The “moral” nation of Uganda has time to persecute LGBT people by padlocking gay bars and promoting its barbaric Anti-Homosexuality Bill — yet it doesn’t have the will to stop child sacrifice?
The villages and farming communities that surround Uganda’s capital, Kampala, are gripped by fear. Schoolchildren are closely watched by teachers and parents as they make their way home from school. In playgrounds and on the roadside are posters warning of the danger of abduction by witch doctors for the purpose of child sacrifice.
A BBC investigation has discovered that many cases of child sacrifice in Uganda are not being followed up by the police and little is being done to protect potential victims. According to a major report released by the charity Jubilee Campaign, around 900 Ugandan children have fallen victim to the practice. The ritual, which some believe brings wealth and good health, was almost unheard of in the country until around three years ago, but it has re-emerged, seemingly alongside a boom in the country’s economy.
It has also coincided with the nation’s boom in fundamentalist Christianity exported from American hate groups. I’m not saying that these fundamentalist organizations support this practice. However, when a nation is infused with anachronistic myths and ancient superstitions this is the inevitable path. When people are taught to do spiritual warfare and believe in invisible demons — this can only contribute to a culture of mass delusion.
Have you ever noticed the more anti-gay a country is, the more superstitious, cruel, corrupt, and backward it is? As thugs like MP David Bahati and Rev. Martin Ssempa hunt down innocent homosexuals who are harming no one, witch doctors are abducting and murdering kids. This shows you how misplaced the priorities are of the self-righteous Ugandan mob that runs this country. We can only hope that Uganda takes police off the gay bashing beat and moves them to a place where they are really needed — like the Child Sacrifice Vice Squad.
It is time that Ugandan society turns away from illogical and incoherent belief systems, expels hateful foreign evangelical thug-preachers, and returns to the reality based community.
Uganda’s parliament has adjourned without debating a controversial bill which includes the death penalty for some homosexual acts.
It had been reported that a vote could be held on Friday.
The Anti-Homosexuality Bill has been condemned by Western leaders and human rights groups, some of whom are celebrating “victory”.
The bill, first introduced in 2009, could still be brought up when the new parliament meets later this year.
David Bahati said, though, that he wants to reintroduce the bill when the new parliament comes back in February. More chapters, sadly, will be written in this story.
The Ugandan parliamentarian behind an anti-gay bill that attracted worldwide condemnation said the most controversial part of the legislation — the death penalty provision — is likely to be dropped from the bill.
David Bahati said if the parliament committee the bill currently sits before recommends that the death penalty provision be removed, “I would concede.”
“The death penalty is something we have moved away from,” Bahati told The Associated Press in an interview.
There is a piece in Christianity Today written by a “Timothy Shah,” which basically accuses gay activists of making a mountain out of a molehill in Uganda. Of course, real investigative journalists like Jeff Sharlet disagree. This is Shah’s read on the “Kill the Gays” bill proposed:
Instead, Uganda has attracted human rights activism because of a single legislative stunt by a single low-level politician named David Bahati, a member of the country’s authoritarian ruling party and an Anglican. In 2009, Bahati proposed an anti-homosexuality bill so draconian that it would make “serial” homosexual practice a capital crime and punish pro-gay advocacy with a seven-year jail sentence.
But the legislation has received widespread attention not primarily because of its draconian provisions, whose very harshness has repelled virtually all of Uganda’s major political and religious leaders—including the President, the Catholic Bishops Conference, and a parliamentary committee that recommended the bill be thrown out as unconstitutional, effectively stopping it in its tracks. Instead, a major reason for the attention focused on the bill is that many believe it is the fruit of American evangelical homophobia.
No, it’s both, sir. But he’s getting around to the real thrust of his piece, which is to absolve American Evangelicals of any responsibility for the consequences of their words and actions.
In the telling of journalist Jeff Sharlet, it’s the American fundamentalist gospel that turned supine Ugandans into raving homophobes. American “fundamentalists,” “evangelicals,” and advocates of “theocracy”—terms Sharlet uses more or less interchangeably—see Uganda as a crucial theo-political “laboratory.”
No, it’s more that the country was already rabidly homophobic [elsewhere Shah points out the statistic that a whopping one in five Ugandans are okay with homosexuality. Whoopie!], full of corrupt leaders who have chosen, on an institutional level, to make homosexuality the next scapegoat for the problems faced by the citizenry. This sort of strategy, of convincing people to blame people completely unrelated to them, or people who have less than them, has played out in the United States for years. The entire Tea Party movement is a case study of this sort of peasant behavior spurred on by political and business leaders. So in this already homophobic climate, American Evangelicals decided to go in and “help” with that “love of Christ” that looks like love only to people who are already inside their echo chamber.
But here is the statement from Shah that demonstrates that he fundamentally doesn’t get it. Referring to the conference led by Scott Lively, Don Schmierer and Caleb Lee Brundige in 2009, Shah says this:
There are, in fact, many reasons to doubt a causal or conspiratorial relationship between Bahati and American Bible-thumpers. Perhaps most important is that the agenda of the Americans who ran the 2009 conference was therapeutic, whereas Mr. Bahati’s bill is remorselessly punitive. His bill even contains provisions that would render the pastoral care advocated by the conference organizers illegal in Uganda.
Ha ha, like hell it was! First of all, no respected, grown-up mental health or medical association considers the work of Exodus to be “therapy” in any sense of the word. Moreover, this was the conference where Scott Lively dropped his “nuclear bomb,” in the form of a series of bold-faced lies fed to the Ugandan attendees, chief among them the insinuation that homosexuals were the kinds of people who caused the Rwandan genocide. Rwanda, of course, is next to Uganda. Perhaps Shah is not aware of the strange, bitter, gay-obsessed history of Scott Lively. If that is the case, click here. And perhaps Shah has never seen video of the presentation. If that is the case, hit the play button below.
So no sir, please don’t tell us that American Fundamentalists don’t bear any responsibility here because, after all, they were just trying to bring therapy and pastoral care to the poor people of Uganda! Those may be the buzzwords for extremist Christian eliminiationist policies against gay people, but they’re buzzwords just the same.
And encourage your ideological cohorts to stop trying to “help.”
One cable I found particularly interesting came after Rick Warren was forced to distance himself from the Ugandan bill and its proponents, because it so completely captures how and why anti-gay sentiment is being used to distract the people’s attention from what’s really wrong in that country. It happens all over Africa every day, and in many other countries around the world. Indeed, it happens in our own [see: Tea Party movement], and it’s what happens when ruling classes learn how to train their citizens to react like peasants, ready to scapegoat a minority at a moment’s notice. Here’s what the US diplomat had to say at that time:
Recent condemnations by Warren and other U.S. based individuals have further isolated Bahati. His homophobia, however, is blinding and incurable. Bahati, Buturo, and particularly Ssempa’s ability to channel popular anger over Uganda’s socio-political failings into violent hatred of a previously unpopular but tolerated minority is chilling. XXXXXXXXXXXX described Ssempa as an anti-homosexuality “extremist.” XXXXXXXXXXXX said he opposes the legislation not because he favors homosexuality, but because legalizing persecution of homosexuals is the first step toward state sponsored persecution of other minority groups.
Emphasis mine. But doesn’t that sound familiar? Think back to every Republican “family values” campaign in the past thirty years, as they have scapegoated gay people, who have nothing to do with the admitted failures of the patriarchal “family” model in the United States. I have said many times that we should be careful not to simply think of Uganda as “over there,” but, especially with the influence American Evangelicals have had on the process in that nation, understand that patriarchal, “pro-family” forces will simply do what they can get away with in a given society. They know that their views are increasingly socially unacceptable in modern, civilized nations, but when they go to Uganda and other places, it’s a far different story.
Reports by U.S. and Ugandan news organizations that Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill had been “shelved” are, once again, incorrect.
This misunderstanding periodically occurs when reporters or editors misunderstand Uganda’s legislative usage of the term “tabled,” which means that a bill has been put “on the table” for eventual consideration, not that the bill has been withdrawn. The misunderstanding also happens when officials in the Uganda leadership anonymously seek to dampen foreign donors’ alarm over Uganda’s worsening human-rights situation with false assurances.
Conservative Christian pundit Warren Throckmorton clarified the bill’s status in a post on Monday.
Today, Mr. Tashobya [member of the committee overseeing the bill] told me that nothing had changed regarding the time table for considering the bill. He said the Parliament will reconvene very soon after the February 18 elections and consider the remaining bills, including the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.
Throckmorton adds:
Jeff Sharlet reported a conversation with [David] Bahati on the matter. CNN interviewed David Bahati who said clearly that the bill would be considered. In November, Bahati told me that the bill would be considered before the Parliament ended in May. He confirmed that again to Rachel Maddow in December when he was in the US. Finally, Stephen Tashobya, the chair of the Ugandan committee which has jurisdiction over the bill, told me that the Anti-Homosexuality would be considered after the nation holds elections in February. Today, he said nothing has changed.
The American fundamentalist group, The Family, has to make an important strategic choice. It can have its influential National Prayer Breakfast each February in Washington, or it can have its Anti-Homosexuality Bill become law in Uganda. It likely cannot have both.
It would be naïve for this secretive and powerful organization to believe that it can turn Uganda into a concentration camp for gay and lesbian people without transforming its signature affair into a symbol of such oppression. It would be madness for The Family to think it can sell the loving Higher Path Jesus at their breakfast, while unleashing its anti-gay Psychopath Jesus in Kampala.
If The Family does not kill the Anti-Homosexuality Bill before it becomes law, the cruel piece of legislation will end up killing The Family, by stripping it of its moral authority and tying its members to genocide. What respectable politician would want to attend an event marred by protests and hosted by human rights abusers?
Last year, a prominent member of The Family, David Bahati, wrote and introduced The Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda’s Parliament. In Jeff Sharlet’s latest book, “C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy”, the bill’s author said he believes that homosexuality is worse than murder and calls it “a threat to our existence”.
Aside from persecuting LGBT people and snuffing out their right to exist, the bill punishes anyone who offers support or friendship. Some of its provisions:
Three years in prison for failure to report a gay person to authorities within 24-hours of disclosure
Seven years in prison for “promotion”, which includes activism or simply acknowledging that homosexuality exists
Life imprisonment for one homosexual act
The death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” (which includes sex while HIV-positive, sex with a disabled person, or sex more than once, marking the person as a “serial offender”)
The Anti-Homosexuality Bill was put on the backburner last year after the National Prayer Breakfast was protested. The efforts to shine a light on The Family’s activities led to President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemning the bill at the event.
Unfortunately, Bahati has revived the bill, claiming it will pass and “close the door to homosex”. Last week, he made a trip to The United States to furtively rally support for his efforts. The Ugandan legislator says that he has strong support in America, but his prominent evangelical friends are afraid to publicly back him because they fear reprisals.
Indeed, Bahati believes he is vindicating his American friends who have lost the culture war against LGBT equality. The grand plan is for Uganda to be used as a proxy in a global war against homosexuality. Once the bill passes in Uganda, the hope is to spread copycat bills throughout Africa. These conservative African nations can then be used as vivid examples to Western countries of how to re-stigmatize homosexuality. Of course, the larger utopian fantasy is to use homosexuality as a wedge issue to establish theocracies across the planet.
We should take this effort very seriously and make it clear to The Family that there will be consequences for such bloodlust. A few of the options include:
Working to have Congress cut off all foreign aid to Uganda
Large demonstrations at The National Prayer Breakfast
Denying Ugandan officials visas to America
Denying prominent members of The Family visas to Uganda
Stripping David Bahati of his degrees at the University of Cardiff and the University of Pennsylvania
Exploring efforts to prosecute Bahati, and others affiliated with this bill, for crimes against humanity.
A media campaign exposing The Family
Bahati justifies his planned purge by disguising it as a morality campaign to protect Ugandan children from predatory Western gay men. However, he has put forth no credible evidence to back his bizarre assertions, and all available information points to an eliminationist witch-hunt against innocent people.
Bahati also rationalizes his cruelty by saying that Ugandans support his bill. Of course, the bill’s popularity and the demonization of LGBT people are only maintained through artificial means. To tar homosexuals as despised villains, Bahati and his goons have to create a repressive culture where free speech is stifled, LGBT people can’t come out, pro-gay allies are punished for “promoting” homosexuality, the media is cowed, and a robust smear campaign is relentlessly waged with no opposition.
Incredibly, Bahati plays the imperialist card, arguing Americans should stay out of his nation’s business, even as he hypocritically does the bidding for American evangelicals that made his career.
In the name of God, these thugs and theocrats are playing God with the lives of LGBT people across the globe. The only Family these tyrants remind me of is The Sopranos – except they are more sadistic. It is time civilized people stand up to such Bible-based barbarism before it is too late. A good place to start is at The National Prayer Breakfast.
David Bahati is an evil monster and should be treated accordingly if his genocidal “Kill the Gays” bill passes. The moment it becomes law, we must document the atrocities so we can prosecute Bahati for crimes against humanity. Uganda must be turned into a pariah state.
Mr. Bahati, if you are reading this, I want to make it clear that you are going to lose. This will not end well for you. If you are going to behave like a genocidal tyrant, you will most likely suffer the fate of most genocidal tyrants.
As for the Americans in The Family, you will be held accountable and considered accomplices for such crimes. Your lives will never be the same and you will become defined and dogged by this controversy. If this passes, I serious doubt The Family will survive the negative publicity and the National Prayer Breakfast will be on borrowed time.
The choice is yours. Act like blood thirsty genocidal murderers and get treated as such by the international community and all civilized nations and people.
People who haven’t dissected a pig since high school won’t want to miss MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s dissection tonight of Ugandan Member of Parliament David Bahati, whose support for antigay genocide in that country has won him financial and political support from U.S. Republicans and evangelicals.
Dr. Warren Throckmorton reports that David Bahati, author of Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill, was denied entry to an economic summit in Washington, DC.
He arrived mid morning and was informed of the decision. It turns out that we didn’t have his proper e-mail address for his phone. There was a frank but calm discussion and Mr. Bahati was not able to enter the building.
There is heavy speculation that Bahati used the economic meeting as a front to coordinate his anti-gay eliminationist campaign with prominent evangelicals — such as the C Street Family.
If you are in DC or New York City and happen to see this madman, do not hesitate to confront him. He is our Hitler and should be treated accordingly. Make it very clear to him that we will not willingly walk into his prisons or death chambers without a fight.
Bahati will be on the Rachel Maddow show this evening to discuss his psychotic fixation with LGBT people — who are innocent and have done nothing to harm him. Yet, he wants us imprisoned or dead.
In my view, Bahati’s visa should be denied and he should immediately be arrested and deported. The United States and other civilized nations should make Bahati and anyone connected to the Kill the Gays bill international pariahs. If the bill passes, he should be arrested for crimes against humanity.
This video is an example of what this atrocious monster has done to peoples’ lives.
This misunderstanding periodically occurs when reporters or editors misunderstand Uganda’s legislative usage of the term “tabled,” which means that a bill has been put “on the table” for eventual consideration, not that the bill has been withdrawn. The misunderstanding also happens when officials in the Uganda leadership anonymously seek to dampen foreign donors’ alarm over Uganda’s worsening human-rights situation with false assurances.
(Weekly Column)
