Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has now expressed some reluctance about pending LGBT criminalization, imprisonment and death penalty bill -- but not because he thinks it's unjust, but because it has "foreign policy implications," according to a report by NTV Uganda.
In the NTV Uganda broadcast, the reporter notes that "the government seems to have buckled under pressure from the West." Museveni is shown addressing his National Resistance Movement party's National Executive Council Meeting, and describing how the subject of visits and calls from western leaders, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have been "gays."
According to a report in the Ugandan newspaper New Vision, Museveni claimed he told Western leaders that the bill was the sole work of parliament member David Bahati (a member of Museveni's NRM party, and also of The Family) and that he had not even had a chance to discuss the bill with him.
Museveni continued to traffic in the claim, popularized by anti-gay activists in the United States, that gay people prey on young people in order to "recruit" them to homosexuality. According to New Vision, Museveni "said when he talked to Hillary Clinton, he informed her that people come from Europe with money and woo young people into homosexuality."
Museveni pointed to a gay rights rally in the United States to claim LGBT people possess terrifying political power. "There was a rally in New York of 300,000 homosexuals. Now, I would want to challenge you, members of Parliament, how many of you, other than me, have ever had a rally of 300,000 people?"
Tags: uganda, uganda anti-gay law
"According to New Vision, Museveni 'said when he talked to Hillary Clinton, he informed her that people come from Europe with money and woo young people into homosexuality.'"
That's hardly original. It bears a striking resemblance to what white Southerners defending segregation said during the 1960s: everything was fine here until those outside agitators came into town and stirred up trouble.
It's also hardly original that people who recognize that they are engaged in wrongdoing would try to find scapegoats to avoid accountability. And it's hardly original that they would attempt to scapegoat those with the least social capital in a society to defend themselves against such caricaturization.
What's ironic is that in the very same breath Africans decry the condescension that they feel the west holds toward them, they engage in behaviors that can only elicit contempt from anyone with a conscience. What's even more ironic is that the rightful concern about the deleterious effects of European colonialism and ongoing neocolonialism is being marshalled to defend some of the most destructive aspects of the very colonial system they decry. Uganda finds itself defending British stereotypes and prejudices and the draconian laws that punished their targets of a century ago. Britain itself has long since moved on, Uganda is stuck in a time warp with the prejudices of their colonizers. How sad.
"Museveni pointed to a gay rights rally in the United States to claim LGBT people possess terrifying political power. 'There was a rally in New York of 300,000 homosexuals. Now, I would want to challenge you, members of Parliament, how many of you, other than me, have ever had a rally of 300,000 people?'"
Perhaps the fact Museveni cannot draw a large rally of people ought to suggest something to him about the policies he's proposing.
Of course, this is not to suggest that popularity of an idea necessarily makes it morally right. One only has to watch Leni Riefenstah's Triumph of the Will to know that immoral ideas can prove popular.
On the other hand, civil rights movements often draw large crowds because human being innately recognize the rightness of treating others with dignity and justice. Indeed, even those who would pass and maintain discriminatory and destructive legal systems know at heart they are on the wrong side of human rights questions, hence the reason they seek to legitimate their prejudices through law, tradition and religion.
300,000 obviously Museveni has never heard of the million man march, hell that's the size of the crowd at a U2 concert.
Better kill Bono, cos of his terrifying political power.
I always wonder how dumbfounded these fundamental christians will be when they die and wake up in hell.
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