Article Title: Another African country is expected to pass an anti-gay law
Article date: March 25 2014
This article discussed the issue that another African country-Ethiopia was going to pass a bill that “would take away the president’s ability to pardon people convicted under laws banning homosexual acts’. Before this anti-homosexuality law published by Ethiopia, there were two other African Country which has passed anti-gay law. These two countries are Uganda and Nigeria. In Africa, there are several countries that ban homosexual acts and for this time, some of this countries are going to put the prohibition on gays in their law.
Gay marriage is one of the hottest words recently. Since several states in the United States found that the ban on gay marriage is a violation to the U.S. Constitution, these state started to push the legislation of gay marriage, which was also supported by federal government. Meanwhile, the whole world started to focus on this issue. People started to pay attention to the rights of LGBT group. These attentions were also paid to the gay right and gay marriage in African countries.
This article I found has a key word: condemnation. After the passage of strict anti-gay law in these African countries, governments of these countries received a huge amount of condemnation from all over the world. Due to the civilization and development of human society, people started to care more about human rights which include the equality of homosexual and heterosexual. But in Africa or we can say in the information of Africa we learned from our media, things seemed to be the same as in the old time. Mainstream of African society still didn’t accept homosexual. The social norm was more likely to be anti-homosexual. As I read all those articles about gay issue , I found that almost every article had the same tone-biased. Journalists are likely to describe Africa as a uncivilized, rude place when they write about human right issue in Africa. The article I chose is from the Washington Post, one of the mainly paper media in the United States. I think the source impacts the choice of words and tone. As a major media in the States, Washington Post represents the mainstream ideology in this country. So when it’s going to write something which is not correspond to the main ideology of this country, the tone is biased.
In my own opinion, homosexual right is one of the basic human rights. People should have the right to choose their partner. However, different places in the world have different societies. As a result, the ideology of each country or region is absolutely different. African countries had their own development, so there are a lot of social customs that cannot be changed in a short time. But with the civilization of their own society and the interaction with developed countries, Africa is definitely going to be more versatile and is able to tolerate homosexual. What we should do is not condemning but giving Africa more time to develop.
