Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni responded to criticism of his country’s draconian new laws against same-sex relationships by urging other African leaders to join him in resisting “the promotion of homosexuality.”
The Ugandan parliament passed a bill on March 21 raising the criminal penalties for homosexuality and increasing the punishment for acts of “aggravated homosexuality” – including same-sex relations with minors, the disabled, or while HIV-positive – to the death penalty. Homosexuality has long been illegal in Uganda, but offenses were not often prosecuted.
Gay activists and human rights organizations denounced the Ugandan bill as an act of cruel repression, pointing to its severe penalties, ambiguously-worded offenses, and harsh punishments for even advocating gay rights. Ugandan activists claimed opportunists were already blackmailing gay citizens by threatening to turn them in for imprisonment or death.
Museveni signaled he would probably sign the bill into law by praising the members of parliament who passed it on Sunday and promising that he would never tolerate “the promotion and publicization of homosexuality in Uganda.”
The Ugandan president described homosexuality as “a big threat and danger to the procreation of the human race.”
“Africa should provide the lead to save the world from this degeneration and decadence, which is really very dangerous for humanity. If people of opposite sex stop appreciating one another, then how will the human race be propagated?” he asked at a parliamentary conference on “family values and sovereignty” in Entebbe.
A Ugandan gay activist who claimed to have attended the conference via Zoom under a false identity told the UK Guardian that Museveni officials explicitly urged Zambia, Tanzania, and Ghana to “reject American influence,” become “self-reliant,” and “break free from western support.”
Vice President Kamala Harris toured those countries last week, announcing billions of dollars in economic assistance and regional initiatives, as the Biden administration seeks to counter the growing African influence of China and Russia.
According to the state-run Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC), some of the other speakers at the Entebbe conference denounced the gay rights movement as a plot by Western governments and the United Nations to undermine African sovereignty.
Museveni himself “appealed to friends from the Western Political circles whom he assured of not having any enmity with them, to stop giving lectures to Africans and wasting their time because they will not succeed as colonialism,” as UBC put it.
Museveni may find the support he seeks from other African nations, about half of which have criminalized homosexuality to varying degrees. The Ugandan anti-homosexuality bill was roundly applauded by conference guest Kaluma Peter, a member of the Kenyan parliament, who said Uganda was an “inspiration” to the rest of the continent.
“A person proposing that there should be same sex marriages or same sex relationships is a person seeking to wipe out the entire humanity out of the face of this earth. So, we are very, very happy to see you being firm on this. You give value to our sovereignty as Independent States in Africa,” Peter said.
The Washington Post on Sunday worried that Africa is “marching backward on LGBT rights,” glumly looking at Museveni’s history of “homophobic remarks” to predict he will sign the bill that was passed almost unanimously by his parliament.
“While generally the world is moving toward more acceptance on LGBT rights, Africa forms a near-unanimous block of intolerance. A core group of African states nearly derailed the appointment and renewal of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity,” the Washington Post noted.
The article noted that pushing LGBT rights in Africa could be disastrous, because “the Biden administration’s advocacy of LGBT rights is likely to come across as another example of the United States lecturing Africa and not listening.”
“Trying to aid gay rights might seem to confirm African suspicions that the United States is a fickle and unreliable partner, particularly as China and Russia attach no such conditions to their assistance,” the Washington Post observed.
As the article pointed out, Harris was noticeably reluctant to discuss gay rights in public during her trip to Africa. While in Ghana, she avoided all mention of a bill making its way through parliament that is “almost as bad as Uganda’s.”
The Washington Post recommended that President Joe Biden take a harder line in his planned visit to Africa this year and avoid visiting “countries with abysmal records on LGBT rights” – a move that would almost certainly push some members of that rather large group into the waiting arms of Beijing and Moscow after the Biden administration just spent huge sums of taxpayer money on keeping them in the U.S. orbit.