I wrote a couple of weeks ago (read it if you haven’t) about the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, morbidly nicknamed the ‘Kill the Gays Bill,’ which outlined, in no uncertain terms, the fate awaiting those who are unlucky enough to be born both Ugandan, and gay. Amongst the cruel ‘legal’ consequences that are proposed, are death for the ‘crime’ of “aggravated homosexuality,” and three years imprisonment for those who know of a gay person’s whereabouts but (in an Orwellian move) fail to report it to the authorities within 24 hours.

The bill, despite receiving frankly pathetic, suspicious, and shameful coverage from all but the Guardian in British media, caused a stir in the international community, which resulted in condemnation, calls for protection of the half a million strong Ugandan gay population, and, in a surprising move, the Swedish government to threaten to pull financial aid from the nation.
The calls have not gone unheard either, reporting yesterday, Bloomberg’s Fred Ojambo wrote,

“Uganda will drop the death penalty and life imprisonment for gays in a refined version of an anti- gay bill expected to be ready for presentation to Parliament in two weeks, James Nsaba Buturo, the minister of ethics and integrity, said.
The draft bill, which is under consideration by a parliamentary committee, will drop the two punishments to attract the support of religious leaders who are opposed to these penalties, Buturo said today in a phone interview from the capital, Kampala.
Ugandan lawmaker David Bahati presented a private member’s bill on Oct. 14 which sought the death penalty and life imprisonment for gay people in the country. The Ugandan government supports the bill because homosexuality and lesbianism are “repugnant to the Ugandan culture,” Buturo said. Still, it favors a more refined set of punishments, he said.
In addition to formulating punishments for the gay people, the bill will also promote counseling to help “attract errant people to acceptable sexual orientation,” said Buturo.”

Buturo said that the new draft of the now, presumably, ‘Cure the Gays Bill,’ will find itself before parliament within two weeks, which has led to many critics of the legislation to fear it’s full inception early on.

James Nsaba Buturo

Despite the removal of the death penalty, the bill is still a lethal blow to the gay community of Uganda, allowing life imprisonment, extradition from another country on suspicion of homosexual behaviour, and, owing to the dreadful way in which the bill has been constructed, the potential for manipulative abuse in the form of heterosexual affection, eg: two straight men hugging.
If that doesn’t make your skin crawl, consider the political corruption that could (and very likely will) surround the private show trials that are explicit in the bill’s text, and the media blackout that will be enforced when cherry picked political opponents find themselves sat in a court of Ugandan law on suspicion of love for the same sex.

The language used by the Ugandan minister of ethics and integrity is very telling also, favouring a “more refined” set of punishments, “counselling” and (according to Pink News) “gay cure therapies.”
It is not so much what Buturo is saying, as much as it is what he is not saying. There are no plans explicitly laid out for the fate of innocent gay people in the nation, only a shady and ominous suggestion towards pseudo science therapy and a life inside a two by two cell. The mere suggestion that the Ugandan authorities will attempt to cure homosexuality not only has zero foundation in scientific study, but has not been so openly and unashamedly acknowledged since the days of Action T4 in Nazi Germany. The potential for torturous, guinea pig like experiments is a very stark reality that we must all sober up to, and should, in many ways, be more concerned about than we were before.

This legislation is paving the way for politically and religiously motivated hatred, sham trials, press blackouts, prejudiced and homophobic, delusion fuelled, sick, torturous experiments, and damage to generations of gay people to come.

It would be very easy for us, at this point, to jump aboard the ‘Shouldn’t, Wouldn’t, Couldn’t‘ band wagon of Western democracy at this point, and look, with a sly glance, in shame, at the Ugandan parliament whilst whacking off to our own superior liberalism, but as per usual, the mix is a little more toxic than first impressions might suggest.

The bill is an American conservative evangelical sponsored piece of legislation. In a press release reported on publiceye, Tarso Luís Ramos, Political Research Associates (PRA) executive director, writes as part of an investigation into the ‘Influence of U.S. Religious Conservatives in Promoting Homophobia in Africa’,

“Just as the United States and other northern societies routinely dump our outlawed or expired chemicals, pharmaceuticals, machinery, and cultural detritus on African and other Third World countries, we now export a political discourse and public policies our own society has discarded as outdated and dangerous. Africa’s antigay campaigns are to a substantial degree made in the U.S.A.”

It also emphasises, “The investigation’s release could not be timelier, as the Ugandan parliament considers the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009. Language in that bill echoes the false and malicious charges made in Uganda by U.S antigay activist and Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively that western gays are conspiring to take over Uganda and even the world.”

Rev. Kapya Kaoma, PRA Project Director, writes, “The U.S. Right – once isolated in Africa for supporting pro-apartheid, White supremacist regimes – has successfully reinvented itself as the mainstream of U.S. evangelicalism. Through their extensive communications networks in Africa, social welfare projects, Bible schools, and educational materials, U.S. religious conservatives warn of the dangers of homosexuals and present themselves as the true representatives of U.S. evangelicalism, so helping to marginalize Africans’ relationships with mainline Protestant churches.”

“We need to stand up against the U.S. Christian Right peddling homophobia in Africa,” said Kaoma, who in recent weeks challenged U.S. evangelist Rick Warren to denounce the bill and distance himself from its supporters. “I heard church people in Uganda say they would go door to door to root out LGBT people and now our brothers and sisters are being further targeted by proposed legislation criminalizing them and threatening them with death. The scapegoating must stop.”

This isn’t the first time that Scott Lively, president of Abiding Truth Ministries, a conservative Christian organization in California, has found himself up to his neck in allegations of such hatred. The author of ‘The Pink Swastika,’ his book, based on supposed links between homosexuals and the Nazi Party, which were dismissed by historians as a total fabrication, has been so consumed with blind hatred for homosexuality, that the man, a the former state director for California’s branch of the American Family Association went ahead with Don Schmierer and Caleb Lee Brundidge, two other far right nutbags, to create Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill.

Scott’s world view, one in which he sees a threatening global gay rights agenda as an evil and infectious disease that is spreading fast around the globe, is a dangerous delusion that has led him, and many others in his home nation, and elsewhere, to prescribe the harshest, most cruel and torturous part of the human condition on our brothers and sisters, in the name of Godly righteousness.
The potential for this evil has been realised time and time again, we have borne witness to the greatest evils of mankind, and this new proposal, with or without the death penalty, is nothing short of religiously prescribed genocide.

If New York’s lady liberty stands for anything at all in this cruel and modern world, it is surely against the madness and slavery peddled by evangelical nutcases, who are hell-bent on the eradication of an entire community, whose only crime is love. Should her copper and steel lips stay sealed, her glassy eyes stare blindly out into the ocean, we will know that this day was the day that Liberty stood in silence on our shores, as well as on theirs.

Uganda, despite significant improvement since the mid-1980s, has an appalling record on human rights. Conflicts in the northern parts of the African state have continued to highlight abuses by the Ugandan Army and the Lord’s Resistance Army, a sectarian  guerilla group engaged in an armed rebellion against the Ugandan government, who have over time, kidnapped thousands of children as young as eight years old, who have been forced to serve and kill, or face the life of a ‘night commuter.’ This culminated in what one United Nations official described as, “appalling brutality,” and the the UN’s humanitarian chief, John Holmes, who met with victims of the attacks by the Lord’s Resistance Army, to speak out.

“Villages around there have been attacked by the LRA – a large number of deaths. We think there have been up to 900 deaths in the whole area, but around that area there have been 350 deaths – unimaginable brutality, a population, which is traumatized and terrorized by what’s happened to them, so to them, for that population the consequences have been catastrophic. The object of the operation we understand and share, of course, which is to put an end to the terror of the LRA. The problem is for this population at the moment, the consequences have been very dramatic.”

Mr Homles went on to describe an attack by the Lords Resistance, “In one case the church was surrounded, when people were engaged in the service, everybody in the church was massacred. In other cases, whole villages seem to have been effectively – small villages – wiped off the map, their populations killed, some very brutal cases of murder, children found by the bodies of their parents; one little girl whom I saw – they seem to have tried to pull her head off effectively, and left her paralyzed – a girl of three. And so these are appalling stories, and that’s why the population is so utterly traumatized – a very peaceful agricultural population – nothing to do with the LRA whatsoever, not their quarrel, not their issue – but they’ve been terrorized in this way by the LRA whose record is well known, but I think even they have exceeded themselves by it.”

Lords Resistance Army

The number of ‘internally displaced’ people is at 1.4 million, torture is widespread amongst security organizations, and the arrests and beating of opposition Members of Parliament, has created international criticism, which led to a decision by the British government to withhold part of the aid to Uganda in 2005.

To add to this list of humanitarian atrocities is the newly proposed ‘Anti-Homosexuality’ Bill, which would sentence “aggravated homosexuals” to death, and in an Orwellian move; punish all those who don’t tell the authorities of the known existence of a homosexual within 24 hours, to three years imprisonment. But the 1984 comparisons don’t stop there, after defining the “crime of homosexuality,” (which is sexual contact between two people of the same sex, oral, anal, with toys, or otherwise) the bill goes on to include the “touching of another person with the intention of committing homosexuality,” – a thought crime.

The guise under which this bill finds itself before us, is, predictably enough, “the protection of the family,” though what exactly the authorities are proposing to “protect” the family from is unclear, especially when you considerer the sectarian violence that has penetrated large parts of the nation. The bill aims to “strengthen the nation’s capacity to deal with emerging internal and external threats to the traditional heterosexual family,” again, it is unclear as to what the terms, “internal and external” actually mean, but if the prophetic Ugandan President is nothing else, he is paranoid, as we can see here as he accuses “European gays” of “recruiting” Ugandan citizens, when speaking at the Young Achievers Awards ceremony on Saturday,

The Ugandan President

“I hear European homosexuals are recruiting in Africa.
We used to have very few homosexuals traditionally.
They were not persecuted but were not encouraged either because it was clear that is not how God arranged things to be. You should discourage your colleagues [who are gay] because God was not foolish to do the way he arranged.
Mr and Mrs, but now you have to say Mr and Mr?
What is that now?”

One of the worrying aspects of the proposed legislation is the ‘confidentiality’ clause, which reads:

(1) At any stage of the Investigation or trial of an offence under this Act, law enforcement officers, prosecutors, judicial officers and medical practitioners, as well as parties to the case, shall recognize the right to privacy of the victim.
(2) For the purpose of subsection (I), in cases involving children and other cases where the court considers it appropriate. proceedings of the court shall be conducted in camera, outside the presence of the media.
(3) Any editor or publisher, reporter or columnist in case of printed materials. announcer or producer in case of television and radio, producer or director of a film to case of the movie industry. or any person utilizing trimedia facilities or information technology who publishes or causes the publicity of the names and personal circumstances or any other information tending to establish the victim’s identity without authority of court commits an offence and is liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding two hundred and fifty currency points.

These conditions create a potential environment in which the “offence” of homosexuality could easily be manufactured, and what little retarded form of justice that is left in the Ugandan courts could be perverted in such a way as to sentence many “innocent” people to jail time or death. I doubt the potential for this abuse is something that has been overlooked by the architects of the bill.

Gay Ugandan is left to die

Any Ugandan seeking refuge in another nation doesn’t have much hope either, as the ‘Extra Territorial Jurisdiction’ and ‘Extradition’ clauses permit the Ugandan Courts to sentence you to death for having homosexual sex outside of their own borders, and to extradite you in order that you might see trial on home turf. Whether this could easily be enforced if a Ugandan citizen sought refuge in a place like Britain is doubtful, but it a stark example of Uganda’s global and religious ambition to wipe homosexuality off the face of the earth.

The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, today raised the issues of this bill with the President of Uganda at the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference in Trinidad, a short time after Canadian and American officials expressed concern. A Downing Street spokesperson said, “The Foreign Office will be following the passage of the bill closely and we will continue to do everything we can privately and publically to prevent its passage . . . it has been raised in the strongest terms at the highest possible level today.”

How much might “the strongest possible terms” carry is yet to be seen, but many critics of the Ugandan bill have called for the nation to be thrown out of the Commonwealth altogether, and in yesterday’s Guardian, Stephen Lewis, a former UN envoy on Aids in Africa, described the proposed legislation as having “the taste of fascism.” In a speech in Trinidad, reported in the Globe and Mail, he said: “The credibility of the Commonwealth is hanging by a spider’s thread. The putative legislation declares war on homosexuality. What is put at risk here – beyond the threat of the death penalty for HIV-positive homosexuals – is the entire apparatus of Aids treatment, prevention and care.”

Perhaps the powers that be might be best advised to concern their efforts with the protection of life, to legislate against bullet holes, not whether two men or women can share their love. Call me an optimist, but I don’t think a homosexual, however “aggravated,” poses an equal threat to a militant with a sub-machine gun. Either way, yet again, as a global community, we face the march of forces that seek our destruction, and it would be our undoing to allow this change to go unnoticed.

New York protest calling for action from Obama.

London Protests calling for public action and Commonwealth sanctions.

Read the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in full here.

Guardian: Activists denounce denounce Uganda’s Homosexuality Bill.
Anglican Church of Canada: Respect the dignity of every human beings.
The Globe and Mail: Uganda’s anti-gay bill causes Commonwealth uproar
Pink News: Gordon Brown raises anti-gay laws with Ugandan president
Human Rights Watch: Anti-Homosexuality’ Bill Threatens Liberties and Human Rights Defenders