From The Globe and Mail:
The Commonwealth convenes for a summit this week amid growing furor over a proposed law that would impose life imprisonment on homosexuals in Uganda, whose President is chairing the gathering.
The law, proceeding through Uganda's Parliament and supported by some of its top leaders, would imprison anyone who knows of the existence of a gay or lesbian and fails to inform the police within 24 hours. It requires the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” – defined as any sexual act between gays or lesbians in which one person has the HIV virus.
The controversy is growing because Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni is the chairman of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Trinidad and Tobago, which opens on Friday with Stephen Harper joining the leaders of 52 other countries.
If it is raised at the summit, the issue has the potential to divide Commonwealth leaders, who hold deeply polarized views on homosexuality. A number of Commonwealth countries, including Canada and Britain, have liberal views on the subject, but many African and Caribbean nations are socially conservative and maintain laws on their books that criminalize homosexuality.
This would not only be an extraordinary violation of the human rights of gay people, but would be singularly unhelpful to society in oh, so many ways. Leave alone the reality that actual human beings would face death for having such a normal and basically benign relationship as sexual congress (with other penalties for persons who only know this could be going on without reporting it--compelling people to be miserable busybodies and informers). In the context of AIDS, this is astonishingly stupid. Where there is a risk of HIV infection (as there certainly is) driving homosexual practice further underground is stupid because of the secrecy and desperation this engenders. People won't want to test themselves for fear they will be exposed. They will be less open to discussing their status with their partners, or open to using condoms, for fear of letting on that they are having anything other than the socially-acceptable, hetero, married, and baby-producing kind. And because they know they could die anyway, why care if they get HIV and die? It lends an inevitability to the outcome that it by no means should have.
This is incredibly cruel and stupid and barbaric--and this is why the western influence of The Family does not exactly surprise me.
(By all means follow the link. I can't find a bit of the excerpt from the Jeff Sharlet NPR interview that isn't worth reading--I'd actually advise following my link and then following their links.)
The actual fact that anyone should find homosexuality so apposite to society that death is prescribed is revolting enough to me. That this is possibly being carried out in Africa is revolting because of the racism--Uganda is currently open to ideas, and The Family has them. It's like a little test. But would they want this for the US? Ah--there is the real bugger, isn't it?
If people here (as in "in the US of A"), think it's alright to kill gays there, then they would....
Seriously--fuck The Family and everything they stand for. That sort of thinking isn't ever right, anywhere. What they are talking about is the real culture of death through ignorance and state oppression, and there is nothing good about it. People need to be nurtured, educated, and to find their own truth and their own happiness. Cutting them off from it under pain of death is evil. That is about as close to a statement of faith from me as you will ever get.
(The graphic above I stole from the website The New Gay. The article of theirs I link to here is really pretty enlightening. )
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