Tutu on Human Rights…Again
This week people all around me here near Washington, DC are all agog with the arrival of The Pope, which is odd since so few of them are Catholic although it is true that Vatican City tends to have pretty stamps and he is the head of state of that petite philatelic gem. As I told a friend recently, Americans seem fascinated by anyone from another country whose first name is "The": The Queen, The Princess, The Pope….
Only last week a more modern world-leader was in the country but, alas, his first name is not "The" and he didn't get so much attention. Desmond Tutu was in San Francisco last week to accept an award from the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.
On 9 April he gave a speech at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. I haven't found a transcript of the speech, but this excerpt from a news story ("Desmond Tutu Speaks to Queer Crowd", BGay.com, 9 April 2008) gives a nice summary. It provides a bit of antidote for The's poisonous obsessions.
In his 30-minute address, Archbishop Tutu said that for his part it was impossible to keep quiet "when people were frequently hounded…vilified, molested and even killed as targets of homophobia…for something they did not choose—their sexual orientation." In the face of this ongoing persecution, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient praised LGBTI people for being "compassionate, caring, self-sacrificing and refusing to be embittered." He spoke critically of his Church, apologizing for the way it has ostracized LGBTI people, and for making them feel as if God had made a mistake by creating them to be who they are. "How sad it is," he said, "That the Church should be so obsessed with this particular issue of human sexuality when God's children are facing massive problems–poverty, disease, corruption, conflict…"
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I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Wednesday, 16 April 2008 at 13.13
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Another "The" has been much in the news here, because The Dalai Lama was in Seattle for a five-day conference. Archbishop Tutu came to Seattle from San Francisco to join the Dalai Lama in a panel discussion on spirituality yesterday. One of the local NPR stations — KUOW — interviewed Desmond, and the session was recorded. I heard part of the interview, vintage Desmond of course, though he is definitely sounding old and a little feeble. Which is not surprising, since he IS old, and he's also had major illness, which had him, for a while at least, living in Atlanta while he was receiving treatment.
on Thursday, 17 April 2008 at 00.09
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Tutu is one of the most remarkable men of our time. Learned and keenly intelligent, of course, as is his holiness, the pope. But what I hear from Tutu invariably is a wonderfully human and warmly humane wisdom. But from Benedict, so far, not so much.