2013 has been a year of great strides worldwide for the LGBT community, but the reality is that there have also been glaring setbacks as well, most recently India’s decision to uphold a ban on homosexual acts. Now, the nation of Uganda has followed suit by passing a law that could strip members of the LGBT community of their freedom for the rest of their lives.
According to the Associated Press, Ugandan lawmakers have passed an anti-gay law that punishes “aggravated homosexuality” with life imprisonment.
The controversial bill was first introduced in 2010 and even included a provision for the death penalty. However, that provision was removed from the current bill.
Uganda had already deemed homosexuality illegal thanks to a colonial-era law that criminalized sexual acts “against the order of nature.” However, the lawmaker who created this new bill argued that the new law was necessary because homosexuals from the West were threatening the family structure in Uganda and were recruiting Ugandan children into their “lifestyle.”
Many LGBT people of Uganda spoke out against the lawmakers and argued that Uganda’s political system had become homophobic thanks to influence from American evangelicals who were spreading anti-gay beliefs throughout their country, as well as much of Africa.
LGBT activists in the country even went so far as to sue Scott Lively, a Massachusetts evangelical, in March 2012 under the Alien Tort Statute that allows non-citizens to file suit in the U.S. if there is an alleged violation of international law. Lively has denied wanting any violence or punishment to befall anyone in the LGBT community, but has admitted that he believes they should undergo therapy to make them heterosexual.
Although the new bill was highly criticized across the globe, many traditional Ugandans praised the new anti-gay law, saying that they had every right to protect their nation’s children, even if it stripped other citizens of their rights.
President Obama, who has been a staunch supporter of LGBT rights for more than year now, spoke about the Ugandan bill when it was first proposed and called it “odious.”
In our opinion, “odious” would be an understatement. Abominable would be a better term to describe a bill that enforces the idea that any person’s rights, and really their life, should be stripped from them just for being anything other than heterosexual. The saddest part is that the same kids that the Ugandan lawmakers claim to be trying to protect with this extreme anti-gay will be hurt, oppressed and persecuted if they discover that they are LGBT, and the kids who are heterosexual will likely have a seed of hate against anyone different planted within them because of the law.
Clearly this law isn’t about protecting anyone’s children. Its sole purpose is to divide people and protect the comfort of those who refuse to see themselves as equal to all of the people they share the world with. –nicholas robinson
