By: Stephen Ghouner
There truly cannot be enough said about the events playing out over in Uganda and the role that Americans have in it. For those of you who don’t know, a national crisis is happening within Uganda in regards to homophobia (among other things). It got so bad that on January 26 of this year David Kato, an advocacy officer in Sexual Minorities Uganda—a program in Uganda that promotes and pushes for human rights protection for lesbians, gays, bisexual and transgendered individuals—was killed when an unidentified assailant hit Kato in the head with a hammer, twice. Police, and other Ugandan officials, have stated that the murder had nothing to do with his activism and sexuality, but that it was a robbery gone wrong. How a robbery goes right, or is right to begin with, I don’t know. But the excuse seems lame-brained and hackneyed, and sounds like the Ugandan government didn’t want to put any effort into solving the case—which isn’t surprising, seeing how the country is known quite well for its national stance against homosexuality. They did, though, finally arrest a suspect after international pressure, and the police later told reporters that it was in fact a robbery. If that sounds like they spun the story the way they saw fit and then conducted the investigation, and subsequent arrest, based on false premises, then you wouldn’t be the only one to believe so.
Why was Kato, of all people, targeted? Well, other than being a rather vocal proponent of homosexual rights in his country, his name, along with many others, was listed in a magazine called Rolling Stones (of no relation to the American magazine), along with phone numbers, email, and home addresses in an article calling for the death of every gay in Uganda. While he did win a lawsuit against the regionally published magazine, that did not undo the damage, and I do believe that, if proper investigation took place, a direct link between the article and Kato’s death could be seen.
The Human Rights Watch, an international organization that promotes human rights (obviously), reported that the robbery story was a fiction the police and government had fixed to satisfy a growing international hostility about the Kato murder. And to a large extent, Uganda’s treatment of homosexuality is entirely a response to Western influence. This is not to suggest that the country and its law makers cannot think for themselves, but rather that a few—and I mean only a few—American evangelical preachers have, for the past twenty years, been visiting and ministering over in Uganda, preaching, most ostensibly, homophobia. The rest of the world was content to allow this to happen. It wasn’t like the country had a significant gay population, right? But in 2009, when an Anti-Homosexuality Bill was on the docket and about to win favor within Uganda’s legislature, the international community finally put its hands up and threatened to withdraw millions of financial aid desperately needed within the country.
It was a bit late, but better late than never, I guess. The Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009 would not only make homosexuality a crime within Uganda, but would make any sort of homosexual behavior a capital offense. If you read the law (at the bottom of the page), you’ll see that Uganda, and whatever screwed-up evangelist that preached to them, knew absolutely nothing about homosexuality. They were preached and conditioned that homosexuality was a threat to the traditional family, not given any statistical or factual proof to back up some of their claims, and so it’s no wonder that now their government is trying impose a death sentence on a person’s sexual orientation. When asked about the human rights of gays Uganda’s Minister of Ethics and Integrity stated, “Homosexuals can forget about human rights.” This is the same man that tried to ban miniskirts in his country.
It’s absolutely atrocious what’s going on over there, and yet it’s not entirely their fault. A good bit of the blame rests of our shoulders. It’s these anomalous preachers that pervert religious scripture for their agenda, while picking and choosing what text to listen to and what to completely ignore. The Bible never states ‘God Hates Fags’. Homosexuality is not even that big of a topic in Scripture. If anything is emphasized within the Bible, it is to love and accept everyone. If I’m not mistaken, Jesus, and most other disciples and prophets, preached that all life was precious. That doesn’t seem to indicate that any religious person is justified in their hatred of anybody, especially homosexuals.
The irony of it all is that these homophobic preachers and religious leaders that are most vocal about their hatred (while probably gay themselves) aren’t actually attracting anyone to their congregation. I mean, there are those misinformed souls that are just preached BS all day and night and believe it, but the majority of people respond with aversion to the church’s antipathy towards homosexuals and is probably a contributing factor as to why a significant amount of the Western population is finding it harder and harder to associate with a religion when all they do is call people very hateful names and pervert their own Scripture. So perhaps it’s time that we actually read Scripture with an informed sense of what it’s trying to teach, since I’m pretty sure that hatred is not celebrated in the Bible, Koran, or Torah—or whatever religious text you might subscribe to.
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2011/01/27/uganda-promptly-investigate-killing-prominent-lgbt-activist
http://wthrockmorton.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/anti-homosexuality-bill-2009.pdf
