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Behind the Ugandan antigay laws: American evangelicals manouvering for power, the better to spread their hate in the name of the Lord.

Talk about a “Lord, save us from your followers!” situation.

So the British planted the Seed. This Alien Legacy

More than 80 countries around the world still criminalize consensual homosexual conduct between adult men, and often between adult women.[14]

These laws invade privacy and create inequality. They relegate people to inferior status because of how they look or who they love. They degrade people’s dignity by declaring their most intimate feelings "unnatural" or illegal. They can be used to discredit enemies and destroy careers and lives. They promote violence and give it impunity. They hand police and others the power to arrest, blackmail, and abuse. They drive people underground to live in invisibility and fear.[15]

More than half those countries have these laws because they once were British colonies.
This report describes the strange afterlife of a colonial legacy. It will tell how one British law-the version of Section 377 the colonizers introduced into the Indian Penal Code in 1860-spread across immense tracts of the British Empire.

Colonial legislators and jurists introduced such laws, with no debates or "cultural consultations," to support colonial control. They believed laws could inculcate European morality into resistant masses. They brought in the legislation, in fact, because they thought "native" cultures did not punish"perverse" sex enough. The colonized needed compulsory re-education in sexual mores. Imperial rulers held that, as long as they sweltered through the promiscuous proximities of settler societies, "native" viciousness and "white" virtue had to be segregated: the latter praised and protected, the former policed and kept subjected.MORE

And now? Here come the US Evangelicals, in search of power to add fertilizer and water to the poisonous plants that in this garden grow.

The Anti-Gay Highway: New Report Details Mutually Beneficial Relationship Between US Evangelicals and African Antigay Clergy

A new report released today details the role that US-based renewal church movements have played in mobilizing homophobic sentiment in at least three African countries. “Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches & Homophobia,” written by Rev. Kapya Kaoma for the progressive think tank Political Research Associates, was the result of a yearlong investigation into the relationship between conservative clergy on two continents, which has hastened divisions within denominations and has “restrict[ed] the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.” Renewal groups and their neoconservative ally, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, have long sought to conservatize or split mainline American churches—frequently over gender or sexuality issues—and liberal scholars have traced many of the mainline schisms that have dominated headlines over the past several years to groundwork laid by the IRD and others.*

Increasingly, though, renewal movements have begun looking abroad for allies. Focusing on three mainline denominations under assault by these renewal movements (the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church, and the Presbyterian Church USA) in three African countries (Uganda, Nigeria, and Kenya), Kaoma has documented a clear trend of the US Christian right exporting its battles over social and sexuality issues to Africa. There, churches have been pressured to sever ties with mainline funders in exchange for conservative support, and have become recipients of a more fiercely anti-gay message than the US Christian right delivers at home.

This report describes growing anti-gay movements in African churches as a “proxy war” for US culture battles. Can you explain?

Since the ’90s, we’ve seen this shift from the American conservatives who are going to Africa, and they started spreading this anti-gay rhetoric across sub-Saharan Africa. We started getting a lot of statements from US evangelicals that homosexuality is wrong and that there is this Western agenda among gays to take over world. So it is coming from the West. Why is it a proxy war? In America, these politics have been going on for a long time—since the ’80s they have been used as a political tool to gain support in American churches.

But we saw a shift in the [tactics] to allow that war to be fought outside American soil: They’ve allowed Africans to get involved and fight on behalf of conservatives. You see [US evangelicals] going to Africa and making statements and having political access to leadership there, asking them to criminalize same-sex orientation. And now, when they do that, the Africans are benefiting the religious conservatives, because they’re helping them fight in America. But American conservatives are also benefiting African leaders in terms of giving them not just an ideological framework—the anti-LGBT arguments that have been used in America—but also providing them with legitimacy.

The second aspect is very interesting in a sense, because in addition to the ideological framework, they’re getting the religious leaders in Africa involved by telling them to misrepresent the progressive or mainline churches as evil—part and parcel of a gay agenda to take over the world—so you cannot deal with them. They say they’re going to partner with [African leaders and churches], if they can disassociate from mainline churches [in the United States], which are part of the gay agenda. So [the African churches] cut the relationship, and then the American conservatives take over financially.

That’s how the war is being fought. Thus, when the Africans come [to the United States] they have nothing to do with mainline churches; instead they side with American conservatives against mainline churches. And the mainline church in Africa is bigger and stronger than in America. So the conservatives are relying on the numbers of African leaders; they start fighting mainline church leadership using Africans to win the American battle, and come across as though they care about Africa.MORE

The FULL REPORT:Globalizing the Culture Wars PDF

Rick Warren and Homophobia in Africa November article

After an uproar, during which he said that Rick Warren Urges Ugandan Pastors to Speak Out Against Proposed Anti-Gay Law Decemeber 10 Post. This bigoted little fucker, by the way, was sold to us as a moderate when he was chosen by Obama for his inaugural, remember?

Go here first to see whats at stake. The Implications of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill

President Museveni has joined the anti-gay crusade

The Rachel Maddow Show: U.S. Ties to Ugandan Anti-Gay Bill



Transcript

The Rachel Maddow Show Attempts to Get Some Responses on the Ugandan ‘Kill the Gays’ Bill


Transcript

Rachel Maddow vs Formerly Gay Author



Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I should note that the bill no longer says in law that homosexuals should be killed or imprisoned for life. Probably due to the international outcry. More pressure must be placed on Uganda to get rid of the law entirely. But remember kids 1. Uganda has just discovered oil. 2. The evangelicals need to be reined in. Something has to be done about these murder-inducing snakeoil salesmen who use the oppression and murder of innocents as a way to gain power.

3 thoughts on “Behind the Ugandan antigay laws: American evangelicals manouvering for power, the better to spread their hate in the name of the Lord.”

  1. Andi Marquette says:

    Thank you for providing this information. I had seen Rachel Maddow talking about it on her show and I was absolutely appalled and then I wondered where I might find more info and here it is, on your blog. Many, many thanks.

  2. Mark Lowell says:

    I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uganda for two years, when the debate over the laws was starting. I was working in a rural community in Busoga, and I had a number of conversations with teachers and other people I was working with about the issue of homosexuality. As far as I can tell, none of them had ever met an out homosexual, and they seemed to think homosexuality is something foreign to Uganda, limited to the upper classes in Kampala and assorted Satanists and witch doctors. As a result, ‘homosexuals’ make a very convenient target for Museveni and other elites, particularly considering the potential for unrest over political and economic issues-it’s sort of the Ugandan equivalent of targeting ‘terrorists’: nobody’s ever met them, but they’re confident they’re evil and plotting to overthrow society.

    One of the weird things about all this is that, at least among the Basoga, Ugandan sexual mores would be considered deviant by the same US conservatives, as most young men outside of some of the evangelical movements aspire to marry multiple wives…

  3. Sara A says:

    They are also the same people who are fueling the literal not figurative witch hunts in places like Nigeria…mostly aimed at women and children, who are described as having “demons” that must be exorcised. That sort of thing occasionally happens in the US, as well (people trying to “pray the devil” out of their children and sometimes abusing them in the process) just not as often or extreme, and it’s usually the same Evangelical churches fostering it.

    It’s what you could call a patriarchal triangulation. Homophobia, misogyny, abuse of children, all tied up with colonialism.

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