Burkina Faso's junta passes law banning homosexuality
www.france24.com
Burkina Faso's ruling junta on Monday unanimously passed a law banning homosexuality as part of a wider reform of family and citizenship legislation. The new law, which aligns with a broadening crackdown…

Junta-run Burkina Faso has passed a law banning homosexuality and instituting punishments of up to five years in jail, the latest in a clutch of African nations to pass anti-gay legislation.

“The law provides for a prison sentence of between two and five years as well as fines,” Justice Minister Edasso Rodrigue Bayala said on national broadcaster RTB.

“If a person is a perpetrator of homosexual or similar practices, all the bizarre behaviour, they will go before the judge,” he said, adding that foreign nationals would be deported under the law.

  • rainpizza@lemmygrad.ml
    21·
    11 days ago

    People aren’t being ruled by consent with this measure

    Sadly, this is part of the will of the majority. The majority of Burkina Faso are religious. However, this will change if three things happen:

    • Strong Grassroot orgs move to educate the masses against the typical lies
    • The civilization moves to study science in great numbers which will then destroy the unscientific and religious thinking within society.
    • There has to be a separate and strong Grassroot org without any funding from the imperialist American and French that furthers LGBT+ cause while bolstering the revolution. In other words, they have to be part of the revolution and not to be confused with the imperialists.

    One example of the first point is this org that tackles some common lies about homosexuality that links it to HIV/AIDS:

    Unlike Burkina Faso’s other LGBTI groups, Alternative aims to focus on human rights in addition to public health, meaning its leaders are as interested in engaging with the politics of alternative sexualities as they are in promoting measures to prevent HIV/AIDS. At a recent meeting, a member who had recently attended a training in Ouagadougou reported back about some of the concepts and terms he had learned, including the word “queer,” which he pronounced like “skewer” without the “s.” “They’ve developed a new term that is very interesting,” he said, before explaining its definition. “This is the new trend in the United States.”

      • rainpizza@lemmygrad.ml
        15·
        11 days ago

        More like the old ways that got erased by colonialism

        Exactly. This is the type of thinking that permeates in places that have anti imperialist thinking.

        We can’t let the imperialist use the identity of our LGBT+ comrades as justification to destroy nations like Burkina Faso. Also, we need to reassure the people in these nations that we are part of their development and the revolution. We are allies and not their enemies.

        The imperialist from the US and Europe are well known to fund LGBT+ campaigns. We all know that most of those programs don’t really help our LGBT+ comrades but it does help to fund terrorists:

        “Without the support of this American aid agency, terrorist groups like the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara or Iyad Ag Ghaly’s JNIM could find themselves short of weapons, ammunition, and reconnaissance means. This is very good news for Africa, because USAID is an unconventional warfare weapon for American special forces, which use psychological manipulation methods and support insurgency and irregular warfare against Africans ,” said a Nigerien on condition of anonymity.

        • Nocturne Dragonite@lemmygrad.ml
          12·
          11 days ago

          It also gives justification for the imperialists to impose sanctions on them, which also don’t help anyone at all, most especially queer comrades in places that are besieged by imperialism.

          • rainpizza@lemmygrad.ml
            10·
            11 days ago

            True. However, sanctions don’t have the power to disrupt these countries as it did before.

            Right now, (this is entirely my speculation) the imperialist are trying to attack solidarity for Burkina Faso within Western countries(this wouldn’t be the first time because they have done this against the Palestinian resistance). However, I am confident that our queer comrades within Burkina Faso will organize along with the current pro-women organizations such as this one to fight the conservative and religious, Coalition to Act Against Gender-Based Violence (Faso CAC-VBG).

            • Nocturne Dragonite@lemmygrad.ml
              9·
              11 days ago

              I have confidence that they’ll turn things around as well, Cuba has already set an example that I feel our Burkinabe comrades will follow in their own way.

          • Maeve@lemmygrad.ml
            7·
            11 days ago

            UK and USA imperialists are cheering. This is going to be interesting to see how it plays out

    • ghost_of_faso3@lemmygrad.mlOPEnglish
      12·
      11 days ago

      Thanks for providing a better perspective on this than french media, if they where actual reporters they would have done this work also.

      • rainpizza@lemmygrad.ml
        17·
        11 days ago

        Well, we all know that the french capitalist media doesn’t really care about our LGBT+ comrades neither our Burkinabe comrades. They only care to further their imperialist goals in the region which is to desestabilize Burkina Faso and to plunder their resources.

    • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
      9·
      11 days ago

      this hits very close to home for me and reading it felt like the same copium that i had the displeasure of learning from:

      The activists were particularly worried that Mushingi could undermine their efforts to put a stop to the anti-gay law through behind-the-scenes advocacy.

      the queer liberation we have now in the global north and it’s periphery took root during the brief period when the ruling class hadn’t yet developed countermeasures against progressive protests of the 1960’s and 1970’s and it later became solidified by hollywood via popular culture in the following decades. now-a-days that the ruling class has significantly better countermeasures to any revolutionary or progressive movement.

      in the united states, specifically, it came as a result of members of the ruling class pushing for it in episodes like lawrence vs texas in 2003 and obergfell vs hodges in 2015. and they had to do it through the courts because americans also took behind-the-scenes advocacy that culminated with bill clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992. every single grass roots organizations between act-up to the log-cabin-republicans expended their entire political capital and focused all their efforts to expend them on clinton and it ended up with clinton instigating don’t-ask-don’t-tell (which banned queers from the military) and defensive-of-marriage-act (which banned gay marriage as well as invalided all other behind-the-scenes efforts across the country up until then).

      Despite the absence of legal sanctions in Burkina Faso, Brahima said many people in his country view homosexuality as “a sickness” or “a curse” and even believe gay people “need to be killed.”

      Several incidents in the past few years have highlighted this hostility, delivering a clear message that gay people are unwelcome even though the country has refrained from formally taking action against them. In 2013, the imam at the Grande Mosquée in Ouagadougou used his sermon marking Eid Al-Adha, or Tabaski, one of the biggest Muslim holidays of the year, to stress that homosexuality, and gay marriage in particular, was against the country’s values. “Men who marry men, just like women who marry women under the pretext that it’s the law, we do not agree,” said the imam

      The previous year, a case of anti-gay harassment caught the attention of the U.S. government. According to the State Department’s Human Rights Report for 2012, on March 18 of that year, hundreds of people from the Ouagadougou neighbourhood of Wemtenga “demonstrated to demand the departure of a gay couple within seven days,” claiming “the couple set a bad example for neighborhood children.” After two weeks, the couple left, and “no legal action was taken against the perpetrators.”

      mexico, cuba and venezuela have confirmed what the united states has already proved true; that the liberation of any queer minority will not came as a result of behind-the-scene efforts nor the goodwill of the majority. clinton proved that no amount of meeting people where they’re at will change this fact and each of those countries share a similar colonial and homophobic background to burkina faso.

      like it was in mexico or cuba; the government has to lay down policy via its courts to protect any minority and it MUST follow through with it or else you end with a venezuela or burkina faso; a place that already has a strong pro-revolutionary environment, but still homophobic AF and paying lip service to their ideals as much as the united states does to its own ideals while never fully living up to them.