A victory the LGBTI might live to regret...
FREEDOM of speech is a cornerstone of democracy. It is a right that is being eroded in South Africa by the very groups who have most benefited from its existence.
The American fundamentalist preacher, Pastor Steven Anderson, who had been invited on a visit by a local Baptist church, has been denied a visa. This followed upon a strident campaign by the local LGBTI – the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or intersex – community against allowing him entry. Their online petition garnered some 60 000 signatures and after initially saying that Anderson would only be allowed in under stringent conditions’, Home Affairs caved under the pressure.
“The promotion of equality binds the state and all persons to prevent and prohibit hate speech … Pastor Anderson will be barred for practising racial hatred,” said Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba.
There is no doubt that Anderson is a bigot and holds deeply offensive views. This is the man who hailed the June shootings at a gay nightclub in Florida with the words: “The good news is that there’s 50 less (sic) paedophiles in this world.”
However, there is a huge leap from merely having hateful opinions to actually endangering public safety. Anderson reportedly had agreed to refrain from any inflammatory rhetoric, but in any case there is no evidence that his visit would have rocked the foundations of our society.
After all, we have a leader who while still deputy president, boasted that as a teenager, he would not even have tolerated the presence of a homosexual in his company. Samesex marriages, Jacob Zuma warned, were a “disgrace to the nation and to God”.
Despite such deeply traditional and sometimes offensively expressed sexist and homophobic opinions, Zuma has gone on to become a two-term president of the nation. Indeed, his achievements might well to some degree be the result of his social conservatism, for this is socially a very conservative country.
Take the most comprehensive research yet undertaken in SA into attitudes towards homosexuality and gender-nonconformity, which was released last week by the Human Sciences Research Council. It found that 72% South Africans believe that homosexuality is morally wrong and are offended by gender non-conforming behaviour.
It is surely the constitutional right of these people to hold such conservative views and consequently to invite to visit a pastor who shares and endorses their beliefs? Just as it is right of the humanists to keep inviting the Dalai Lama who, too, cannot get a visa, lest we offend China.
In the same vein, it is the right of agnostic and atheist critics to deride and mock this religious majority of South Africans for what the secularists see as naïve and primitive beliefs. It is consequently also the right of these secularists to invite, as they did, the likes of controversial anti-religious Danish journalist Flemming Rose to deliver an academic freedom lecture at the University of Cape Town.
This caused an uproar among the readily offended of UCT. So, if those who were offended by Rose’s views had been able to marshal 60 000 signatures, should he too have been denied a visa by Home Affairs?
Of course, we shall never know. Dr Max Price, UCT’s bendy-spine vice-chancellor, was quick to disinvite Rose, a self-professed “classical liberal”, because in the opinion of Price, the man is in fact a “right wing, Islamophobe … whose statements have been deliberately provocative, insulting and possibly amount to hate speech”.
God forbid, so to speak, that we fragile South Africans should be exposed to the deliberately provocative and the insulting. As for the supposed hate speech, well there is legislation to deal with real, as opposed to academically imagined, hate speech – words that demonstrably incite violence against another group.
The LGBTI community in SA is unique in Africa in the rights that it holds. Those include, critically, the right to be heard, to speak freely, despite the fact that their opinions are deeply offensive to the majority of religious South Africans. It’s this right that the LGBTI community and the likes of UCT are now wanting to deny to others.
Ours is not a cottonwool society and nor is it a tinderbox. That same HSRC survey found that despite the majoritarian antipathy to LGBTI people, the respondents supported by a margin of two to one the retention of the current constitutional protections against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.
So had they been allowed to visit, neither Anderson nor Rose would likely find much traction, in the highly unlikely event that they illegally advocated anti-gay or antiIslamic violence. On the other hand, the social conservative majority will no doubt be pleased to note that all it takes to subvert the freedoms of our hard-won constitution is 60 000 signatures or poking the belly button of a fall-over academic.
The LGBTI community should remember this when they consider inviting their next highprofile, radical, provocative antiestablishment guest speaker from overseas.
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