Gay rights activists across the globe are raising questions about how three American evangelicals may have inspired a radical new bill under consideration in Uganda that would sentence gays to be hanged.
Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks.
The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family.
For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”
Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior.
One month after the conference, a previously unknown Ugandan politician, who boasts of having evangelical friends in the American government, introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which threatens to hang homosexuals, and, as a result, has put Uganda on a collision course with Western nations.
Donor countries, including the United States, are demanding that Uganda’s government drop the proposed law, saying it violates human rights, though Uganda’s minister of ethics and integrity (who previously tried to ban miniskirts) recently said, “Homosexuals can forget about human rights.”
The Ugandan government, facing the prospect of losing millions in foreign aid, is now indicating that it will back down, slightly, and change the death penalty provision to life in prison for some homosexuals.
“What these people have done is set the fire they can’t quench,” said the Rev. Kapya Kaoma, a Zambian who went undercover for six months to chronicle the relationship between the African anti-homosexual movement and American evangelicals.
Mr. Kaoma was at the conference and said that the three Americans “underestimated the homophobia in Uganda” and “what it means to Africans when you speak about a certain group trying to destroy their children and their families.”
“When you speak like that,” he said, “Africans will fight to the death.”
If put into effect, the bill wouldn’t be the first of it’s kind. Muslim countries like Iran and Yemen already have the death penalty for homosexuals and in northern Nigeria gay men can face death by stoning, but human rights advocates in Uganda believe the visit by the three Americans made conditions in Uganda (where gay Ugandans were already subject to beatings, blackmail, death threats, constant harassment and “correctional” rape) even worse.
Watch the videos below for more info on this hot button topic!
Follow @bossip on Twitter Right Now!!!
More On Bossip!
Road Rage! Celebrities That Shouldn’t Be Allowed To Drive
Turning In That V-Card: When Did Your Favorite Celebrities Lose Their Virginities?
Dirty Dog Diaries: A Gallery Of Men That Left That A$$ For A White Girlllllll
Rumor Control: Did Trey Songz Smack One Of The Kardashians?!
