Uganda's Cabinet urges Parliament to drop anti-gay bill; encourages enforcement of existing law

Uganda’s Cabinet Minister’s have urged Parliament and MP David Bahati to drop the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, according to the Daily Monitor. Bahati declined to do so, saying the bill is now the property of Parliament. Here the entire story:

Cabinet has finally thrown out the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2009 on the advice of Mr Adolf Mwesige, the ruling party lawyer. However, Ndorwa West MP David Bahati, the architect of the Bill, insists the proposed legislation is now property of Parliament and that the Executive should stop “playing hide- and- seek games” on the matter.
The decision to throw out the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was made at a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday where Mr Mwesige, according to sources, told ministers that the Bill was unnecessary since government has a number of laws in place criminalising homosexual activities.
“We agreed that government should search the law archives and get some of the laws, enforce them rather than having another new piece of legislation,” a source said. “He [Mwesige] said the Bill is overtaken by events and that donors and other sections of the public were not comfortable.”
The Bill seeks to criminalise all same-sex relations in the country and proposes the death penalty for sodomy. Mr Bahati and his group maintain that the country should have stronger laws against homosexuality in order to protect the moral fabric that holds society intact.
“The future of this country’s children will be determined by the peoples’ representatives in Parliament,” Mr Bahati said during a phone interview on Saturday.

It is not clear whether or not this action will effectively kill the bill. In 2010, a Cabinet committee led by Adolf Mwesige recommended that the bill be dropped for essentially the same reasons. However, it was not dropped at that time, even though Mwesige was confident that it would be shelved.
Even though the bill might be slowed by the Cabinet’s reluctance to push ahead, Mwesige also called for enforcement of existing law (prohibition of unnatural carnal knowledge). If so, Uganda’s GLBT community could still face a worsening situation going forward.

AFA takes a stand on religious freedom

While this is not a perfect statement (see this post for a critique), the AFA decided to oppose Bryan Fischer’s narrow view of the First Amendment. Earlier this week, the AFA issued the following statement.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM FOR ALL 
An American Family Association Policy Statement 
The American Family Association celebrates Religious Freedom for all people and for all beliefs as one of the foundational values that make the United States of America a great nation.  
Historical Background 
America’s Founders disagreed how broadly the First Amendment extended Freedom of Religion.  Since James Madison, known as the Father of the Bill of Rights, insured that the Congressional debates over the Bill of Rights were conducted in secret, Americans must look to later sources to understand the positions taken by their Founders.  Thomas Jefferson and Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, whom Madison appointed to the Supreme Court and who later founded Harvard Law School, openly debated over the place of Christianity in American law.  Jefferson advocated a broad view that that all religions, not merely variations of Christianity, were to be protected.  In his autobiography Jefferson wrote: 
[When] the [Virginia] bill for establishing religious freedom… was finally passed,… a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word ‘Jesus Christ,’ so that it should read ‘a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.’ The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination. 
Joseph Story stated a contradictory view in his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States:  
The real object of the [First] amendment was, not to countenance, much less to advance Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment, which should give to an hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government.”  
Jefferson’s position has ultimately prevailed; under American law all religions enjoy freedom from government interference.  However Joseph Story’s view continues to have proponents, including Bryan Fischer, one of American Family Radio’s talk show hosts.   However, the American Family Association (“AFA”) officially sides with Jefferson on this question.   AFA is confident that the truth of Christianity will prevail whenever it is allowed to freely compete in the marketplace of ideas.  

In other words, on one of the fundamental issues the AFA speaks about, they have a spokesperson who takes the anachronistic view with which they disagree.
Now I would like to see the AFA come out and issue a statement regarding Bryan Fischer’s position on the nobility of displacing and eradicating indigenous people from the land. It appears that they now understand a little better that silence communicates consent. So now there are several statements they need work on.

AACC is not larger than the APA

Yesterday, Right Wing Watch pointed to a broadcast  from Liberty Counsel and a tweet from the same group saying that the American Association of Christian Counselors is larger than the American Psychological Association. Here is the still-uncorrected tweet:
As RWW pointed out, that is simply not true. The non-profit APA has “more than 154,000 members” and the for profit AACC has said they have “nearly 50,000 members” for several years.
There is another aspect to the claims made by Liberty Counsel that should be pointed out. Mat Staver said on the broadcast that the AACC has produced “the most definitive, most recent research that’s come out that says change is possible.” I assume he is talking about Jones and Yarhouse’s study of Exodus participants (and even there the changes were minimal and not in keeping with the claims made by Staver). However, the Liberty lawyers should also know that a more recent study published in Edification, a journal of the AACC, found that a group of heterosexually married sexual minorities reported no change on average in homosexual attractions.
I pointed this out in this post.

Bachmann staffer: Perry is Saul and Bachmann is David

The visibility of veteran GOP political organizer Peter Waldron has risen a good bit since The Atlantic broke a story today about Waldron’s 2006 detention in Uganda on allegations of illegal gun possession. Waldron has a lengthy resume but now includes work for GOP Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann. Specifically, the campaign acknowledged that Waldron helped deliver the Iowa straw poll win last weekend.
According to The Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta, Alice Stewart, Bachmann’s press secretary, said about Waldron: “Michele’s faith is an important part of her life and Peter did a tremendous job with our faith outreach in Iowa. We are fortunate to have him on our team and look forward to having him expanding his efforts in several states.”
Apparently the next state is South Carolina. In a comment on his Facebook page, Waldron said he would soon be in Columbia and cover the state. We get a hint in one comment about what he might tell evangelicals he hopes to win over to Bachmann. In one comment, Waldron compared Rick Perry to King Saul and Bachmann to King David. If you have been to Sunday School, you know that Saul was a tall, good looking guy who eventually had a bad end because he fell out of God’s favor. God placed His blessing on King David instead.  Here is the comment:

In another comment on his page, he says Bachmann “fights with the anointing of God upon her.” Waldron has some ties to the Christian Reconstruction movement, having co-authored a bookwith Reconstructionist George Grant. In the above comment, he seems to see America as a covenant nation with God much in the same way the Old Testament depicts the Jewish people as having a special covenant with God.
I posted first on this here and then have a three part video interview from YouTube here.