Death Penalty for Gays in Uganda...we need to pay attention

[SuperFemme]

Culhane: What’s at stake in Uganda

I want to broaden the focus this week from the usual legal analysis of the LGBT movement in the U.S., and ask this question: What’s really at stake in the pending anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda?

As readers of this site likely know, proposed legislation in that country would make certain kinds of homosexual behavior punishable by death, while seriously criminalizing other acts. For the increasingly visible LGBT community in Uganda, of course, the stakes couldn’t be higher. But what happens there – whether this law gets passed, and if so, how much it’s enforced – could have huge repercussions for the international human rights movement, and possibly even for the advance of our rights here in the U.S.

Let’s start by looking at how this ugly piece of legislation originated: with the “counsel” and support of some American fundamentalists, who have made company with Ugandan politicians and its leader, President Yoweri Museveni (somehow overlooking that he’s a dictator) because of what Jeff Sharlet has called “the evangelical zeal of his regime.”

Sharlet’s long-form article in this month’s Harper’s is compelling reading. He connects the dots between the mysterious American evangelic group known as “the Family” or “the Fellowship” and its Ugandan equivalent, which is ensconced within its Parliament.

Frustrated by their failure to create a government sufficiently grounded in Christianity, U.S. “Family” members have tried, like big tobacco before them, to export their product to places where it still sells. Members include high-profile men like former AG John Ashcroft and Rick Warren, who infamously delivered the invocation at Obama’s Administration. According to David Bahati, the Ugandan member of Parliament who introduced the legislation, Warren told his Ugandan brethren that “homosexuality is a sin and that we should fight it.”

There’s no evidence, of course, that American evangelicals want to kill us.
But at least some of the most fundamentalist among them do want to eradicate homosexuality by curing it.

Others would be satisfied stuffing us back into the closet. Since the first is a marginal and mostly ridiculed failure, and the second effort is collapsing by the day, perhaps these men think that success in a place like Uganda will one day be transported back to the U.S., even if in some watered-down form. Or maybe they’re just frustrated and looking for others with whom they find common ground.

As I’ve written, some (but not all) of the evangelicals who met with Ugandan leaders shortly before this unspeakable bill was introduced have beaten a full retreat; others, not so much. (Read especially about one Scott Lively, who seems, well, sinfully proud of his effort.)

But the blood of our LGBT brothers and sisters is already on their hands: the scapegoating of sexual minorities that has accompanied the introduction of this bill has already led to such atrocities as “corrective rape” – which is supposed to have the effect of making a lesbian into a straight woman and violent and, according to the article, was carried out under clerical supervision in at least one harrowing case. None of these domestic evangelicals are idiots (except morally), and can’t have been surprised at the product of their toxic rhetoric.

In a larger sense, this struggle is but a piece of a much broader conflict between the liberalism (both religious and secular) of the human rights community and the forces that resist modernity – in this context, I found particularly telling one Ugandan’s worry that the iPod, of all things, was an insidious agent of gay recruiting.

Fundamentalist Christians and radical Muslims are the two most visible examples of these reactionary forces, but their ability to attract a huge global audience speaks to a primal fear of threats and change that many understand little and like even less. In Uganda itself, as Sharlet notes, “the homosexual” serves as a convenient bogeyman for the dictator to use to hold onto his power.

The advances of the LGBT movement here in the U.S. can lead us to forget that things are much worse in many parts of the world. Even at the U.N. level, there are currently competing statements about how to treat sexual minorities, with mostly the Western countries (and, since early in the Obama Administration, the U.S.) supporting gay and gender identity rights as part of the broader recognition of human rights while a number of other nations (mostly in the Middle East and Africa, and including Uganda) have signed onto a counter-statement that, among other misstatements, links homosexuality to pedophilia.

There’s so much work to do, and the most critical of it isn’t here at home. But it’s hard to know what to do about these atrocities taking place so far from us, both geographically and culturally.
John Culhane is Professor of Law and Director of the Health Law Institute at Widener University School of Law in Wilmington, Del. He blogs about the role of law in everyday life, and about a bunch of other things at: http://wordinedgewise.org.