From Newser:

A controversial condom burning Ugandan pastor, Martin Ssempa, who is a supporter of the homicidal Anti-Homosexuality Bill, is being financially supported by the 6,000-strong Canyon Ridge Christian Church in Las Vegas. Today, Canyon Ridge pastor Kevin Odor says that Ssempa is being “misrepresented” . “His heart is not to kill people,” says Odor.

Odor tells NPR. “His heart is to redeem people. We want to help the AIDS problem in Africa, and we found somebody who is making a difference, so we support him.”

Warren Throckmorton, a professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, has a different take. “The church wants to be viewed as moderate and outreach-minded and compassionate, and yet they’re supporting a set of values and principles elsewhere that are very harsh and deadly, frankly, to the very community you say you want to reach”.

Isn’t it odd how the brutal, draconian laws pushed by Ssempa are in complete contradiction to his supposedly redeeming heart? What a partnership – Canyon Ridge found a crackpot and Ssempa hit the jackpot. It’s a Las Vegas dream come true!

Much more from Dr. Throckmorton, who has done a terrific job staying on top of this issue.

For more than a year, we have been reporting on the Anti-Homosexuality Bill winding its way through Uganda’s legislature. The impetus for the bill is that Uganda is supposedly a fundamentalist Christian nation and its laws should reflect such radical beliefs. Today, a different sent of religious nuts, this time Muslims, have expressed their “holy” values in all its horror:

The deadly bombings in Uganda during the World Cup final have deepened worries among American authorities about another once localized Islamic group that is spreading its terrorism across borders, using a playbook written by Al Queda.

Note to everyone in that volatile region of the world: Religious extremism — Muslim, Christian or other — is harmful to your health and bad for society. Isn’t it time to rethink the “goodness” of such zealotry and fanaticism?

When religious extremists are in power, no one wins.

I was reading the newspaper this morning and came upon a shocking story. It turns out that members of the International Criminal Court gathered in Kampala, Uganda, to consider whether to amend the Court’ statute to allow it to exercise jurisdiction over the crime of “aggression.”

Huh???????

What the hell are human rights advocates doing meeting in Uganda while the nation is still considering its deplorable, violent Anti-Homosexuality Bill? To discuss human rights in such a barbaric setting is nothing short of a sick, twisted joke. We are talking about a nation that is seriously contemplating genocide against LGBT people. How can human rights be legitimately discussed in a nation that boasts of how it physically and psychologically abuses a good portion of its own citizens?

Since they are already in Kampala, The International Criminal Court can make good use of its time by immediately arresting David Bahati and Martin Ssempa for “aggression” against LGBT people. Both men should face trial and jailed once convicted.

Let’s be honest. To hold a conference in such a brutal and backward nation is a slap in the face and undermines the basic concept of human rights for all people.

It’s not verified, but as Jeff Sharlet pointed out to me, it does track with past statements from the “Ugandan Rick Warren.”

So go leave some pro-LGBT comments, ‘kay?

NICELY.

Here.

(h/t Jeff Sharlet)

The Ugandan tabloid Red Pepper is an instrument of that nation’s ruling family, and it is periodically used by corrupt Uganda evangelicals — among them, Martin Ssempa — to mobilize vigilantes to violently attack and kill dissident pastors and human-rights advocates as well as LGBT people. Truth Wins Out has previously reported on Red Pepper, and Box Turtle Bulletin has substantial additional detail.

The tabloid’s stunning defamatory article about prosperity preacher Benny Hinn, while timely in its publication alongside Hinn’s pending divorce, is likely an attempt by rival evangelicals to destroy Hinn.

As despicable as Hinn may be for his worship of mammon and his trivialization of spirituality, this tabloid is NOT to be trusted.

At The Daily Beast, Max Blumenthal calls the Obama administration on the carpet for affirming Rick Warren and allies’ efforts to deny access to condoms and prevent Africa’s heterosexual and LGBT people from protecting themselves against HIV/AIDS.

Blumenthal notes that Warren has never been required to prove the efficacy of his anti-condom program. Instead, independent investigation into Warren’ involvement in Africa revealed alliances with Christian Right clergy who sidelined science-based approaches to combating AIDS in favor of abstinence-only education.

These clergy sabotaged Uganda’s once highly successful initiative to combat HIV/AIDS. Comprehensive sex education — consisting of lessons in abstinence, monogamy, and condom use — slashed HIV infection rates during the 1990s and up until 2003, when Christian Rightists in the Bush State Department and Congress began to sabotage the initiative. By 2005, Blumenthal notes, federal aid was being redirected to deny access to condoms and to discourage their use. Progress against HIV infection rates then halted. (Read More)

Martin Ssempa has more power than the American I’m thinking of, but read this piece by Ariel Rubin, which describes a press conference pastor Ssempa held to announce his Million Man Kill the Gays March, or whatever he’s calling it. In the piece, Ssempa is described gleefully and pruriently showing the crowd pictures of strange sexual practices that he claims, with no backing evidence, that gays commonly partake in. He shows picture after picture, which he claims he got from “their website,” which is strange, because I wasn’t aware that there was some single monolithic website for gays. But then again, much like the American I’m thinking of, Ssempa is speaking to a crowd which is foolish, uneducated, and easily led.

And in Ssempa’s case, it could have disastrous results.

The brewing human-rights disaster in Uganda has thus far been blamed squarely on those who launched the current campaign of violence and brutal punishment: Exodus International board member Don Schmierer, Massachusetts ex-gay activist and Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, the ex-gay International Healing Foundation led by Richard Cohen, Uganda ex-gay activist Stephen Langa, and Martin Ssempa, a longtime leader of Uganda’s religious war against its LGBT citizenry who is funded by U.S. evangelicals.

But as the crisis grows, so does U.S. foreign aid to Uganda: The State Department just promised Uganda $246 million with few if any human-rights strings attached. And so responsibility must now be shared not just by the masterminds of the campaign, but also by U.S. taxpayers. Let’s take a look back at how U.S. taxpayers like me — and many of you — became implicated in a violent evangelical war against Ugandan sexual minorities.

(Read More)

George Oundo, the poster man for a campaign launched by U.S. ex-gay political leaders to promote vigilantism and arrest against same-sex-attracted persons in Uganda, has reportedly been expelled from his ex-gay organization due to sexual scandal.

Earlier this year, Oundo was a frontman for Martin Ssempa, a violently antigay African pastor who allegedly received substantial sums of money from U.S. global anti-AIDS programs begun under the Bush administration. Instead of combatting AIDS or promoting faith-based health assistance to Africans, Ssempa used the money to launch a string of violent antigay vigilante campaigns monitored by Human Rights Watch.

Hosted by Ssempa, Oundo and fellow ex-gay activists Stephen Langa and Paul Kagaba spent months accusing Uganda’s handful of native-born pro-equality advocates of conducting a massive Western youth-molestation conspiracy against the country. Unskeptical, antigay news media in Uganda lapped up the two ex-gay activists’ gossip and defamed not only gay Ugandans, but also the popular heterosexual Catholic priest Anthony Musaala, a rival to Ssempa. How did Kagaba know that Musaala was gay? Because, Kagaba said, Musaala “regularly holds parties for gays at his residence in Gayaza near Kampala.” Violence by antigay vigilantes, antigay arrests, and antigay hit lists ensued.

GayUganda said today that Oundo has been expelled from Ex-Gay Uganda:

According to Paul Kagaba, Ex-Gay Uganda Chairman, Oundo was taking boys to be “sodomised’ to his house. What I could have told Kagaba, and I have known for a few weeks, is that Oundo has been going around asking kuchus for “forgiveness’.

We await confirmation from other sources, and given Kagaba’s false accusations against gay Ugandans, his circular firing squad against Oundo must be viewed with some skepticism. However, it also seems quite feasible that Oundo was, all along, projecting his own alleged pedophilia onto innocent gay Ugandans, with the support of Martin Ssempa, U.S. taxpayer dollars, and Exodus International officials Alan Chambers and Don Schmierer.

As Truth Wins Out and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission have previously pointed out: Exodus board member Schmierer keynoted the vigilantes’ Kampala launch conference in March; Chambers approved of Schmierer’s trip beforehand, and applauded Schmierer’s speech afterward. Schmierer’s speech blamed parents and abuse for the formation of homosexual orientation. His co-speaker Scott Lively blamed homosexuals for the Nazi Holocaust and Rwandan genocide, while Ugandan ex-gay conference organizer Stephen Langa angrily complained that Uganda’s life-imprisonment sentence for homosexuality was far too lenient. A fourth speaker, U.S. ex-gay activist Caleb Lee Brundidge — a protege of former PFOX leader Richard Cohen — promoted magic rituals as a means of converting homosexual persons into heterosexuals.

We received news passed along to us via South African Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation:

Heartened by support from prominent U.S. ex-gays — in particular, Exodus International board member Don Schmierer, ex-gay activist Scott Lively, and Richard Cohen protege Caleb Lee Brundidge — at a March 5-7 conference in Kampala, Uganda is moving forward with a campaign that was announced at that conference. Uganda intends to imprison gay Ugandans for their attraction, regardless of whether they are sexually active.

Church- and government-led vigilante campaigns require money to operate, and that money appears to be coming, in part, from U.S. taxpayers.

The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission has uncovered evidence that the Bush administration had used anti-AIDS funds to subsidize groups in Uganda that actively promote violence and discrimination against lesbians and gay men. Among those receiving money, according to U.S. government records, were Uganda Muslim Tabliqh and the Makerere University Community Church. The church’ leader, Pastor Martin Ssempa, was a leading organizer of anti-gay rallies in Kampala. The supply of laundered has not yet been stopped by the Obama administration.

According to 365gay.com (April 6):

KAMPALA — The Ugandan government vowed to move forward with a bill that would toughen the country’ already harsh punishment of homosexuality. Sex between two people of the same sex already is a criminal offense in Uganda – punishable by life imprisonment – although there are no records of any recent convictions.

Now the government is prepared to expand the law, making it a criminal offense to be gay. The legislation would make any public display of being gay a crime.

International human rights and LGBT groups have called on Kampala to drop the bill and repeal the sodomy law.

Last week, about 20 gays and lesbians staged a rally in the capital denouncing the government. One woman said she was publicly stripped naked and taunted by a pastor and his congregation as they attempted to exorcise her.

Read more at 365gay.com.