The Nigerians Are Hunting Down Gays Again

While you were sleeping, Africa went from being a progressive, modern, intellectually curious continent to a place riddled with illness, starvation, and stone-aged thinking. I guess no more TED conferences in Mali for the time being. Anywhere you find large swaths of poverty and illiteracy, you can be sure to find a decent religious fundamentalism taking shape. In Africa, it’s Islamists, pitching that catchy tune that life may be filled with horrific disease and shit in the streets and eating old roof shingles to survive until tomorrow, but if you kill enough Sodomites, Allah’s got something nice cooked up for you in the next world. So, the half of Nigeria that isn’t working on email scams, is rounding up suspected gay men, beating and torturing them for names of their gay compadres so they all can be sent to prison, where obviously there’s no such thing as gay sex. Anybody actually convicted of buggery faces a dozen years in the clink, albeit Nigeria is one of those shithole countries where it’s hard to tell if you’re living in prison or just living in Nigeria. Some gay and civil rights groups have jumped on this brutal roundup in Nigeria, but most remain busy here at home focused on the truly sinister Duck Commander.