Thanks for reminding me of why African governments need to wean themselves from donor aid which does nothing but fuel official corruption and provides an effective tool for Western governments to use to manipulate and blackmail us.

On this we agree.

Of course, you and I differ on what it means to be independent. I think that you will discover as African nations move towards self-sufficiency this will also encourage attitudes that lean towards modernity, liberty, and individual freedom.

A prosperous Africa will eventually be an Africa that is less bound to the attitudes that you hold so dear.

So we both have reason to look forward to that day.

Timothy, with all sympathy and respect, don’t let yourself be baited by this divisiveness.

Maazi, for the record, America does not have any holocaust-denial laws (or any law of the kind) and is better for it. The AHB will not better Ugandans, by restricting them from speaking as they would.

Thanks for reminding me of why African governments need to wean themselves from donor aid which does nothing but fuel official corruption and provides an effective tool for Western governments to use to manipulate and blackmail us. Anyway sadly for you, chinese, indian, russian, south korean, brazilian and gulf arab investors are now investing in Africa. So the days of the West blackmailing Africans are coming to an end. No foreigner will exercise veto over the Ugandan parliament. If you think that you can sit in location thousands of miles away and direct issues on the ground in Kampala, then you are grossly mistaken.

BTW, please stop flogging tired propaganda— advocates of the bill have already explained that death penalty would be expunged. Freedom of speech is not an absolute. In Germany, Czech Republic and Austria exercising freedom of speech to deny holocaust is criminal offence. In Uganda, any attempt to preach about the “wonders of homosexuality” will be a criminal offence. Distributing pro-gay literature in schools as done by some misguided UNESCO staff in 2007 will also be a crime. Threats of Iranian-style isolation do not scare us. Please take your bullying tactics to the pro-American Gulf Arab states which have anti-gay penal codes worse than that of any African State. Why not compel the US government to ban Saudi Arabian crude oil from American markets until the Saudi rulers strike down their penal code which stipulates death by hanging for people that engage in sodomy?

There is no doubt (in my mind) that the bill has serious faults and more wisdom should have been taken in it’s writing. But to say it’s not needed would not be correct. Yes, it needs to be amended – but it is necessary. For it’s imperative for us to implement what we feel is best for Uganda concerning the issue of homosexuality.

But we are also clear that the Western checkbook closes when you start institutionalizing murder and banning free speech. If you wish to emulate Iran, you’ll be treated like Iran.

/2010/02/09/bahati-says-law-is-silent-about-defilement-of-boys-2007-law-says-otherwise/

Your law was amended in 2007 to address the very issue that Bahati and Ssempa told the world that the AHB was written to address. The 2007 amendment was not addressed just to heterosexual actions.

According to the new Penal Code Amendment Bill, an individual who is aware of their HIV-positive status and has sex with a child under the age of 14, with or without their consent, is guilty of “aggravated defilement” and, on conviction in the High Court, “liable to suffer death”. The crime of defilement is defined as sex with a person under the age of 14.

Parliament unanimously passed the bill, first tabled in August 2006, but parliamentary spokeswoman Helen Kawesa said it needed presidential assent to become law, which usually takes about 30 days.

The proposed legislation seeks to amend the existing penal code, which has been criticised for being too lenient with HIV-positive people who rape children. Capital punishment has been the penalty for anyone found guilty of rape or defilement since 1996, but has never been implemented.

Although you have corrected yourself, I believe that you are still mistaken.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no laws in Uganda to imprison heterosexuals for consensual private sexual conduct. There is no such thing as “aggrivated heterosexuality” or any death penalty associated.

It seems that you are repeatedly insisting on that which simply isn’t true. Please either provide a real reference to these “current laws that imprison or even execute the death penalty on heterosexuals” or quit claiming that they are identical.

I know that you wish us to understand that you see a distinction between homosexual people and homosexual activity. Often this is a distinction without a difference. There are undoubtedly homosexual people who do not engage in sexual activity with people of the same sex, but most humans have a strong sex drive and selecting one group of people to deny any sexual expression is to pass laws against them.

Your attempt to see some level playing field is misguided.

Laws against homosexual behavior are, in reality, laws against homosexual people. They say that, unlike heterosexual people, that this group of citizens are banned from romance, from love, from finding someone to mate with for life, from the experience of joy that comes from sexual expression of your love for another person, from growing old together.

Should a person choose this for their life, that is their choice and to be respected. But coercing one into this life is cruel.

While you may see banning homosexuality as a matter of banning some specific acts, what you really are doing is telling homosexual people, “You will never, ever be the most important person in anyone’s life. I won’t let you.”