Nigeria & Shariah: Cool Out

There’s an interesting report today about Nigeria in The New York Times. It debunks the notion, constantly repeated by Anglican schismatics, that Archbishop Peter Akinola has to promote draconian anti-Gay laws to compete with the Muslims.

Shariah hasn’t worked out too well. One guy got his hand amputated for stealing a cow, but otherwise, the politicians turned out to be politicians.

The shift reflects the fact that religious law did not transform society. Indeed, some of the most ardent Shariah-promoting politicians now find themselves under investigation for embezzling millions of dollars. Many early proponents of Shariah feel duped by politicians who rode its popular wave but failed to live by its tenets, enriching themselves and neglecting to improve the lives of ordinary people.

For the past two years, U.S. Episcopalians have been treated to the amazing spectacle of White Southerners trying to place themselves under the jurisdiction of Black African archbishops, in a bid to segregate Gay people. Schism is now a cottage industry, complete with coffee mugs, T-shirts and cheap mousepads, as well as multi-million-dollar lawsuits.

The frenzy has even reached usually-placid Canada, where last week a retired bishop defected to Chile and became a Southern Conehead.

Loyal Episcopalians have tried pointing out to the dearly departed that they’re hitching their buggies to horses they don’t know; that the cure is worse than the disease. But the fever continues unabated.

In 2006 Akinola tried to get a law passed in Nigeria that would make it illegal for LGBT people to go to a meeting, visit a website or have lunch together. His proposed penalty: 14 years in prison.

It was so ridiculous that even George Bush’s State Department protested.

When Episcopalians publicized this outrageous proposal, the newbie “Anglicans” replied that Akinola’s program was much more humane than the Islamic fundamentalists to the north, with whom he was said to compete for hearts and minds, because under Shariah the punishment for Gay sex is death.

But Shariah doesn’t criminalize lunch, and any government that wants to outlaw “sodomy” soon finds the Gross Domestic Product plumeting to zero. There’s too much sex going on to possibly root it all out. You’d have to deputize half the population, and even then most people will look the other way.

So now the “Anglicans” are stuck. They’ve hitched their wagons to an archbishop who’s an international joke. Akinola tried to prohibit freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press and freedom of thought. They knew exactly what they were getting into, and they went with him anyway.

Their plunge over the cliff will be long and hard, so look away and don’t watch.

Meanwhile it’s interesting that the four U.S. dioceses considering secession (out of 110) have suddenly taken up with the Chilean Coneheads, not Akinola. His sun has set.

Still, it’s a long way from Falls Church to Buenos Aires, and the archbishop there is fruitcake. Sooner or later the Virginians will run out of places to hide. Not secession nor nullification nor segregation are sufficient to keep them safe from Gay people on their knees.++