Errol Naidoo: High priest of hysteria

In today’s Cape Times, Errol Naidoo uses the Sax Appeal story to have a thinly-disguised rant about homosexuals, who he clearly has some sort of “thing” about. Anyway: let’s take him at his word. He suggests that the “liberal media elite” (where “liberal” is clearly meant to be some kind of swear-word, although Naidoo’s grasp of argumentation is too weak for him to realise that many of us might see the media being “Liberal” as a positive) would not be nearly as tolerant if homosexuality, rather than his faith, were the object of the sorts of offences he imagines were perpetrated against his faith in the recent edition of Sax Appeal. He says:

The sanctimonious drivel published in our nation’s newspapers over the past two weeks ostensibly in defence of civil liberties is nothing but a sad reflection of the liberal media’s hypocrisy and double standards when it comes to Christianity.

What he doesn’t seem to get is that nobody sane has any incentive to mock or ridicule homosexuals. Homosexuality is neither a belief system nor an ideology – in fact, the only thing that homosexuals have in common is a sexual preference, which is hardly mock-worthy. Nor, in my experience, are “homosexuals” particularly funny as a group of people – in fact, they’re just like Mr. Naidoo (well, perhaps slightly less funny). In fact, the only ridicule directed at homosexuals that I can recall reading usually emerges from organisations such as his.

It’s indeed a problem if one set of people who make no sense get singled out for ridicule, and others get a free pass. This is perhaps why the “liberal media” sometimes publish articles criticising astrology, homeopathy, crystal-rubbing, etc. They don’t do this enough, to be sure – but they let Mr. Naidoo off most of the time, contrary to his paranoid suggestions.

On a side-note, I’ve noticed that he always ends his missives with:

Standing
Errol Naidoo

Does he think that “standing” is some kind of an accomplishment? Is he perhaps making some subtle comment about evolution?

By Jacques Rousseau

Jacques Rousseau teaches critical thinking and ethics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and is the founder and director of the Free Society Institute, a non-profit organisation promoting secular humanism and scientific reasoning.