A bill to legally kill gays in Uganda

By JONATHAN WOLFMAN

I was delighted to be able, Tuesday, report that a panel of the Ninth Circuit Federal Court in San Francisco ruled that California’s Prop 8, undoing marriage freedom, was unconstitutional and void. The case will almost certainly be further adjudicated at the Supreme Court in 2013. I believe the case has a shot because it is possible that Fourteenth Amendment/Equal Protection arguments may well sway a fifth vote, perhaps Justice Kennedy’s. I hope they do.

I’m pleased, too, to tell you that the Washington State Senate has passed by a 12 vote margin a same-sex marriage bill that the state house then endorsed. Governor Gregoire will sign the legislation shortly, adding her state to the six others and Washington, DC that already have stepped up for equality. It’s a good day.

And yet we here in the United States and the West generally, simply have no real understanding of just how miserable some government and church alliances make the lives of LGBT citizens in other regions. I have shared here what the situations look like in Zimbabwe and Uganda, for example. This week the Ugandan Parliament, urged on by several touring American Baptist ministers – I have written here about their African tour previously and in detail – has begun debate on what papers there call the “Kill The Gays Bill.”

Being gay can, right now, result in decades of imprisonment in Uganda. Were the bill to pass, the government, with the majority of Uganda’s ministers’ approval, would be able to sentence to life or execute citizens for no other alleged crime than his or her homosexuality. The bill might have well been passed yesterday save for the fact that when the planned vote arose many female parliament members walked out in protest and the measure was tabled for at least a week.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has, as we know, levelled strong condemnation of this specific barbarism. She and many of Europe’s foreign ministers three years ago fought against the fourteen-year sentences to hard labor of two Malawi men for holding a party at which they announced that one day they wished to marry. Their sentences were overturned and the men exiled.

Here is a statement from Amnesty International on the current situation:

Uganda is a country where American-style evangelical Christianity is exploding, and there are close links between many American anti-gay preachers, politicians, and activists, and their Ugandan counterparts.

Mr. Bahati, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill’s sponsor, is the secretary of the Ugandan branch of The Family, the American evangelical organization whose members include Sens. James Inhofe, Jim DeMint, and Tom Coburn.

Martin Ssempa, a Pentecostal preacher who has championed the bill, was a protégé of Rev. Rick Warren and, during the Bush administration, a recipient of at least $90,000 of American aid earmarked for abstinence promotion. Another major anti-gay activist, Stephen Langa, the head of Uganda’s Family Life Network, is an affiliate of the Phoenix-based group Disciple Nations Alliance.

…the ideology underlying the bill comes from American conservatives. It is Americans who have elaborated a vision of homosexuality as a satanic global conspiracy bent on destroying society’s foundations, akin to the Jewish ”octopus” in classic anti-Semitic narratives. According to Warren Throckmorton, an evangelical psychology professor once associated with the ex-gay movement, when Uganda’s anti-gay activists speak about homosexuality, they cite materials by Scott Lively and Paul Cameron, two of the fiercest American opponents of the so-called homosexual agenda.

Reverend Scott Lively was among the U.S. touring missionaries who held dozens of seminars three summers back in over a dozen African parliaments, congresses, and for heads of state. More have followed and still others have offered advice and support from here. While no U.S. missionary recommended death sentences for being gay, per se, they all insisted, and in every meeting, that only nations wishing to invite God’s wrath and who wanted homosexuality to rot the foundations of civil society would allow gay citizens any real measure of freedom. And, again, Amnesty makes it clear just who some of the American pols are who support these ministers’ work.

Justice will, I have no doubt, eventually prevail. Freedom always does. But until it does, people will be killed by bigots egged on by the Ugandan press, its government, and their American church and politician-collaborators who, of course, when challenged, will neatly claim that they really don’t approve of outright murder.

Americans of good conscience, every single decent one of us, ought to be ashamed of this complicity and roundly condemn it. The aiding-and-abetting is being done in my name and in yours.

Expect better.

Demand better.

Jonathan Wolfman blogs at http://open.salon.com/blog/jlw1.

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Posted by Gary on Feb 9 2012. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.