For many young Americans, the Westboro Baptist Church has become the face of extreme antigay hatred from the religious right; Mike Bickle’s Kansas City-based International House of Prayer, with its smooth pop-rock driven exterior, would seem almost the antithesis of Westboro Baptist. But today, Friday April 27th, 2012, IHOP is slated, according to a news release from ChristianNewsWire, to publicly screen a movie-length video featuring a Ugandan religious leader, Julius Peter Oyet, who has stated that “even animals are wiser than homosexuals.” and has openly called for practicing homosexuals to be hunted down and imprisoned or even executed.
Oyet even claims (see video at end of story) to have played a central role in a pending Ugandan bill, the internationally condemned Anti Homosexuality Bill, designed to make that happen; in a 2010 interview with French journalist Dominic Mesmin, Oyet stated that he had served on a committee that picked MP David Bahati to introduce the bill in Uganda’s parliament and had a special government commission to rally public support behind the bill, which has been internationally denounced – including by President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hlllary Clinton.
Julius Oyet has also worked closely with Ugandan evangelist Martin Ssempa, a former close ally of Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren. In 2010, after Warren had distanced himself, Ssempa subsequently became known for ostentatious incitement of antigay hatred that has included screening, in churches and other public venues, fringe gay pornography, in an attempt to convey the impression that coprophagia is a common homosexual practice.
In early 2011, Ssempa and Oyet co-presented to Uganda’s parliament a petition signed by millions of Ugandans calling for speedy passage of the Anti Homosexuality Bill. Julius Oyet has been consistent – in his interview with Dominic Mesmin, Oyet stated that he was able to rally millions of Ugandans behind the bill.
For his own part, IHOP founder Mike Bickle has stated that during the End-Times “Marriage as an institution will be forbidden in parts of the earth. As one of the signs of the times, the gay marriage agenda, which is rooted in the depths of hell – this is not about love, this is deception.”
These are far from IHOP’s only connections to the incitement of antigay hatred. One of the ministry co-directors of IHOP is Lou Engle, whose The Call ministry rents space from IHOP for its main base of operations. In May 2010, Engle brought his The Call to Uganda, to stage an event billed as fighting rampant immorality, including homosexuality, idolatry, and witchcraft.
Appearing at the event, held at one of the Ugandan capital Kampala’s biggest universities, were major supporters of the Uganda Anti Homosexuality Bill including prominent Ugandan evangelist Julius Oyet, who has ties to Uganda’s President and First Lady and declared from the stage:
“We call upon our parliament not to waste time. Uganda says no to homosexuality… our children today are being deceived by the West to buy them, to give them school fees, so that they can be homosexuals.”
Following Bishop Juius Oyet at the May 2010 The Call rally in Kampala, The Call founder Lou Engle told his Ugandan audience:
“We are not standing with violence or hatred to people in homosexual lifestyles. We are restraining, trying to restrain, an agenda that’s going to hurt the nation and hurt families. And so we have come here to join you, to pray that your government would have wisdom to uphold righteousness in this land.”
At the event journalist Sorious Samura, reporting for the BBC, asked Lou Engle “What do you think about supporting Julius Oyet’s fight against homosexuality here in Uganda?” Engle denied supporting the Anti Homosexuality Bill, telling Samura, “We’re not promoting the bill. We’re simply saying we believe that there needs to be a righteous stand, but there needs to be a revelation of Jesus in his mercy and kindness as well, in all that’s going on here.”
But when Samura questioned Julius Oyet, the Ugandan evangelist stated that “Lou Engle is a strong ally”. Samura then asked, “How do not feel that people like Lou, and American leaders, are withdrawing their support?” Oyet replied:
“To the media they may say that. But deep in their heart – as you hear him pray – what did he say? As he made his speech, what did he say? He said ‘Uganda, you are a key, you are standing now as a leader for righteousness’. That is support”.
Another speaker at the Uganda antigay rally, along with Lou Engle and Julius Oyet, was Ugandan evangelist John Mulinde – who has maintains a ministry base of operations in Southern Florida and gave a March 2011 sermon at Mike Bickle’s International House of Prayer in Kansas City.
Mike Bickle, who has repeatedly prophesied coming “prison camps” and “death camps” for Jews, was one of the original prophets in an elite prophetic group in C. Peter Wagner’s New Apostolic Reformation. The NAR boasts many leaders in the vanguard of the fight against LGBT rights both in the U.S. and internationally. Lou Engle later joined the same prophetic body Bickle was an early member in, the Apostolic Council of Prophetic (ACPE).
“An Unconventional War is one in a series of nine Transformationsmovies produced since 1999 by George Otis, a pioneer of the New Apostolic Reformation. In the film, a prayer movement led by Apostle Julius Oyet is credited with weakening Kony’s Lord Resistance Army (LRA) and ending a decades-long conflict in Uganda through “spiritual warfare in Jesus name.” The 2005 “documentary” claims that: 1) surviving youth were treated by deliverance of demons, 2) parents who prayed hardest got their children back first, and 3) the Acholi of Northern Uganda were fortunate to be forced into interment camps (by the Ugandan government) so they could hear the gospel and be shielded from Islam. Julius Oyet and President Yoweri Museveni are the godly heroes, representing “a unique church-state collaboration” against Kony, the demon-possessed villain.
According to this version of the conflict, Kony’s LRA was allowed by God to terrorize the Acholi people because they needed to repent of false beliefs. This is the story of Uganda presented as an advertisement for Christian supremacism.
All of these messages are tucked into a tear jerker with a happy ending about Kony’s young victims. The exploitation seen in this film and many other Western evangelical media productions, may help to explain why war-weary viewers threw stones at a screening of Kony 2012 in Lira in Northern Uganda this past week.
The Transformations Movies
The Transformations movies are part of a global attack on religious pluralism and secular democracy, promoted in the guise of prayer, charity, and social justice. The films can not be dismissed as emerging from the fringes, considering the evangelical pedigrees of the those involved. Throughout these movies, world leaders – including presidents, prime ministers and politicians – are filmed in interviews, with some actually participating in dramatic reenactments of past events.”
As a disturbing footnote, An Unconventional War was being filmed in Northern Uganda in 2005, around the time the co-founders of the Invisible Children nonprofit were shooting footage in Northern Uganda for one of their KONY videos.
This is notable because Northern Uganda was then sealed off by the Ugandan government – as Todd David Whitmore, a scholar at the Catholic University of Notre Dame who did research field work in Northern Uganda in 2005, “entry to northern Uganda required vetting by Lieutenant Colonel Shaban Bantariza, the Director of Public Relations and Information for the Uganda Peoples’ Defense Forces (UPDF), the military wing of the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) government.”
During his research in Northern Uganda, according to Whitmore, he was given a typewritten letter, allegedly from now-Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni to his half-brother Salim Saleh, outlining the need for a depopulation campaign to reduce the population of Northern Uganda, to open up access to the region’s rich farmland.
Whitmore describes an atmosphere of desperation in the Acholi concentration camps, and a ubiquitous presence of government spies keeping tabs on the few non-Ugandans who had been allowed into the region.
The relatively few academics and journalists who have investigated the question of how between one and two million Northern Ugandans from the Acholi tribe wound up in the displacement camps in the first place describe the Ugandan army as having used murder, torture, even outright shelling and strafing of Acholi villages to drive the Acholi into the euphemistically termed “displaced person” camps (concentration camps in reality) that were, in turn, so lightly guarded by the UPDF (which by some accounts seemed mainly concerning with keeping the Acholi imprisoned, not defending them) that the camps served to make the Acholi population easy prey for Joseph Kony’s LRA.
The Ugandan army, in turn, instituted a policy that Acholi found outside of the camps were to be considered enemy combatants and killed. Few provisions were made by the Ugandan government to provide food, clean water, shelter, or medical care so that, by the height of the conflict, an estimated 1,000 Acholi per week, out of the 1-2 million in the camps (estimates vary widely) were dying from the wretched camp conditions.
This is the horrific backdrop to the so-called “Invisible Children” presented in Invisible Children’s KONY 2012 videos, which have a number of disturbing parallels to An Unconventional War including the presentation of the role of the Ugandan government and army as a positive force in the conflict, and an emphasis on alleged occult powers possessed by LRA head Joseph Kony.
But An Unconventional War takes the narrative to an even more grotesque perspective, that the Acholi brought their suffering upon themselves, for having the wrong beliefs. As Tabachnick describes:
“As An Unconventional War comes to a close, the viewer is told that the Internal Displacement Camps that housed approximately 1.6 million Acholi after they were herded when forced from their villages, served a “redemptive purpose.”
“God has allowed them in come in the camps, whereby all of them can hear the word of God and come to Jesus Christ, and if we don’t use this window of opportunity, the Muslims are there. They’re eager to come and take them.” [The last phrase is accompanied with a scene of a mosque.]The narrator states that the mystery of the Acholi’s people’s suffering has been solved.
Narrator: The cause of her wound is no longer a mystery.
Apostle John Mulinde: There is a strong connection between the bloodshed and the witchcraft.
Apostle Julius Oyet: What God is saying is that rebellion and idolatry can separate you far from me.”
“In September 1996, the government began what would prove to be a policy of long-term mass forced displacement and internment in Acholiland. The UPDF drove hundreds of thousands of Acholi peasants out of their villages and into camps through a campaign of intimidation, murder, torture, and bombing and burning entire villages, as discussed in chapter 2. After the formation of the camps, the UPDF announced that anyone found outside of the camps would be considered a rebel and killed…
Forced displacement had devastating consequences for the interned civilians… with excess mortality levels reaching approximately 1,000 per week by the mid-2000s. Moreover, the camps were tragically unprotected, and accusations that the government soldiers failed to protect the camps, refused to respond to LRA incursions, and thus turned civilians into easy targets for the LRA, were heard regularly from camp inhabitants.
Despite a record of extreme anti-civilian violence by both sides, as explained in the last chapter, dominant international portrayals of the conflict have tended to cast it in unambiguous moral terms, celebrating the Ugandan government and demonizing the LRA. This portrayal has been in the interest of the Ugandan government and its Western donors, but it is also in the interests of aid agencies, as I explain in this chapter… aid agencies are able to collect funds through marketing the suffering of abducted children and pour aid in to support the Ugandan government’s military campaign, even as they absolve themselves of the need to be accountable for the consequences of their actions. The irony, of course, is that the internment camps were, by far, the greatest cause of children’s-and adults’-suffering in Northern Uganda and, if anything, made abductions by the LRA easier.”
The sponsor of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, David Bahati, is practically begging the United States to cut off aid if his grotesque bill is passed.
“If there was any condition to force the Western world to stop giving us money,” David Bahati told Josh Kron of the New York Times. “I would like that.”
Newsflash to Bahati: The United States does not need Uganda and 99-percent of our citizens would not notice if every last nickel was withdrawn from the dictatorship. Indeed, in a time of economic distress at home, many people are questioning whether we should be sending our hard earned tax dollars to places like Uganda — that may not represent our interests and values.
If Uganda passes this hideous violation of human rights the US should take six actions:
1) Cut off all aid to Uganda.
2) Work to ensure LGBT Ugandans can escape their country’s tyrants and resettle to more friendly nations.
3) Offer legal immunity for LGBT Ugandans who defend themselves and their families in the face of state terror. Everyone is entitled to a vigorous self-defense and is not required to sheepishly walk into the hands of security forces that would violate international human rights standards and lock them in prison for life and throw away the key — or worse.
4) Congressional hearings about the involvement of American evangelicals in egging on Uganda’s anti-gay hysteria — that has already led to fear, violence, and death of gay activists.
5) Evidence should be compiled to eventually take to the International Criminal Court to prosecute Bahati, Martin Ssempa, and the Americans involved with this anti-gay bill.
6) A travel ban to the United States for all Ugandan officials
The most cynical part of violent tyrants like the oddly gay-obsessed Bahati is that he claims attempts by the West to stop the human rights violations are “neocolonialism.” In fact, Bahati had no problem when American Christian colonialists like The Family (aka The Fellowship), Rick Warren, and Lou Engle embraced him and made Uganda their right wing experiment. As Bahati pointed out, Uganda became their virulently anti-gay laboratory because the Americans admitted that it was “too late” to pass such heinous laws in the U.S.
Furthermore, I would still like to know why a Ugandan General was at a party at the same hotel where the Values Voter Summit was taking place last year in Washington. What unsavory plotting and planning may have been taking place? Who were the evangelicals who may have been involved with undermining US foreign policy and promoting violent homophobia overseas?
Finally, the Obama administration should not forget Bahati’s insult today against the President. He told the Times: “The good thing with the West is that we know that Obama can influence the world only up to 2016. That’s definite.”
The Obama Administration should recognize exactly what the Republican-embracing Bahati does — that as long as Obama occupies the White House, America can reduce our financial obligations abroad by cutting off Uganda like a midnight drunk at the bar.
If the hate bill is passed, the rabidly euphoric anti-gay celebrations would eventually die down. Ugandans would soon realize that the money from Uncle Sam has dried up. In short order, the public would turn on Bahati and others of his ilk who put their prejudices before the best interests of their nation.
And if I’m wrong and they still support Bahati in the face of poverty, economic and diplomatic isolation? Well, then it is rather clear that our money would be better spent elsewhere — like in more tolerant nations or fixing the aging infrastructure back home.
It is simply unacceptable that American citizens would be asked to continue subsidizing anti-LGBT violence and discrimination.
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.
Gay Man Claims Ssempa Paid Him To Say He Was ‘Ex-Gay’; Ssempa’s ‘Ex-Gay’ Also Testified in Favor of Anti-Homosexuality Bill Under What Appears to be Coercion and Duress
BURLINGTON, Vt. – Truth Wins Out today called on Ugandan authorities to investigate anti-gay activist Martin Ssempa (pictured) for potential extortion, perjury and fraud, following the New York Times’ discovery that Ssempa may have paid and pressured a witness to give false testimony in favor of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.
In a last ditch effort to bring the “Kill the Gays” bill up for a vote, Ssempa brought so-called “ex-gay” activist George Oundo to a meeting with the speaker of Parliament, Edward Kiwanuka Ssekandi. In the meeting, Oundo said that he had gone from gay-to-straight and strongly urged the speaker to pass the notorious measure.
However, with Ssempa no longer present, Oundo (pictured left) reversed his testimony and told New York Times reporter Josh Kron that he was paid by Ssempa to say he had gone straight and actually opposed the anti-gay bill. Clearly, there appears to be coercion, if not extortion involved, given Oundo’s quick repudiation of his testimony and his allegation that he was paid for delivering a bogus sexual conversion tale.
“Something stinks in Martin Ssempa’s corrupt campaign to get a vote,” said Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director Wayne Besen. “Ugandan authorities should immediately launch an investigation of Ssempa to find out if he has engaged in coercion or illegal activity in pursuit of passing the Anti-Homosexuality bill.”
Mr. George Oundo, 26, a transgender person who used to go by the name Georgina, went next. (testifying to Edward Kiwanuka Ssekandi)
“I used to call myself the Queen Mother and Lady of the City,” Mr. Oundo said. “I was recruited into homosexuality many years back, when I was 12.”
“When I joined Mr. Ssempa, I told him all my problems,” he said. “I had to come out and join the struggle.
“Please help us; let the bill pass,” he said.
But an hour later, in a quiet hotel, Mr. Oundo recanted much of what had been said at the meeting.
“David Kato was murdered; it was a plot,” Mr. Oundo said. “I don’t support the bill.”
As for being a “former homosexual,” that, too, was not true.
I’ve always been gay,” Mr. Oundo said, in a timid but growing voice. “I didn’t choose it.
“David Kato was the first one who taught me to protect my human right,” Mr. Oundo added.
Mr. Oundo said that his presence alongside Mr. Ssempa at Parliament had been to “protect” himself and that he had been contacted only that morning by Mr. Kagaba about the meeting and offered about $42 to attend. He said Mr. Ssempa had offered him about $2,000 in 2009 to repent and switch sides in the debate, but later reneged. Either way, Mr. Oundo became a poster-child for Mr. Ssempa’s anti-homosexuality movement.
Mr. Ssempa declined to comment on the allegations.
Mr. Oundo admitted that he had picked up boyfriends at high schools and universities, what the antigay movement calls recruiting. But he said Uganda’s gay population was full of “natural-borns,” like himself.
“If I live or die, I am gay, and if I am buried, bury me gay,” he said.
“It is clear that George Oundo came under an inordinate amount of pressure to lie about his sexual orientation and suppress his actual position on the this bill,” said TWO’s Besen. “Ugandan officials should question Ssempa to see if blackmail, extortion or fraud led to Oundo’s false testimony. If it is determined that Ssempa lied or forced Oundo to lie at any time under oath, he should be charged with perjury. Martin Ssempa should not be above the law.”
Truth Wins Out is a non-profit organization that fights anti-LGBT religious extremism. TWO specializes in turning information into action by organizing, advocating and fighting for LGBT equality.
In a disgusting new twist to the anti-gay fervor that has swept Uganda, The Daily Monitor reports that Makerere University student leaders said in a meeting with the chairman of the committee handling the Anti-Homosexuality Bill that recruitment of gays was rampant at the university campus. The students told Mr. Tashobya (in charge of the committee) that each of their colleagues who join homosexuals is paid a monthly salary of Shs800, 000.
I have no idea how much Ugandan money that is — but it sounds like some serious coin. We also know, due to reality and common sense, that this allegation is pure propaganda and utterly false. Exactly, who is paying these students? Until there is proof, such allegations should not be made and those putting forth such lies should be punished.
I’m still in shock. In one of the most anti-gay nations on earth — gays are getting salaries. Do they have to take out taxes for such services?
Seriously, what next, accusations that gay people roast children and eat them for snacks?
I’m not trying to be judgmental — but the anti-gay Ugandan legislators sound remarkably ignorant. How uniformed (particularly in the Internet age) does one have to be to believe such bile? Or maybe raw hatred makes some people blind to the complete incoherence and idiocy of the arguments put forth by supporters of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.
The legislators in Uganda must ask themselves a pertinent question: Do they really want to look like some of the shit stupidest people in the world by passing a murderous bill based on laughably ridiculous stereotypes and lies? Do they really want to be laughingstocks and punchlines for the rest of the planet? Because I guarantee them — based on the “evidence” put forth — that anyone who votes for this bill will be disrepected and mocked in normal societies throughout the world. They will be viewed as circus freaks with brains the size of lady bug spots.
Speaking of people snickered at on the world stage, the noticeably effete anti-gay and condom burning activist Pastor Martin Ssempa (pictured) has presented a petition in Uganda’s parliament, calling for the passing of the anti-gay bill. The petition, signed by two million people countrywide, was presented to the Speaker of Parliament, Mr Edward Ssekandi, yesterday.
Ssempa’s bizarre obsession with gay people having sex is jarring — particularly because he looks so damn gay.
Guest post by Bruce Wilson, cross-posted at Talk To Action.
Government funded missionaries in public schools? The idea would flabbergast many of America’s founders, most certainly the architects of the United States Constitution. Here’s the background: As a February 23rd, 2011 story from the Florida Independent, by Andy Kopsa, describes, the American leader of the Florida-based abstinence-only education program Project SOS endorses Martin Ssempa, a leading Uganda backer of the so-called “Kill the gays” bill that may soon come up for a vote in Uganda’s parliament. Project SOS has received over six and a half million dollars in federal funding, from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services since 2002, to teach abstinence education in Florida public schools. The funding continues into the present – in September SOS received over $450,000 from HHS.
But the Uganda tie is far from the most controversial aspect–the founder and head of SOS says the program was inspired by God, and her church identifies the Project SOS program as one of the “ministries” it supports, with SOS head Pam Mullarkey as a “missionary”…federally funded, that is.
To begin with, should federal funding still be flowing to a sex ed approach proven to be largely or wholly ineffective, according to a 2007 federally commissioned large scale study by Mathematica Research?
And, what if the program founder says plans for Project SOS came directly from God, advocates child-beating, and suggests that Catholics aren’t truly saved? What if SOS is actually a stealth ministry backed by a right wing church that teaches both anti-labor union ideology and Young-Earth Creationism, and whose longtime pastor is promoting antigay doctrines in Florida prisons?
In February, a brave gay Ugandan man living in exile appeared at the National Press Club in Washington with a paper bag over his head to denounce Uganda’s draconian Anti-Homosexuality Bill. He wore the mask to conceal his identity because he feared for his life.
Today, Kushaba Moses Mworeko took off his mask to urge the African Anglican Bishops at the All African Bishops Conference in Entebbe to speak out against Uganda’s “Kill the Gays Bill” and other forms of anti-gay discrimination on the continent.
“It is time for Christian leaders in Africa to start promoting peace and stop persecuting LGBT people,” said Kushaba Moses Mworeko, who recently escaped to the United States. “I call on the Anglican Church to speak out forcefully against the Anti-Homosexuality Bill and to support decriminalizing gay relationships across the continent. As the church grows in Africa it must choose to be a force for good and not intolerance.”
Speakers claimed that the continent would have 673 million Christians by 2025 and lead Christendom in the 21st century. Egyptian Bishop Mouneer Anis spoke of the significance of this meeting when he told bishops from more than 400 dioceses, “There is no doubt that history is going to record what happens at this conference for future generations. This is no ordinary conference because it’s happening in an extraordinary context.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, (pictured) spoke at the event, but has yet to effectively use his bully pulpit to shape a more accepting environment towards LGBT people in Africa.
“The All African Bishops Conference offers Rowan Williams a unique opportunity to show leadership and moral clarity by denouncing Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill,” said Mworeko. “I urge the Archbishop of Canterbury to display a backbone and set a positive tone for the Anglican Church in Africa. His silence will be seen as a green light for the witch hunts against the LGBT community to continue.”
In a new Youtube video, Mworeko sent a message of perseverance and hope to his LGBT brothers and sisters still living in Uganda.
“We shall continue fighting for our rights and the time to fight is now,” said Mworeko. “This is about liberty, this is about equality, this is about justice. We are here to reclaim our freedom.”
“If Moses has the courage to put his life at risk by speaking out against intolerance and injustice, the least Rowan Williams can do is acknowledge the inhumanity of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill while he is at this conference,” said Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director Wayne Besen. “His noticeable indifference to the suffering of LGBT people in Africa and worldwide is a great stain on his shrinking legacy. Only by finding his voice on LGBT issues can Williams reverse the damage that has occurred on his watch.”
Truth Wins Out is a non-profit organization that fights anti-gay religious extremism. TWO’s goal is to create a world where lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people can live openly, honestly and true to themselves.
The Uganda Observer published an innocuous glossary of terms on July 22 to inform readers what words like “gay” and “lesbian” mean. The stated purpose was to enable readers to make their own decisions about homosexuality on the basis of facts rather than fear.
Pastor Martin Ssempa — U.S. aid recipient, former ally of megapreacher Rick Warren, leader of Uganda‘s political campaign to execute all homosexuals, and de facto leader of Uganda’s ex-gay movement — was outraged by the publication of such facts.
As Warren Throckmorton notes, Ssempa responded with a letter to the editor in which he asserted that the mere publication of a glossary causes children to become homosexual. He implies that such reporting is, or should be, illegal.
A youth group warned Canyon Ridge Christian Church on Sunday that its members will be held accountable for bloodshed resulting from its support of antigay genocide and U.S.-sponsored theocracy in Uganda.
According to Prof. Warren Throckmorton’s article at Salon.com, the group — led by organizer Chase Cates — said that ”if this bill was passed and people were executed or criminalized in any way, Canyon Ridge Christian Church in turn would be held responsible for financing Ssempa who so overtly pushed the bill.”
The populist megachurch has openly supported Uganda pastor Martin Ssempa, who is a leading advocate for the nation’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill drafts of which call for the execution of HIV-positive homosexuals; imprisonment of family members, doctors, and clergy who fail to report gay relatives and patients to the authorities for execution; and the suppression of educational or scientific materials which discuss homosexuality without stigma or stereotype.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
However, with Ssempa no longer present, Oundo (pictured left) reversed his testimony and told New York Times reporter Josh Kron that he was paid by Ssempa to say he had gone straight and actually opposed the anti-gay bill. Clearly, there appears to be coercion, if not extortion involved, given Oundo’s quick repudiation of his testimony and his allegation that he was paid for delivering a bogus sexual conversion tale.
In a disgusting new twist to the anti-gay fervor that has swept Uganda, 
Speakers claimed
