God Don't Like Ugly

When the Cricket World Cup was hosted by South Africa in 2003, there was a globally televised Olympic style opening ceremony complete with a Parade of Nations. All of the fourteen national cricket teams participating in the competition marched into the stadium behind their flag bearer and a model carrying a placard bearing that nation's name.

There was only one African model in the stadium that February 9 evening in Cape Town doing placard duty, a Senegalese born beauty named Barbara Diop. She had done work in South Africa and international runways in Italy prior to this fateful day that she held the placard aloft for the cricket team members from Zimbabwe.

A few days into the competition rumors started flying that Barbara was a transwoman. She denied it at first but eventually admitted she was as the story continues to gain traction in the local and eventually the international media.

So why am I talking about a seven year old event when the post is entitled 'God Don't Like Ugly'?

Patience, TransGriot readers.

When Barbara was revealed to be trans, Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe went ballistic and threatened to pull his team out of the Cricket World Cup.

He didn't get to carry out that threat because Zimbabwe was eliminated from the competition.

So what set Bob off? Mugabe is in competition with Uganda's Yoweri Museveni for the mantle of which one is the African continent's biggest homophobe. He ranted at the time that the organizers deliberately did it to embarrass Zimbabwe.

As if you don't do a bang-up job of that yourself, Bob.

In July 2002 came this infamous quote out of Mugabe's mouth: "When I said gays are worse than dogs and pigs, I really meant it because pigs and dogs do not do unnatural things."

He has had a long running policy of anti-GLBT repression in Zimbabwe that the Religious Right would love to emulate here.in the good old USA.

But Bobby, Yoweri, Benedict XVI and all others who do shady stuff to innocent people will eventually come to realize the truth of one of the African-American community's oldest sayings: God don't like ugly.

It's an iconic saying that is so ingrained in African-American culture that it served as the title of a book by novelist Mary Monroe.

Basically, it's taking about karma. Just as Mugabe felt it in 2003 and others will sooner or later experience it, the beautiful thing about observing karma play out is that the evildoers come crashing down due to their own incompetence, hypocrisy, hubris, pride and arrogance.

Or a combination of all the above.

That karma can take form in an anti-gay politician being outed after leaving a gay bar. A transphobe being caught in drag. An anti-gay minister being arrested for soliciting sex from a male sex worker. A large organization that impedes the civil rights advances of a marginalized group it doesn't like finding themselves in trouble on multiple fronts.

One of my favorite ones played out in the home state. I got to watch the rise of Tom DeLay in Texas and later national politics with his questionably shady tactics and running roughshod over a lot of people in both parties in the process that earned him the nickname 'The Hammer'.


It came crashing down in flames around him not long after the 2003 Delaymandering of Texas for maximum GOP political advantage. In October 2005 he was arrested on conspiracy and money laundering charges relating to the 2002 Republican takeover of the Texas Legislature. He watched Nick Lampson, a Democrat he drew out of his seat return to Congress in 2006 by taking the Sugar Land area congressional seat he'd occupied for ten years.

Well, if you didn't get the message, time to straighten up and fly right and do the right thing by people.

If you don't, that cosmic rap on the knuckles or kick in the rear will be coming soon.

How hard that karmic beatdown becomes is dependent on how much dirt you did that God is displeased with.