Roots of Uganda’s anti-LGBT law
WITH AN editorial from the Guardian from December 2009 calling the passage of Uganda's Orwellian "anti-homosexuality bill" likely because of support from the ruling party, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activists in Africa and throughout the world need to prepare for action in the instance that this inhumane proposal--which would carry the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality" and for "repeat offenders"--becomes law within the country.
The bill's sponsor, Ugandan MP David Bahati, has since said that the death penalty would be replaced by a penalty of life imprisonment, but it is not clear what the final version of the bill will be.
This proposal was not created in a vacuum. In fact, some of the intellectual justification for this law comes from U.S. evangelicals, including groups such as Exodus International and individuals such as Scott Lively, who uses bogus facts to argue that homosexuality leads to higher divorce and HIV transmission rates.
What this hints at (even though Exodus later condemned the bill as blocking its mission of "extending its love for Christ...to all") is that the U.S. evangelical movement is not only rabidly anti-gay, but that it seeks to destroy the LGBT community within the U.S., and could be using Uganda as a "testing ground" of sorts to experiment with anti-LGBT legislation for the U.S. and other nations where it has a strong presence.
It has also become clear that most evangelical organizations are not open to discussion on changing their views of LGBT people. They have clearly spent serious time and effort to aid in the creation of anti-LGBT policies and continue to organize to block and oppose the rights of a group that simply does not fit with their own bigoted religious views, as shown by research from ReligiousTolerance.org.
The time for "discussion" is over. By doing nothing to stop this hateful law in Uganda, evangelical groups in the U.S. have implicitly supported the proposal, and also give us an idea of what they would like to see in the U.S.
LGBT activists and the left need to hold evangelical groups accountable. They need to publicly denounce and protest not only the Religious Right's own bigotry, but also their inability to tolerate lifestyles different from their own and their desire to legislate the return to a Leave-It-To-Beaver–style family and have it forced on society as a whole.
We need to counteract their demands on every level. If they are calling for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in the U.S., the left needs to campaign for an amendment that would guarantee same-sex couples marriage rights all across the country at the federal level. The piecemeal strategy of mainstream LGBT groups, such as the Human Rights Campaign, only emboldens hateful forces that want to drive everyone in society into a bigoted and hateful mindset and lifestyle.
Western nations also ought to do more to make the proposed Uganda law completely inoperable. A good proposal would be a law requiring the U.S. and other Western nations to grant automatic refugee status to anyone convicted under the law, along with an automatic suspension of foreign aid if the Ugandan government refuses to transfer such refugees over to international custody.
Never before has the LGBT rights movement been forced to take such an international approach as this one. Without combating hate on all fronts both in the West and abroad, the rights of law-abiding, tax-paying citizens in the U.S. are in jeopardy, and the lives of innocent Ugandans are at risk.
We need to advocate both against the Ugandan proposal and the Religious Right in the U.S. to ensure that rights for LGBT people are guaranteed all around the world.
John Parsons, from the Internet
