A Red Stripe perhaps, but no other colors

Jamaica is perhaps one the most homophobic places on Earth, says Time.

This comes as a shock to me, but it looks like the tiny Carribean country is more intolerant than Wyoming. The Time article goes on and on, referring to a number of little-publicized hate crimes against gays.

"In the past two years, two of the island's most prominent gay activists, Brian Williamson and Steve Harvey, have been murdered — and a crowd even celebrated over Williamson's mutilated body. Perhaps most disturbing, many anti-gay assaults have been acts of mob violence. In 2004, a teen was almost killed when his father learned his son was gay and invited a group to lynch the boy at his school. Months later, witnesses say, police egged on another mob that stabbed and stoned a gay man to death in Montego Bay. And this year a Kingston man, Nokia Cowan, drowned after a crowd shouting 'batty boy' (a Jamaican epithet for homosexual) chased him off a pier. 'Jamaica is the worst any of us has ever seen,' says Rebecca Schleifer of the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch and author of a scathing report on the island's anti-gay hostility."

As a kind of social buttress for the sentiment, the article cites a number of major Rastafarian reggae artists who advocate violence against gays and lesbians with their lyrics. Some examples:

"One of [Buju Banton's] first hits, 1992's Boom Bye-Bye, boasts of shooting gays with Uzis and burning their skin with acid 'like an old tire wheel.'

Banton's lyrics are hardly unique among reggae artists today. Another popular artist, Elephant Man (O'Neil Bryant, 29) declares in one song, 'When you hear a lesbian getting raped/ It's not our fault ... Two women in bed/ That's two Sodomites who should be dead.' Another, Bounty Killer (Rodney Price, 33), urges listeners to burn 'Mister Fagoty' and make him 'wince in agony.'"

I know I can't speak for the rest of you, but this makes me fucking ill. Jamaica, like Texas, is now officially on my list of places I have no desire to visit.