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Posts Tagged ‘thabo mbeki’

South African Government As Strict As High School Lunchladies

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

Like they can talkBecause there are hardly any pressing problems left in South Africa with which its government must deal, two weeks ago President Thabo Mbeki (on the left) signed into law a bill that makes it a criminal offense for teenagers under 16 to “kiss, touch or rub up against each other in public.” They probably did this in some sort of half-assed effort to stop the spread of AIDS in South Africa, since they don’t really want to get into things like comprehensive sex education and massive condom distribution programs and whatever, not that Mbeki believes that HIV causes AIDS anyway. This was, in fact, also the rule at my high school, and I was warned for holding my boyfriend’s hand under the lunch table and then given detention for whispering in his ear and it definitely didn’t stop me from having sex, so take that lunchladies and stupid government leaders! What did keep me from getting pregnant/diseased from said sexing, though, was the extremely comprehensive sex ed classes that were required by the State of New York and taught without embarrassment by our teacher. But, hey, a new law criminalizing teenage PDA is sooo much better. [Cape Argus]


The Lesser of Two Evils?

Friday, December 28th, 2007

jacob%20zuma.jpgLast week, Jacob Zuma beat Thabo Mbeki in a race to run South Africa’s African National Congress, which sorta set him up to take Mbeki out as the President. Mbeki is the President who said that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, pregnant women should stop taking AZT to prevent transmission, the white people spread it through Africa on purpose and HIV could be cured through traditional remedies. Zuma was fired by Mbeki in 2005 when his financial adviser was caught soliciting a bribe and is now facing charges that he took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from French arms dealers, not that that prosecution is at all politically motivated. Sometimes, even our bad leadership choices can be made to seem better. [Yahoo News]