Related: How Might Hillary Clinton’s Exit Impact Uganda Kill-the-Gays Bill?
Last week, the U.S. Christian-Right website LifeSiteNews falsely reported that Canada had denied visas to Ugandan lawmakers due to their supposed opposition to marriage equality. (TWO wrote about this false claim.)
This week, the world was reminded of the actual reason for visa denial — and reminded, also, that Uganda has one of the world’s worst human-rights records:
Having delivered an antigay tirade in Canada, Uganda’s Speaker of the Parliament, Rebecca Kadaga, returned home Monday and vowed to hold a vote on that country’s three-year-old legislation to execute homosexuals and silence family members and human-rights advocates.
Kadaga’s antigay rampage coincides with the premiere in the United Kingdom and Paris of Call Me Kuchu, a documentary of African antigay violence and the 2011 murder of Uganda LGBT activist David Kato (pictured).
Uganda’s kill-the-gays campaign was launched following a 2009 conference that was led by visiting U.S. ex-gay activists. Alongside this legislative campaign, some of Uganda’s violently antigay media conducted a campaign of extrajudicial violence, publishing hit lists of suspected LGBT Ugandans. One consequence: Kato’s murder.
Uganda’s Daily Monitor reports that Kadaga’s press briefing this week “was organised by religious leaders, former Ethics and Integrity Minister Nsaba Buturo and the mover of the Bill, Mr David Bahati, all of whom are pushing for the enactment of the anti-homosexuality Bill.
“A large procession comprising members of different Pentecostal churches, Makerere University students and boda boda cyclists camped at the airport from 10am to after midnight when Ms Kadaga emerged to greet them as they ululated and waved placards appreciating her boldness in Canada.”
The renewed push for the Anti-Homosexuality Bill jeopardizes a portion of the $200 million that Uganda receives each year from U.S. taxpayers. Antigay Uganda churches receive a large chunk of that aid for programs that were originally intended to combat HIV/AIDS, and these churches receive millions more in aid from the U.S. Christian Right.
African news channel NTV reported on Kadaga’s effort to reboot the kill-the-gays campaign:
U.S. Christian professor Warren Throckmorton notes that Uganda’s Parliament reacted by passing a resolution in support of Kadaga’s actions.
LifeSiteNews, meanwhile, has given the renewed kill-the-gays bill a silent nod of support — by declining to inform its readers of Ugandan leaders’ lethal intentions. And U.S. ex-gay hardliners are likewise declining to speak out against Uganda’s campaign to execute homosexuals. This is to be expected: Ex-gay hardliners supported the conference which launched the campaign, and successfully deterred the now-moderate Exodus from retracting that support until more than a year later.
Veteran ex-gay and antigay activists Robert Gagnon, Anne Paulk, Stephen Black, David Kyle Foster, Frank Worthen, Andy Comiskey, and others severed ties with Exodus International and formed the new Restored Hope Network this year, after Exodus withdrew its support for criminalization and stopped damning gay Christians to eternal hellfire.
The hardline Restored Hope Network’s doctrinal statement support offers no support of homosexuals’ right to life, liberty, or justice; RHN leaders have declined to respond when asked via Twitter and Facebook whether they support or oppose Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill specifically, or human rights generally for those whom RHN condemns to hell.
Related information:
Box Turtle Bulletin:
Uganda Parliament May Vote On Anti-Homosexuality Bill By Christmas
LGBT Ugandans speak out:
Our duty to tell the truth about being gay in Uganda
The media-facilitated murder of David Kato:
Call me Kuchu: The life and death of a gay rights campaigner
Why the United States subsidizes and arms Uganda:
The CIA in Africa and Somalia: A Strategic Analysis
Some of Restored Hope Network’s hard-line ex-gays on Twitter:
Anne Paulk
Andy Comiskey
Stephen Black
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I think this site is in desperate need of some serious publicity.
http://uganda.usaid.gov/
I think we are moving too fast with our ego’s leading the way to make decisions for lives of millions of Ugandans. I am blessed with a chance to rub shoulders with profiles and yesterday i was talking to a very respectable judge and he said to me. “Son, you have given alot of powers to the so called legislators and you have buried the future of your children, When they start Killing them you will say….. I was here in 2012 and i did Nothing, i’ll be long gone and You My son will sit where i sit and send your child to death”.
These words are still running in my mind. I think little has been done to educate the public about consequences of these bills and legislation, because even the members of Parliament am friends with will tell you that only one side is represented. Funding to gay organisations is one of the problems causing this. Why should you fund a disaster that has not yet happened and you send the money, can’t you keep it in your vault until the disaster happens and you fund the actions required at that particular time or in a few months to come. This has decayed administrations and caused hypocrisy among leaders in the gay community. Can’t we redirect efforts to much more important issues bse we claim Ugandans are hateful but where was it easy for gay people and what made them strong? Ugandan are eager to understand the gay community, all that is required is awareness.
Titus:
You seem to be saying that Uganda gay organizations have received foreign funding. This appears to us to be untrue. What evidence do you have?
You also seem to be saying that one side is reported in Uganda. That is correct — it’s the antigay side. Reporting and public expression of the gay perspective appears to have been virtually forbidden.
There is a mixup in the way this gay thing is viwed by the west that somehow in Uganda, as a result of some exgay campagains from the US, Ugandans have been influences to be ahit gay. Besides, that soehow Uganda faces a collapse because of donor funding getting cut because of this anti gay stance. Please, let’s get facts right;
1.Whether there has been some anti-gay campaigns or not, Ugandans do not see this practicesocially acceptable. To us it is a moral decadance.
2. To tie the gay thing to foreign aid means these donors convince themselves that with money we shall sell away our conscience. This is, and I should empasise, is a misplaced imagination.
There is apro-gay propaganda that Uganda is passing a bill to execute gays. The basis of this is to justify the unfortunate allegation that the gay kato was killed on account of his sexual orientation. This is evidence of lack of knowledge about the circumstances that led to Kato’s death. The fact is that Kato was killed by a fellow gay whom he did not pay for the night he spent with his fellow male partner. Kato’s killer was arrested, prosecuted and is jailed for murder. To spread unfounded stories of Kato with falsehood so as to justify the errstwhile evil of this sexual orientation is a testimony of hoping to sell what in the mind of the seller in viewed as wrong to society.
The Bill in the Uganda Parliament is a bill to serve the interest of Uganda, a sovereigh nation, just as any country under the sun is free to make any laws it deems fit for its good governance. If anyone out there thinks we are wrong, let him/her register as a citizen of Uganda to influence decisions. This is what sovereinity is
if canadians can not respect our ethics and morals then we do not have relationship because Uganda is a big bird,if only a few people benefit from the donation from canada then what about rest who do not benefit from it at all?
Mrs.Kadaga you did us proud and stones don’t lay on water but instead on the ground,we are very many people behind you.
Eresu: You have just enough education to be stupid, and a sufficiency of blindness to demonstrate one of the reasons Africa is what it is. Not the only reason, but certainly a noticeable one.
a real big one is the failure to recognize the many negative legacies of colonialism, including that there were many tribal homelands that were simply patched together to make a European colony, and patched somewhat differently to make an African nation. They aren’t and they weren’t, as the slaughter in Rwanda showed.
In other news, 8 good Christians were murdered by Muslims in Nigeria a few days ago. Or maybe it was the other way around. The country is, I believe, on the brink of civil war between the two groups.
In other news, the millions of people living around the African Great Lakes in four different countries are causing the lakes to go bad, the water table to drop, and fishing to disappear. But keep on having babies, because actual control of your population is a western import designed to make you go bad. You wouldn’t recognize progress if it bit you on the a*s..
In religion news: those extremely moral African Christians who only follow the word of god also practice…wait for it…polygamy!!!! One man and one woman, unless you’re African and can change to word o’ god. Musaveni has four wives, for example. God knows how many Mugabe has. How would you like to have THAT coming at you in the middle of the night?
Proving ince again that its only heterosexuals who want to marry polygamously, or marry the Eiffel Tower, or whatever.
Eresu, all your prattle shows is not the “rightness” of your antipathy to gay people– not to mention love and let Live and not judging others– but that very backward and violent thinking usually come from very backward and violent places.
We have the exact same problem in our own south. Mississippi is about as southern as you can get in this country, as Religous as you can get, and not surprisingly, has the worse possible statistics in just about every measure of personal, economic, education, and societal health.
Pretty much like the bulk of sub saharan Africa. And yet your worried about Mkwale and Bandu living together, free from your government’s distractions from the mess it is making of your already messy ocuntry.
Food for thought.
Ines, its sheer insanity for you to ask us to respect your decision to imprison and execute innocent people. We will never respect grotesque injustices.
Eresu: There is a mixup in the way this gay thing is viwed by the west that somehow in Uganda, as a result of some exgay campagains from the US, Ugandans have been influences to be ahit gay.
Eresu, I think that the issue isn’t that Ugandans themselves have been influenced to be anti-gay, but that the legitimization of the genocidal legislation has been influenced by US anti-gay activists.
I’m sure the legislation is just an extension of the personal disgust you and other Ugandans hold for same-gender sex.
The exact same thing continues to go on here in the US, and they’d kill us here too if they could get enough support for such a law.
Eresu: Besides, that soehow Uganda faces a collapse because of donor funding getting cut because of this anti gay stance.
We realize this is not the case, as the money donated to Uganda, by liberal and gay accepting churches — for health and wellbeing purposes — has been returned.
In addition, your leaders, be they spiritual or otherwise, have expressed, time and again, that they would rather hate those who are gay than to receive help for the impoverished, prone to disease, diseased, starving and dying Ugandans from anyone who loves human beings who are gay.
Eresu: Please, let’s get facts right;
1.Whether there has been some anti-gay campaigns or not, Ugandans do not see this practicesocially acceptable. To us it is a moral decadance.
First of all, same-gender attraction is a state of being, not an action, or “practice” as you put it.
Secondly, how is same-gender sex a “moral” issue? Or have you bought into the anti-gay propaganda that most if not all gay persons molest children and want children to grow up gay so they can molest more children?
Prominent anti-gay activists say the same things about us here in the US to convince people to vote for anti-gay laws.
How would you like it if the rest of the world defined being Ugandan to a “morally decadent practice” worthy of death? And NO, there is no difference between that and your stance on homosexuals.
Hypothetical anti-Ugandan preacher: There is a big bad Ugandan agenda to convert the rest of the world into the Ugandan lifestyle. A lifestyle hell-bent on Ugandanizing non-Ugandans into child molesting perverts so they can spread that practice to the ends of the earth.
It’s in the best interest of the rest of the world to stop the spread of Ugandanism by passing a United Nations law stating that anyone found to be Ugandan be imprisoned, and if found to be practicing the citizenship of Uganda, be executed.
Does that sound like a fair, moral, conscience driven thing to you? And to repeat, NO, there is no difference between that and your stance on homosexuals.
Eresu: 2. To tie the gay thing to foreign aid means these donors convince themselves that with money we shall sell away our conscience.
Again, the same thing is expressed here in the US, but let’s get something clear, one’s conscience is what tells them the difference between right and wrong in the good and evil sense, and if you think that love between two persons of the same gender, or sex between two people of the same gender — that does not affect you, or anyone else in ANY negative way — then you have no understanding of the meaning of conscience or morality.
Further, to misconstrue your personal disgust for gay couples and / or trysts, as being a matter of morality, is in itself immoral.
Eresu: There is apro-gay propaganda that Uganda is passing a bill to execute gays. The basis of this is to justify the unfortunate allegation that the gay kato was killed on account of his sexual orientation.
The accuracy or inaccuracy of Kato’s killing is not a “basis” for the objection to the fact that Uganda IS PASSING A LAW TO EXECUTE GAYS.
Eresu: The Bill in the Uganda Parliament is a bill to serve the interest of Uganda
If that is your “interest,” so be it, just quit bitching about our bitching about it. The fair minded of us in this world choose to love, honor, and cherish lesbian, gay, bisexual and the transgendered as our BROTHERS and SISTERS.
It’s not the Ugandan hatred for gays that angers me the most, bigoted ignorami like you are a dime a dozen, in Uganda, here in the US and anywhere else you go. What bothers me the most is that my, my family’s and my LGBT allies’ US tax dollars are being spent to support your genocidal agenda.
[...] Last week Truth Wins Out wrote about the refusal of Robert Gagnon and other leaders of the hardline ex-gay Restored Hope Network to oppose the execution of homosexuals, specifically in Uganda. [...]
It’s a real pity these Europeans and Americans never bother to get their facts straight. please understand it today:
Kato was not killed for being a gay rights activists. He died a death many other Ugandans have fallen victims to, a death many people in Europe and America have fallen victim to, killed by thugs in the night.
Gay rights activists simply grabbed at his death as an opportunity to further their cause, to garner publicity from all over the world. The rest of us looked on and remarked at their shamelessness, milking such a tragedy as a death. They were no better than greedy politicians.
There is a professor at Makerere University who is a more popular gay rights activist than Kato was (the country didn’t even know the man) and no one has ever tried harming this professor. She has been around a lot longer than Kato, ismore well-known and is alive and well.
There is a popular DJ who’s been publicly gay for more than 10 years now, and is alive and well too. What was so special about Kato, who was barely known?
Kato was not killed for being homosexual but, hey, why would the wonderful Europeans and Americans bother to check their facts? There was a juicy story and by god they were going to run with it. Well, shame! An even bigger shame on all those of you that take whatever stories you hear in the news as bible truth.
And oh yes, it’s true. Money is injected by gay rights activists into such things as enticing and recruiting school children into homosexuality, among their other projects.
It may be a bitter pill for Europeans and Americans to swallow but everything Maazi says is true. What’s more, it’s how 99.9999% of Africa feels.
There seems to be an ongoing mass campaign by the west to make Africa acultural. Homosexuality (and it’s acceptance) is, simply put, the most unAfrican that could ever be demanded of Africa.
Listen, our leaders are so very greedy, and yet not even the threat of cutting off aid could ever make them legalise homosexuality. There’s no question of religion involved. And even if there was, love your neighbour (as prescribed by religion) is not synonymous with legalise their wrongs.
Uganda currently has homosexuals, obviously, but no one is hunting them down unless they go out of their way to make raucous. Just like they did when they claimed years back that a gay man that had been killed by thugs (just like so many other unfortunate heterosexuals) was killed because he was gay. Which was never the case. But gay rights activists eagerly clutched at the opportunity to milk it for their cause, without a moments thought to the victim’s poor family, who most certainly did not as for or want their home and their son’s funeral to be so disgraced. I’m certain they considered the activists’ intrusion a blight on their old age and the respect the community had towards them.
Please let Africa be. If your governments cannot help out the poor of Africa without asking that we lose our cultural values in return, then let them keep your taxes, to help you in your efforts to get homosexuality legalised in other parts of your western world, and to help you invent a cure for Aids, which afflicts you too and happens not to have it’s origins in Africa.
Had your forefathers not chosen colonialism as fun activity, none of us would be thus inconvenienced. Africa has never asked for anyone to come knocking at her doors, invade her, and start inculcating her people into foreign cultures. In the Africa of old, everyone looked out for their neighbour, orphans were taken care of by the entire village, there was no need to go begging, no need for aid.
Enter the white man, and Africa is so westernised people have grown the ‘everyone for himself and God for us all’ mentality’. People have developed the western world’s nuclear family mindset and everyone now looks out for themselves and their own. Orphans suffer, the homeless suffer, all thanks to this aculturalisation of Africa. Pretty soon there will probably be nursing homes where people dump their parents and grandparents as is the norm in the west.
All the industrialisation and carelessness in the west is what has brought on global warming, and now just like the name says, it’s affecting the whole globe. And still, Europeans and Americans come to steal more of our oil, diamonds, gold, with the help of our corrupt leaders. Well, this time there’s an end to it, your money won’t make them sell their values. Why, because they simply cannot fathom the idea that their child should come one day and declare I’m gay. In Africa, it’s unnatural. In your world homosexuality is natural, more power to you.
Gay activists visit schools and start enticing unassuming children with money under the guise of human rights advocacy. Why the need to recruit, then? For strength in numbers? How many heterosexuals are spending money to recruit children into heterosexuality? That question does not even make sense because it’s counterpart is simply mind-boggling. Why would one get ‘NGO’ funds from Europe or America, and take them to Africa to use them to recruit school children into homosexuality? There are people going hungry and homeless in Europe and America too, that money could be better used to help them. Take a stroll along your streets, look at those ‘bums’ on your subways. Are you saying they are less in need than Africans? it does’t even snow here, a night out wouldn’t give anyone frostbite. Charity should begin at home, after all. There are issues closer to your homes you could concern yourselves with. Do so.
Let’s see the west go and try to convince muslim Asia to legalise homosexuality. Or is that Africa is deemed weaker and hence the easier target?
Believe it or not, your governments don’t come to Africa simply out of charity. They want stuff in return. Usually we ‘let’ them have it. The only reason your leaders demand homosexuality of Africa is so you’ll think them grand and vote them into office. Nothing else.
Let Africa be, see if it’ll remain in the dumps forever.
“Gay activists visit schools and start enticing unassuming children with money under the guise of human rights advocacy. Why the need to recruit, then? For strength in numbers? How many heterosexuals are spending money to recruit children into heterosexuality? ”
The rest of what you have to say makes no more sense than this, except for the parts about greed, stupidity, and power mongering.
[...] them: The renewed campaign by the corrupt Ugandan government and some of its U.S. evangelical sponsors to enact a death penalty for homosexuals. (Uganda already [...]