JAUNDICED EYE

This is a victory that the LGBTI activists may yet regret

Freedom of speech is self evidently a cornerstone of democracy. Yet it is a right that is being eroded in South Africa by the very people who have most benefited from its existence.

The American fundamentalist preacher Pastor Steven Anderson who was invited by a local Baptist church to visit, was this week refused 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 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.

Anderson is undoubtedly 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, it is a huge leap from merely having hateful opinions to actually endangering public safety. Anderson reportedly had already agreed to refrain from 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 have tolerated even the presence of a homosexual in his company. Same-sex marriages, Jacob Zuma warned, were ‘a disgrace to the nation and to God’. 

Despite such sometimes offensively expressed sexist and homophobic opinions, Zuma has gone on to become a two-term president. Indeed, his achievements might well to some degree be the result of his engrained traditionalism, for this is socially a deeply conservative country. 

Take the most comprehensive research yet into SA attitudes towards homosexuality and gender-nonconformity, 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. 

Surely it is the constitutional right of these conservatives to invite 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 our Chinese allies.

In the same vein, it is the right of agnostics and atheists to deride the religious majority of South Africans for holding what they view as naïve and primitive beliefs. It is consequently also the right of these secularists to invite, as they did, the 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 at UCT. The question is, if those opposed to Rose’s views had been able to marshal 60,000 signatures, should he, too, have been denied a visa? 

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, Rose 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 gratuitously insulting. As for the supposed hate speech, well there is legislation to deal with real, as opposed to academically conjured, hate speech – words that demonstrably incite violence against another group.

The LGBTI community in SA is unique on the continent in the rights that it has won. Those include, critically, the right to speak freely, despite the fact that its opinions are provocatively offensive to the majority of South Africans. It’s this important 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 self-same HSRC survey found that despite the antipathy of seven out of ten South Africans to LGBTI people, the respondents by a margin of two to one supported the retention of constitutional protections against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. 

So had they been allowed to visit, neither Anderson nor Rose would likely have found much traction if they had dared advocate anti-gay or anti-Islamic violence. On the other hand, the social conservative majority will no doubt be pleased to note that all it takes to subvert our hard-won constitutional freedoms is 60,000 signatures or poking the belly button of a pushover academic.

The LGBTI community should keep this possibility in mind when next they consider inviting from overseas a high profile, radical, insultingly anti-establishment guest speaker.

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