Uganda hears anti-gay call
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN, KAMPALA
January 5, 2010
http://www.theage.com.au/world/uganda-hear...00104-lq2g.html
LAST March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about ''curing'' homosexuals have been widely discredited in the US, arrived in Uganda's capital to give a series of talks.
The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organiser, was ''the gay agenda - that whole hidden and dark agenda'' - and the threat homosexuals posed to the traditional African family.
For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened to the Americans, who were presented as ''experts'' on homosexuality.
The visitors discussed how to change people from homosexual to heterosexual, how homosexual men often sodomised teenage boys and how ''the gay movement is an evil institution'' whose goal is ''to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity''.
One month after the conference, a previously unknown Ugandan politician who boasts of having evangelical friends in the US Government introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which threatens to hang homosexuals and has put Uganda on a collision course with Western nations.
Donor countries, including the US, are demanding that Uganda's Government drop the proposed law. The Ugandans, facing the prospect of losing millions in foreign aid, are now indicating that they will back down, slightly, and change the death penalty provision to life in prison for some homosexuals. But the battle is far from over.
The three Americans who spoke at the conference - Scott Lively, a missionary who has written anti-homosexual books; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads ''healing seminars'', and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is ''mobilising the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality'' - are now trying to distance themselves from the bill.
But the Ugandan organisers of the conference admit helping to draft the legislation.
Gay Ugandans already describe a world of blackmail, death threats like ''Die Sodomite!'' scrawled on their homes, beatings and even so-called correctional rape.
NEW YORK TIMES