Category: sexual orientation

Ugandan MPs vow to pass Anti-Homosexuality Bill

Despite Cabinet’s wish to shelve the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, Ugandan MPs voiced defiance in a Daily Monitor article today,

Members of Parliament yesterday accused Cabinet of bowing to pressure and described the Executive’s decision to block the gays Bill as “moral corruption”.

The lawmakers said it was immoral for government to think that donor funds matter more than traditional values and vowed to push for the Bill and ensure that it is passed even without the support of government. “Whether they want or not, we are going to pass it. For government to come up and throw out such a Bill means we are living in a crazy world,” said Mr Andrew Allen (Bugabula North).

Ndorwa West MP David Bahati, the architect of the Bill, says Cabinet cannot throw out his Bill because it is now property of Parliament and insists that he is going to push for it.

As I reported yesterday, Parliament spokeswoman Helen Kawesa said the bill was in the jurisdiction of Parliament. Today, MPs echoed her words.

Prior to the move, the international community had put pressure on government by threatening to cut aid if government passes the Bill. Ms Betty Amongi (MP Oyam South) says Cabinet has given Parliament a chance to exercise and prove its independence and not allow donor influence to “also jeopardize its works.”
The Anti-homosexuality Bill is a private members Bill and Shadow Attorney General, Abdu Katuntu (MP Bugweri) said Cabinet cannot throw out a Bill it didn’t bring. “The only option they have is to come and oppose it on the floor of the House,” he said.

American Anti-gay Campaign in Africa: Family Watch International

Late yesterday, Religion Dispatches posted my lengthy report on the anti-gay work of Family Watch International and the World Congress of Families.
I became curious about FWI when I saw that they had distanced their organization from Martin Ssempa. I reported way back in January 2010 that Ssempa was associated with the group. However, efforts then to get FWI to respond to the issue were ignored.  Recently, however, FWI made a change which according to Slater was a reflection of their belief that gays not be killed or beaten for being gay. She told me in the interview that FWI did not support violence, but take no position on other penalties.
The question that came to my mind was – “Isn’t removal of freedom and being cast in jail violence?”
Apparently, not violent enough.
I hope you will go read the report at RD.

Uganda's Cabinet and Parliament At Odds Over Anti-gay Bill

Today, in the face of reports that Uganda’s Cabinet tossed out the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, Parliament spokesperson, Helen Kawesa, said that the bill “is in the Parliament now. It’s Parliament’s property.” She added the Cabinet ministers will “have to argue it out in the Parliament” since the bill is controlled by Parliament and has not yet had a vote.
Kawesa added, “If the Cabinet has issues with it, they will be brought in to the floor of the House.”
Currently, budget meetings are on the agenda but a budget is slated to get a vote by next Wednesday. After that, other business, including the anti-gay bill could be considered. As of now, according to Kawesa, there is no official action scheduled for the Anti-Homosexuality Bill but she said the bill could come up at any time after the budget has been passed.
In 2010, a Cabinet committee chaired by Adolf Mwesige called for removal of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill and made recommendations to enforce existing law. Those recommendations were detailed in a report to Parliament. Many observers believed at the time that the bill had been shelved. However, the bill remained under the jurisdiction of the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs committee. That committee then wrote a report recommending that the bill be passed. However, for reasons that remain unknown, the Parliament placed the bill on the daily agenda but then failed to act on the measure. Currently, the bill remains in the hands of Parliament and is one of several measures considered in the last session which is alive in this session.

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.

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.