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Murderous anti gay law in Uganda
Sorry for the Anglit - working from a goy computer.
This abomination says so much about law in general. we usually think about law as being in some way inherently different from other forms of control, due to its deliberative nature more resistant to biases although certainly not immune to them.
It would be a mistake to see this simply as a legal codification of traditional prejudice. this is new, since not individuals or organizations nor civil society but the state constitutes itself as discriminatory. this is ho-hum to anarcho-libertarians (as well as some Hobbesians) who see the state as a necessary evil, but always shocking to Rouseauists and Hegelians (or Habermasians) who regard the state as an opportunity to do things better, to be better, on an ethical scale, than persons. who see in collective organization not just a restraint on how bad humans can be, but a technology of allowing them to explore how good they can become (in this sense law is always measured against some imagined Utopian project).
In fact, legal criminalization of a category of human existence (being gay, or woman, or Jew) is something utterly new in relation to social prejudice and constraints, arguably re-invented by modernity since we no longer identify law simply with the biases of the sovereign. Uganda is not playing the traditional fundamentalist game but is doing something thoroughly modern, since it is modernity for which law as technology and form has become the normal language of relations. [As an aside, an association i claimed elsewhere: generated by state law, the Shoa was not a massive pogrom inter alia for this reason, and rests apart from other forms of genocide, even annihilatory genocide, b/c of it]. That's one reason why we (OK, some of us) considered Bowers v. Hardwick such an abomination. Expressively (possibly also practically) this is not simply denying equal protection. The state itself becomes an enemy of a class of its citizens, and a class of humanity.
This abomination says so much about law in general. we usually think about law as being in some way inherently different from other forms of control, due to its deliberative nature more resistant to biases although certainly not immune to them.
It would be a mistake to see this simply as a legal codification of traditional prejudice. this is new, since not individuals or organizations nor civil society but the state constitutes itself as discriminatory. this is ho-hum to anarcho-libertarians (as well as some Hobbesians) who see the state as a necessary evil, but always shocking to Rouseauists and Hegelians (or Habermasians) who regard the state as an opportunity to do things better, to be better, on an ethical scale, than persons. who see in collective organization not just a restraint on how bad humans can be, but a technology of allowing them to explore how good they can become (in this sense law is always measured against some imagined Utopian project).
In fact, legal criminalization of a category of human existence (being gay, or woman, or Jew) is something utterly new in relation to social prejudice and constraints, arguably re-invented by modernity since we no longer identify law simply with the biases of the sovereign. Uganda is not playing the traditional fundamentalist game but is doing something thoroughly modern, since it is modernity for which law as technology and form has become the normal language of relations. [As an aside, an association i claimed elsewhere: generated by state law, the Shoa was not a massive pogrom inter alia for this reason, and rests apart from other forms of genocide, even annihilatory genocide, b/c of it]. That's one reason why we (OK, some of us) considered Bowers v. Hardwick such an abomination. Expressively (possibly also practically) this is not simply denying equal protection. The state itself becomes an enemy of a class of its citizens, and a class of humanity.
