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Commentary
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Wednesday, 18 November 2009 19:54 |
By Michael Madill
"The object of this Bill is to establish a comprehensive consolidated legislation to protect the traditional family by prohibiting any form of sexual relations between persons of the same sex." It’s outlandish and poorly written, and it’s the opening salvo in the latest campaign to do away with gay people in Uganda.
The Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009 [that’s really the name of the Bill] is making its way through Uganda’s parliament and will probably become law before Christmas.
If you are gay in Uganda, you’re an endangered species; hunted. The sponsor of the Bill, David Bahati calls homosexuality a "creeping evil." Laws like his are already on the books. A 2007 survey by public opinion research firm Steadman Group of Kenya found that ninety-five per cent of Ugandans thought homosexuality immoral.
The country’s president, Yoweri Museveni, personally ordered the arrest and imprisonment of gays and lesbians in 1999. This year, though, gays can look forward to life imprisonment or the death penalty if they are arrested for certain offences under the proposed law.
There are probably six hundred thousand gay men and women in Uganda. Nobody knows for sure, not even gay rights groups in Uganda, because homosexuals are persecuted so viciously that many are afraid to publicly identify themselves for any reason. If the estimate is correct, then gays and lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people are about two per cent of Uganda’s population.
Look at it this way: The government is about to make it possible to execute two per cent of its population because of their identity. Two per cent of Ugandans are Seventh Day Adventists. Two percent of Ugandans are Banyoro, an ethnic group with a rich pre-colonial history. What about them?
About two per cent of Chicago residents are of mixed-race heritage. What if our government decides that two per cent aren’t worth having? Imagine the outcry.
In Uganda, there is little more than a peep from domestic constituencies. Indeed, the prevailing attitudes are that the Bill is both just and necessary, if a little harsh. A coalition of religious leaders there called for the Bill to be modified.
They wanted the death penalty removed from the Bill with life imprisonment instead, for the offence of "aggravated homosexuality" [yes, that’s in the Bill, too]. How did this come to pass?
The answer is that you helped. If you are a Christian and a regular churchgoer, you are touched by and probably contributing to the rise of murderous homophobia in one of fastest growing and most conservative religious communities in the world.
When you send money or missionaries to Africa you may be doing the work of Christ, but do you know what you’re buying? When you give money to churches in Uganda, they build schools, immunize children, care for battered women and campaign to execute gay people. Does your church here do this?
The Anglican Church in Uganda and Pentecostal ministries in Uganda are growing faster than any others in their traditions – Nigerian Pentecostal ministries run a close second – but they are doing it by recruiting in the US.
When the governing council of the Episcopal Church in the United States [our franchise on the Anglican Communion] permitted the consecration of the gay bishop Gene Robinson in 2004, homophobes all round the country began pushing their parish churches out from under the influence of the Episcopal Convention and into the fold of the vociferously anti-gay churches of Uganda.
In 2007 the Church of Uganda consecrated Bishop John Guernsey in Virginia. The Reverend John Kalimi preaches his homophobic message at Saint Vincent’s Cathedral in Dallas-Fort Worth. Pentecostal, anti-gay ministers of mega-churches here, like TD Jakes of The Potter’s House and the Miracle Crusader Benny Hinn went to Uganda on fundraising and soul-getting missions and came back richer.
Protectors of American families like Scott Lively and Rick Warren, who think gay people need healing, threw their support behind Ugandan preacher Martin Ssempa until he started talking to the media about killing homosexuals. Rick Warren of Saddleback Valley Community Church has repudiated Martin Ssempa. Scott Lively of Defend the Family has gone quiet on the subject.
Though human-rights groups and diplomatic missions in the US, the EU and Uganda are protesting to Uganda’s government, there is no groundswell of indignation from Christians affiliated with the churches, ministers, or people here who are peddling hate there. That should make us wonder how tolerant we are, really.
The good people of Chicago, Dallas, Pasadena and Alexandria are fueling a pogrom in Uganda. They are doing it with their money and with their hearts. If we give them the benefit of the doubt and say, "forgive them for they know not what they do," then it is fair to ask of what else inside their churches are they ignorant?
Catholics across the US found out the hard way the cost of looking the other way in recent years, yet the Archbishop of Kampala is a leading supporter of the more humane life-in-prison-for-aggravated-homosexuality version of the bill.
If Anglicans and Pentecostals and Evangelicals support their Christian brothers and sisters in Uganda in this campaign, and if Catholics are unwilling or unable to resist the hierarchy, well that would explain a lot about the lot of gay people in this country, wouldn’t it?
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