The Internet and cell phone pornography bill

The original text of this article in The Daily Maverick.

Last Saturday, in an act of flagrant disregard for the faiths of others, Pastor Ray McCauley had planned to promote his brand by exploiting paranoia around tourist safety at the World Cup. Unfortunately for Pastor Ray, a heart attack meant that he could not attend. But while tickets for the “National Day of Prayer” for a safe World Cup might as well have been accompanied by homeopathic remedies for xenophobia (which would be equally effective), the event still raises questions. Firstly, why do we need his god to help out with policing those pesky foreigners and other threats to World Cup harmony, like Ivo Vegter? Is Ray saying that the other gods aren’t up to the task or even – sotto voce – that they may not exist?

Freedom of (Multi)choice

Originally published in The Daily Maverick.

A number of the self-appointed guardians of South Africa’s moral fabric have recently weighed in on DStv’s news that it is considering introducing a pay-per-view pornography channel. As previously reported by Kevin Bloom in The Daily Maverick, Taryn Hodgson of the Christian Action Network claims that the channel will fuel the “fires of sexual abuse and exploitation”, and that those who believe otherwise have “imbibed the lies of the porn industry”. Errol Naidoo of the Family Policy Institute cites sympathetic studies (including one from a right-wing Christian organisation, and another from a high-ranking Freemason’s address during the 1989 ‘Religious Alliance against Pornography’ conference) which purport to demonstrate a connection between pornography and sexual violence. The trade union Solidarity claims that “children’s rights will be violated” by this channel, based on their own research indicating that “77% of molesters of boys and 87% of molesters of girls used pornography”.

More on Maxwele and freedom of speech

A follow-up article on the Chumani Maxwele incident, and the implications it has for free speech in South Africa, appeared in the Durban Mercury (22/02/10) and the Cape Times (23/02/10). My original text can be found here.