Day: January 15, 2010

Update: Thanks for helping the sis. Team Grove City pulled out the victory in the last couple of hours.

That would be midnight. Here is the entry for my girl child’s high school video production class. Play it and rate it awesome and they might get the spot on television during the Super [Commercial] Bowl.

Thanks!!!!

From Reuters via the New York Times:

KAMPALA (Reuters) – A Ugandan preacher with close ties to U.S. evangelicals and President Yoweri Museveni’s family said on Friday he planned to organise a “million-man” march in February to support a proposed anti-gay law in parliament.

The east African nation has faced intense pressure from Western governments and human rights groups over anti-homosexuality legislation tabled in parliament as a private members’ bill last year.

Museveni seemed to distance himself and the government from the proposed law on Tuesday, saying it was a foreign policy issue and calling for more talks. The ex-rebel leader said he had been under pressure from Western leaders.

“We want to show how many people support the bill,” Pastor Martin Ssempa told journalists in the Ugandan capital.

“We want to give a postcard that (Museveni) can send to his friend (U.S. President) Barack Obama,” Ssempa said in front of posters saying “Africans Unite Against Sodomy” and “Barack Obama Back Off.” He said the march was planned for February 17.

Read the rest here.

Ugandan readers: Is this a real test for Museveni? Will legislators there fall on their sword over this bill?

This morning, Barbara Bradley Hagerty explores the connections between the US evangelical scene and Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Extensive material from Scott Lively is included with a brief comment from yours truly.  The transcript is at the link; go read and listen to the entire program but here are some segments.

The battle over the Bible and homosexuality has torn apart Christian churches and entire denominations in the United States. But what happens when that culture war is exported to other countries? Ugandans are finding out — with potentially deadly consequences.

Uganda is now considering a bill that would impose the death penalty or life in prison on gay men and lesbians for some homosexual acts.

To understand how this bill came to be, one needs to know the story of King Mwanga. In 1886, Uganda’s king ordered some two dozen male pages to have sex with him, and when they refused because of their Christian faith, he ordered that they be burned to death. Every year on June 3, Ugandans celebrate a national holiday honoring the Christian martyrs and deploring the pedophile king.

Into this climate stepped Scott Lively, an American evangelical and president of Defend The Family International. In March 2009, Lively traveled to Uganda to speak, along with two other Americans from “ex-gay communities,” about the “gay agenda.”

I agree with Jim Naughton when he said:

Jim Naughton, a former canon in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C., says their message plays one way in the U.S., but differently in a place like Uganda. And they should have known.

“If you go to countries where there’s already a great deal of suspicion and maybe animosity towards homosexuals, and begin to tell people there, ‘Well, actually these people are child abusers, they’re coming for their children, that they’re the scourge that is being deposited on you by the secular West,’ you’re gonna get a backlash.” Naughton says it’s like “showing up in rooms filled with gasoline, and throwing lighted matches around and saying, ‘Well, I never intended fire .‘ “

Spot on.

I was interviewed Tuesday for this segment. I did not know some things then that I know now, particularly about the College of Prayer.

If [Rev. Rick] Warren was slow to condemn the bill, other Christian conservatives have yet to do so, says Warren Throckmorton, who teaches psychology at Grove City College and has been monitoring U.S. evangelical response. He says some of the Christian groups most publicly tied to Uganda have been the quietest. Joyce Meyer Ministries, Oral Roberts University, the College of Prayer in Atlanta — all have close ties and declined to express reservations about the death penalty.

“Silence is often interpreted as consent,” says Throckmorton, who is himself a conservative evangelical. “So I think those kinds of responses may lead those individuals in Uganda to think that perhaps what [they’re] doing really is according to the evangelical faith.”

I have since learned that the College of Prayer wants it to be clear that for them, at least, silence should not be taken as consent. To be sure, they have been pretty silent, but Rev. Fred Hartley told me that the College of Prayer has no involvement in any way with the bill.

Here is the audio. If the player doesn’t work, try this or just go to the site.

This is interesting.

I cannot make a sound inference from these statements from the Speaker. This seems more defiant than some believe is wise in Uganda. But here he is declaring his independence from his party’s leader and President.

It ain’t over til it’s over.