Kony as Kansas in August

 So, it turns out the KONY 2012 campaign is a smokescreen for the religious right. Extensive connections have been traced between its people (the charity Invisible Children) and conservative groups who have supported California’s Proposition 8 (the 2008 ballot initiative which outlawed same-sex marriage) and its links to the Ugandan government (against whom Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army is fighting) include support for its continuing execution of homosexuals. Its hierarchy also overlaps with The Fellowship, a scary-sounding group of Christians who claim the allegiance of sitting members of Congress.

I watched the KONY 2012 documentary when it aired on Channel Ten in early March, and thought it a worthwhile cause, but one which was hindered by its imitation of other plastic-wristband causes which flatter Western hipsters as being the carriers of a modern-day White Man’s Burden. It also implicitly legitimises the Ugandan government, whose human rights record is no better than Kony’s, and ignores the reality that the Lord’s Resistance Army have mostly moved on from the country and now operate in the DRC, the CAR, and South Sudan. (Those criticisms, and others, have been made extensively since – Wikipedia has a summary.) There was also the little matter of Invisible Children founder and KONY 2012 presenter Jason Russell having a hilarious public meltdown. The revelation that the project is linked politically to America’s foremost reactionaries, however, takes matters to the next level – one wonders what other organisations are secretly controlled by the Christian right…or, indeed, if any are fronts for Islamism.

Perhaps what we need is a RELIGION 2012 campaign, in which we banish medieval superstition, racism, sexism, homophobia, terrorism, child molestation, honour killings, ritual animal slaughter, female genital mutilation, suttee, apocalypse predictions, HIV/AIDS denialism, and creationism from the public sphere.