How do you get more people to watch your
documentary? Give it a teasing title, clearly intended to grab floating
viewers by piquing their interest. Gosh, where could it be, the world’s
worst place to be gay? Afghanistan? China? North Korea? Tunbridge Wells?
It turns out to be Uganda, at least
according to the Radio 1 DJ Scott Mills, who is himself gay. He went to
Kampala and indeed found plenty of depressing evidence of
institutionalized homophobia, and this was before the murder last month
of the Ugandan gay-rights activist David Kato.
Africa generally is becoming a dangerous
place to be openly gay – no fewer than 37 African countries have
declared homosexuality illegal – but Uganda is evidently the most
dangerous, with a prominent politician called David Bahati championing
legislation – bluntly called the Anti-Homosexuality Act – which would
introduce life imprisonment for people found guilty of same-gender sex, and the death penalty for serial offenders.
If only this represented the ranting of a
right-wing zealot, out of step with public opinion. In fact, Mills
found perfectly bright schoolchildren who are likewise of the view that
homosexuality is an abomination, and met a newspaper editor who
insisted that it reduces the human lifespan by 24 years. A young
lesbian told him that she had been raped in an attempt to cure her of
her orientation, yet far from curing her, the rape left her pregnant and
HIV-infected.
All this is a relatively recent
phenomenon, apparently visited upon Africa by the growing influence
there of American evangelists. And where angry shouting doesn’t work,
glib humour is deployed. In the beginning it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, offered a panellist on a phone-in radio show.
Missionaries of Hate
Vanguard correspondent Mariana van Zeller
investigates the growing influence American Evangelical Christian
groups have in shaping anti-homosexuality laws and attitudes in Uganda.
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