Think Progress on LGBT Rights in the U.S. Is Slow? Try Malawi

The BBC, in addition to a variety of other news sources, reported yesterday that a gay male couple in Malawi, who were arrested for gross indecency after a public engagement ceremony, have been sentenced to fourteen years hard labor:

A judge in Malawi has imposed a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison with hard labour on a gay couple convicted of gross indecency and unnatural acts.

The judge said he wanted to protect the public from “people like you”.

Steven Monjeza, 26, and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, 20, have been in jail since they were arrested in December after holding an engagement ceremony.

The case has sparked international condemnation and a debate about homosexuality in the country.

The British government, Malawi’s largest donor, expressed its “dismay” at the sentences, but has not withdrawn aid.

Neither has the U.S., although the State Department issued censorious remarks. Of course, there’s not a lot that these governments can do; a given country has a right to its national sovereignty. But when national sovereignty extends to the oh-so-anachronistic-seeming practice of sentencing gay men to hard labor for “gross indecency” (remember that Oscar Wilde was convicted in 1895 of the same crime, and given the same sentence, albeit for only two years) there’s a serious problem. LGBT Americans march in the streets for the right to marry, but unlike Monjeza and Chimbalanga, they face no threat from the state when they do so. Situations like this, or like that in Uganda, where the so-called “kill the gays bill” seems likely to go ahead, force those of us Americans who consider ourselves activists for LGBT rights to completely reorient our perspectives. American activists for marriage equality sometimes will paint marriage as a “life-and-death issue,” emphasizing aspects like hospital visitation rights and inheritance laws, and I must admit that I’ve used this phrasing in the past. But I have to think that to talk like this does a disservice to those few brave individuals in faraway countries for whom their sexual orientation quite literally is an issue of life and death. We in America would do well to get as angry about this couple in Malawi, or about gay people in Uganda who may soon find their existence a capital crime, or about gay people in Iraq whose lives have been threatened in increasing numbers since the U.S. invasion, as we did about Proposition 8.

Emily is a staff writer for Campus Progress. She attends Princeton University.

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