
Bob Piper manages to combine being a ‘lifelong supporter of Aston Villa’ with following Yorkshire County Cricket Club, which is pain enough for one man. I can’t bring myself to be in any way critical of his blog.

5-3 Labour Home
A multi-author blog ‘attempting to reinvigorate the party’s base and grassroots’, Labour Home celebrated its second birthday in June 2008. Despite its youth it still feels old and wrinkly with a masthead design from circa 1987.

6-17 Bloggers 4 Labour
Has the most facile political slogan in the business on its masthead, ‘Forward not Back’, but it’s still the place to go for Labour bloggers. Its blogroll claimed 429 affiliated Labour blogs at 23 May 2008. Of these, 209 hadn’t been active for at least two months, though, and only 144 had posted anything in the previous week.

7-32 Newer Labour
Now headed ‘New Direction. Choose Change. Beyond the Third Way.’ That’s three slogans that run Bloggers4Labour hard in the meaningless stakes.

8-- Chris Paul's Labour of Love
Loves Labour Lost, or something like that. Sorry, there’s a good Shakespearean pun in there somewhere if only I can find it. And there’s a good blog in Chris Paul's meanderings, too, if you labour long enough.

9-8 Dave's Part
Dave Osler, formerly of the Red Pepper parish, is one of the few ‘don’t miss’ bloggers of the radical left. Talks a lot of left-wing sense, such as on crime (read him on recent gun killings, for example), always accessible – and often funny too.

10-35 Luke Akehurst
The ‘obscure Hackney councillor’ is well to what used to be called the right of the Labour Party, but he laces his (fairly predictable) opinions with a heavy dose of hard information. Particularly good on obscure local by-election results. Unfortunately, his satirical online doppelganger appears to have given up the ghost after a double act in which the real Akehurst and the Fakehurst gave an online interest to each other that they could never have achieved on their own.

11-73 Fair Deal Phil
'Phil Dilks became known as Fair Deal Phil when he led a campaign for reduced bus fares for pensioners and disabled people in the Deepings.’ You might expect that with an intro like that (and headlines like ‘Local man appears in Ken Livingstone's biography’), you’re unlikely to find much of interest here if you’re not from Lincolnshire. But the headline is self-parody and Fair Deal Phil has a lightness of touch that would make me a regular reader – if I lived in Lincolnshire.

12-- Chicken Yoghurt
Chicken Yoghurt is the blog of Brighton-based writer, Justin McKeating. It has one of the best ‘About’ lines in the blogosphere when he concludes his entry with the words: ‘He will now stop talking about myself in the third person.’ Well, it made me chuckle anyway.

13-- Paul Flynn MP
'Read my day. Solid blogging.’ This is that rare thing, an MP’s blog that makes interesting reading. The independent-minded Flynn makes a point of not including ‘party political propaganda’ on his blog, which helps. It also keeps the House of Commons thought police off his back, since MPs’ expenses may not be used for anything ‘interesting, provocative or original’, as Flynn revealed in Blogs censored.

14-- Bloggerheads
I looked in here when this ‘online marketing man gone native’ was doing a live blog on the abortion vote. There’s a lot going on but it’s not terribly well presented.

15-5 Antonia Bance
A Labour councillor for Rose Hill and Iffley ward in Oxford, Bance’s blog is mainly of interest to people living in Oxford, though her round-ups of what other bloggers are saying shows she is far from parochial in her reading. She wrote of the Dismayday election results: ‘A blog called Socialist Unity appears to think that the IWCA [Independent Working Class Association] and Greens losing in Oxford is a defeat for the left: they might think so, but it won’t be a Green or IWCA administration that turns Oxford into a living wage city. That’ll be the Labour party.’

16-- British Bullshit Foundation
‘Rather than leave the BBF lingering around - like a fart in the ether of t'interweb - I propose that we go out with a bang. Well, an online bang at any rate.’ After a ‘final’ entry in September 2007, this one-time Labour House of Commons researcher returned in January 2008 for another last fling. The afterplop, presumably.

17-9 Mars Hill
'Local Labour activist Paul Burgin's private thoughts, meanderings and odds and ends' continue to flow as freely as ever - rather too freely probably; he could do with a good editor.

18-4 Harry's Place
When it moved to a new URL, fittingly enough on Dismayday 2008, Harry’s Place ditched its old Soviet-style pastiche logo in favour of Corporate Bland. It currently features David Davis (satire, in case you were wondering). New writers and other intitiatives are promised without abandoning the blog’s original aim: ‘to provide an open forum for the democratic, secular, anti-fascist, liberal, anti-totalitarian left’. There’s only so long you can get by on slagging off George Galloway and the SWP but without Harry's vitriol towards what it sees as the Islamist fellow travellers on the left it doesn’t have an obvious raison d’etre.

19-- Ministry of Truth
Overlong and detailed postings - a light read this is not - made tolerable by the fact that, unusually among bloggers, there is original research and not merely comment.

20-- John Angliss
Gon to the great blog in the sky, by the looks of it: the attrition rate among Iain Dale's 'top bloggers' is running at about one in five. More people survived the Somme.

21-70 Three Score Years & Ten
My old friend, former left MP Harry Barnes, is still going as strong as ever at three score years and eleven. He’s also the only person I know who supports Sheffield FC.

22-- Rupa Huq
The second highest-ranking woman on the list. If there’s another reason for her being there, I’ve missed it. [12 hours later: that was a cheap shot and it's not even true. I had an attack of the Littlejohns.]

23-- Skipper
Taking your blog’s name from the fact that you used to be captain of a cricket team is a bit too old maids and John Major for my taste, but Bill Jones certainly knows how to bowl a bouncer. ‘It would take a Shakespeare to do justice to a story that combines the jealousy of Othello, the ambition of Macbeth and the indecision of Hamlet,’ is his recent verdict on Gordon Brown.

24-14 Tygerland
The author is in the process of moving to Tallinn, so this is currently a good place to go for photos of Estonia. Really.

25-- Jag Singh
Seems to have passed over at 6.13pm on 1 December 2007. Left us with the headline 'Let's celebrate mediocrity.'

Non-recreational drug use: a warning

Now I remember why I don’t like non-recreational drugs. I took a single diazepam last night to try to get a few hours unbroken sleep (someone built an eight-lane motorway through my brain a few years ago and the traffic runs all through the night). Today I feel like I spent the night doing GHB and skunk – but without the nice bits.

I checked the known side effects on an NHS website: drowsiness, dizziness, lightheadedness, muscle weakness, confusion, sickness or vomiting, stomach problems, headaches, dry mouth, addiction and sex problems. I don’t know about the last one (haven’t had any offers yet today) and it seems a bit soon for the penultimate one after just one pill. But I’ve put a tick against all the rest.

Heed my advice kids: beware of taking drugs for the purposes for which they were intended.

Left evangelicals

It’s been assumed for so long that white evangelicals in the US vote Republican that none of the major pollsters even bothers counting those who back the Democrats. But a recent post-primary poll in Missouri and Tennessee, commissioned by Faith in Public Life and the Center for American Progress Action Fund and conducted by Zogby International, suggests that abortion and same-sex marriage aren’t necessarily the evangelical vote-clinchers they’re usually seen to be. And there are a lot more left-leaning evangelicals than you might think.

One in three white evangelicals in Missouri and Tennessee voted in Democratic primaries. In both states their number is equal to or greater than all African-American voters, all voters over 65 or all voters who said the Iraq war is the most important issue facing the country. What’s more, white evangelicals in both parties back a broader agenda that includes ending poverty, protecting the environment, and tackling HIV/AIDS by large majorities.

In the Zogby poll, far more white evangelicals ranked jobs and the economy as more important than abortion and same-sex marriage (30 against 14 per cent in Missouri, 34 against 19 per cent in Tennessee). Other issues also ranked highly. In Missouri, 12 per cent chose Iraq as the most important, 11 per cent health care, 7 per cent immigration, 6 per cent terrorism, 4 per cent taxes and 4 per cent education. In Tennessee, 8 per cent chose Iraq, 8 per cent health care, 6 per cent education, 6 per cent immigration, 5 per cent terrorism and 4 per cent taxes.

The poll doesn’t exactly put white evangelicals in the ideological vanguard, but it does suggest that they may be a lot more amenable to progressive argument than is generally assumed.

'Nuff Respect

History repeats itself, as Marx almost said, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. With the 90th anniversary of the Russian revolution almost upon us, what used to be the tragedy of the left’s propensity for splitting has long since descended into the most predictable of farces.

Hot on the heels of the Tommygate sex libel reducing the Scottish Socialist Party to an embittered laughing stock, the SSP’s southern cousins in Respect are repeating the trick. This time it’s the Socialist Workers Party versus George Galloway (who knows a bit about sex libels himself, if you check the archives) that’s defining the battle lines.

Like all those historical splits on the left, the main parties to the argument will claim that there’s some deep and irreconcilable political principle that’s driving the divisions (the SWP likes to see it as a ‘witch-hunt of socialists’). But it’s difficult from the outside to see it as anything more than the latest example of the terminal failure of a certain category of leftist ever to find sufficient common ground to do anything without the ruthlessness of a Lenin to make it happen.

The left blogosphere is stuffed full with what passes for debate, if you’ve the time to follow it in detail. One of the more illuminating discussions, as is often the case, can be found on the Socialist Unity blog – a name, incidentally, that passes further into the realm of wishful thinking with every new comment that is added. Try Jerry Hicks’ letter of resignation from the SWP, for example, for a cogent explanation of his take on events (which has attracted 200 or so comments, at the time of writing).

Harry’s Place enjoys its usual schadenfraude at the expense of Respect, the SWP, George Galloway and his Muslim allies (killing at least four sitting ducks with one stone there). A hat-tip to Harry, too, for this link to Ray Grange and the late Joe Strummer discussing revolution and the SWP (plus the Clash playing an Anti-Nazi League rally) back in the late 1970s:



The Clash in Rudeboy

Harry’s Place also has what could well be my favourite comment of all offering background to the Respect split. Written by ‘Simon B’, it’s referring to Alan Thornett, a veteran leftist of the revolutionary Trotskyist persuasion who’s lined up with Galloway’s faction – for now:

I'm not an AWL member, but an ex-member, I'm also too young to have first hand experience of Thornett in the same group (the WSL as it then was). But briefly this is the history as I understand it.

Thornett led an opposition in the WRP in the 1970s and when expelled started his own group, the WSL, which went on to merge with the I-CL (led by among others the current leaders of the AWL).

I do know that the split was partly about the Falklands war when Thornett supported the military junta and what is now the AWL opposed both sides, but also that Thornett thought that everyone else should defer to him because he and his mates were the 'proper workers' and the rest were all posh.

Aside from this being untrue - Sean Matganma, for example, was a docker before becoming a full-time activist - it is also a ridiculous way of operating.

There was a pamphlet about the debates and the split with Thornett called 'The Worker Leader Against Marxism' which detailed all this. I've no idea where my copy is and it is sadly not online.

Thornett merged with what was left of the IMG and formed the ISG, which was, and still is, the British section of the USFI. The ISG consists of, I'd generously guess, about 50 people, and until now has been the SWP's good cop in Respect. They are now assuming the role of Galloway's court jesters.

By the way, anyone bemused by all the acronyms I mentioned should just count themselves lucky that they don't know what they mean and get on with their life.