Uganda: A Glimpse at the True Christofascist Agenda

Having followed the misnamed "Christian Right" for decades, the real goal of wjite evangelicals and Christofascists is to role back all the progress in civil rights and equality won since the early 1960's and return America to a 1950's world where abortion, contraception, homosexuality are illegal and where they can force their beliefs on all of American society.  With the Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs overturning Roe v. Wade, they are well on their way to achieving the first phase of their goal as Republican controled legislatures across the country enact bans on abortion, "don't say gay" laws and restrictions on voting rights (In Michigan Republicans have blocked the repeal of a ban on cohabitation).   It is no coincidence that recordings have emerged of Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk - the who banned an abortion nedication that has been on the market  for 23 years - railing against contraception, gay rights, and modernity in general.  But if one wants a glimpse of just how extreme and dangerous these "Christians" are, look no farther than Uganda where a new dealth penalty law for gays has been enacted largely through the efforts of white American evangelicals who have marketed their hatred far and wide in Africa to an often uneducated public.  What has happened in Uganda is the same goal they seek to inflict on America.  A piece in Foreign Policy looks at the role white evangelicals have played in Africa and Uganda in particular.  It's no coincidence that Republican politicians in America eager to win evangelical/Christofascist support are once again working to depict gays as a threat to children and schools as a center of "indoctrination".  Here are article highlights:

Uganda’s parliament is set to debate a new anti-gay bill next week, as the country’s president called for a “medical opinion” on the deviancy of homosexuals. The bill, besides criminalizing homosexuality, also criminalizes the “promotion” and “abetting” of homosexuality and follows a January parliamentary investigation into an alleged promotion of homosexuality in schools. It’s no surprise, given how rampant anti-gay sentiment is in the country.

In September, I came across a video that was going viral on Twitter in Uganda. In the video, 26-year-old Elisha Mukisa, who is reported to have been previously imprisoned on defilement charges, speaks for a little over eight minutes detailing how he was lured as a minor into acting in gay porn by Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG)—a nongovernmental organization (NGO) based in Kampala working to support and defend LGBTQ+ persons in the country.

The video caught my attention for several reasons. The first was the anti-gay rhetoric it catalyzed in the following days and the corresponding moral panic. In the ensuing conversation on social media, SMUG was defined as a threat to children that parents had to watch out for. One Twitter user, @Ashernamanya, wrote: “Uganda must be for God Almighty not for Bum lickers the Gays. SMUG an NGO is recruiting young children into Homosexuality and acting the gay. They need to be arrested.”

The second reason the video kindled my interest was that it added to the growing list of instances of mass media being weaponized in Uganda to propagate the “ex-gay” narrative, in which a person claims to have been “lured” and “recruited” into homosexuality. It was also organized by the Family Life Network’s Stephen Langa, who in March 2009 put together a similar seminar called “Exposing the Homosexuals’ Agenda.” The language and presentation of luring and recruitment (as though it were a job listing) were not, in fact, novel to my ears, and it is a phenomenon I have seen across African news media.

It has deep links to white evangelical Christianity and is an export of a made-in-the-USA movement and ideology that is polarizing African countries and harming and endangering LGBTQ+ people.

While it looked innovative, it was not the first time such a press conference was creatively planned to spark panic and parade out a person claiming to be ex-gay. It was also not peculiar to Uganda; it is a method that was and continues to be used in both puritanical and evangelical Christianity in countries from Ghana to Kenya and Nigeria.

From the days of European colonialism, when sodomy warranted the death penalty, the church has been the face of the anti-LGBTQ+ movement and has deployed language and framing consistent with present-day ex-gay movements.

The rhetoric relies on a “prodigal son” framing that checks out with the Bible, in which gay people are only valid as long as they turn away from their sexuality. . . . When the pro-conversion therapy Christian group Exodus International put Yvette Cantu Schneider and other ex-gay spokespeople on TV in the 2000s to talk about being formerly gay, it was because of such beliefs.

[A]s the ex-gay movement lost its grip in the United States, it started to reach for relevance elsewhere. . . . The church has been involved in manufacturing and sustaining the ex-gay framework in more than subtle and metaphorical ways. Evangelical preachers have traveled across Africa, verbalizing this harmful language.

In the early 2000s, American evangelical Scott Lively was part of a series of anti-gay events that culminated in Uganda’s 2009 “Kill the gays” bill, which called for the death penalty for what it described as “aggravated homosexuality.” Lively had written books such as The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party and Seven Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child against what he described as “pro-homosexual indoctrination.”

This recasting of homosexuality as akin to pedophilia, alongside the widespread use of similar language, is meant to legitimize the response and crackdown by governments and institutions. If gay people are not successfully framed as predators, then extreme measures against them could be questioned.

However, the violence that LGBTQ+ people experience in Africa has been justified by these anti-gay groups through the construction of a narrative of intent by “them” to target children.

That same rhetoric drawing connections between homosexuality and pedophilia has remained largely unchanged from how evangelicals created panic around gay people in the early days of the anti-gay movement. In a 1981 letter, U.S. preacher Jerry Falwell described gay people as out to “recruit,” saying “many of them are out after my children and your children” and that they “must not be recruited to a profane lifestyle.” Falwell also added that gay people threatened families because they didn’t reproduce.

These comments on recruitment, destruction, and being a threat to families now cloud much of the discourse around homosexuality in several African countries. They were present in the Mukisa press conference, are currently in use as Ghana’s Parliament debates a draconian anti-gay bill, and continue to swirl across the anti-LGBTQ+ movement on the continent. In an African context, visits and speeches from prominent Americans such as Lively and Falwell have the effect of legitimizing homophobia; their straight white male identities crown it with credibility.

I do not mean to exonerate Uganda, Ghana, or other African countries of homophobia or suggest that they are incapable of it without external backing. They are.

However, claiming that homosexuality is uniquely Western offers the United States’ ex-gay movement the opportunity to present itself as being on the right side of history, as being close to the sources of “moral decadence” but still resisting it. For Ugandan and African homophobes, the reverse is the case. It gives them a premise for absolution—an anticolonial veneer that allows them to say, “This was brought here from abroad, and we need to eradicate it.”

Proponents of ex-gay and anti-gay philosophies depend on the permanence of gay people for their message to be relevant. They require an enemy for their fight to be valid, and they go to great lengths to construct this enemy as a well-funded and all-powerful foreign movement while falsely presenting the local anti-gay movement as a grassroots underdog, despite its heavy reliance on U.S. evangelicals for publicity.

These people are vicious and dangerous and too many Americans fail to realize that banning abortion and demonizing gays are only the first phase of their agenda.