Tomorrow’s New York Times correctly identifies the individuals who launched Uganda’s campaign to exterminate its LGBT citizenry.
Exodus International board member Don Schmierer, U.S. ex-gay activist Caleb Lee Brundidge, and U.S. ex-gay activist Scott Lively are the three evangelicals who led a March conference in Kampala to accuse LGBT Ugandans of child recruitment and pedophilia, to recommend forced ex-gay therapy, and to support Uganda ex-gay activist Stephen Langa and antigay pastor Martin Ssempa in their effort to toughen Uganda’s pre-existing life-imprisonment sentence for LGBT Ugandans.
The Times said:
For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”
The Times fails to point out the direct role that U.S. government aid has played in subsidizing Uganda’s antigay evangelicals. Instead, the Times indirectly points to the State Department’s PEPFAR program for HIV/AIDS prevention as a source of aid to Ugandan conservatives. And the Times identifies sources of funding for Ugandan LGBT human-rights advocates:
“It’ a fight for their lives,” said Mai Kiang, a director at the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, a New York-based group that has channeled nearly $75,000 to Ugandan gay rights activists and expects that amount to grow.
Despite denials of responsibility issued by the three U.S. ex-gay activists, the Times points out that “the Ugandan organizers of the conference admit helping draft the bill, and Mr. Lively has acknowledged meeting with Ugandan lawmakers to discuss it. He even wrote on his blog in March that someone had likened their campaign to ‘a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.’ Later, when confronted with criticism, Mr. Lively said he was very disappointed that the legislation was so harsh.”
Schmierer has traveled to Uganda numerous times since 2002, and should have known that his false teachings to parents about homosexual “recruitment” would cause violence.
“What these people have done is set the fire they can’t quench,” said the Rev. Kapya Kaoma, a Zambian who went undercover for six months to chronicle the relationship between the African anti-homosexual movement and American evangelicals.
Mr. Kaoma was at the conference and said that the three Americans “underestimated the homophobia in Uganda” and “what it means to Africans when you speak about a certain group trying to destroy their children and their families.”
“When you speak like that,” he said, “Africans will fight to the death.”
