Buju Banton Denies Bashing Gays

Buju Banton, a Jamaican reggae artist whose tour is being greeted with protests by gay rights supporters all over the country, says he's not a gay basher:

"I have never bashed any gays before, and if I bashed gays, I bashed them 16 years ago," Banton tells Billboard magazine in an interview conducted on his tour bus. "There's no tolerance from [the gay community]. I'm not a gay-basher. I'm not a homophobe."

Beautiful, he should be a politician. I've never done that, and if I did, it was a long time ago. Mind you, one of his songs talks about shooting gays in the head, pouring acid on them and setting them on fire. But come on, who hasn't said that? He added, "I have lots of gay friends."

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Jamaica was found to be one of the worse countriesw in the world for gay bashing. Sorry, i have been unable to find a link to the study - but I found it interesting that that it was ranked third behind St. Martens in first and, I believe, another island nation in second. Rastafari tend to have a lot of screwball issues. They tend to beat "their" women, they tend to be very anti-gay and contrary to their fetishment of marijuana, a sacrement they partake of quite regularly, they are often very violent. I was, for quite a while, getting into reggae. But as I listened to it and learned more about Rastifari, I realised that aside from the pot smoking they are not very different than the rest of the religious right.

A character in Spider Robinson's novel Callahan's Con is a lapsed Rastafarian who gave up his religion one day when he realized it was kind of silly to worship a god who called himself "Highly Silly Ass, Eh?"

By CaptainMike (not verified) on 04 Oct 2006 #permalink