Unfortunately, we’ve been consumed with Mehlman fever (antibiotics should do the trick) the past twenty four hours, so I missed this. Jeff Sharlet has a new book, and a new piece in Harper’s, which unfortunately isn’t available yet, but an NPR interview with Sharlet drops a bit of a bombshell about the private ambitions of the sick, twisted, maniacal Ugandan MP David Bahati, the sponsor of that nation’s infamous “kill the gays bill”:
“Bahati said: ‘If you come here, you’ll see homosexuals from Europe and America are luring our children into homosexuality by distributing cell phones and iPods and things like this,’ ” Sharlet recounts. “And he said, ‘And I can explain to you what I really want to do.’ “
Sharlet accompanied Bahati to a restaurant and later to his home, where Bahati told Sharlet that he wanted “to kill every last gay person.”
“It was a very chilling moment, because I’m sitting there with this man who’s talking about his plans for genocide, and has demonstrated over the period of my relationship with him that he’s not some back bencher — he’s a real rising star in the movement,” Sharlet says. “This was something that I hadn’t understood before I went to Uganda, that this was a guy with real potential and real sway and increasingly a following in Uganda.”
And he has connections to American leaders. Sharlet explains that Bahati is one of the Uganda leaders of an American evangelical movement called the Fellowship, or the Family — the secretive fellowship of powerful Christian politicians who wield considerable political influence, both in Washington and abroad.
His legislation has also been outright defended, or explained away, by Cliff Kincaid, Peter LaBarbera, Don Schmierer of Exodus, Lou Engle, Molotov Mitchell of WingNutDaily and several others.
If that’s what Bahati says to an American journalist with a history of reporting facts, I’d hate to imagine what he says behind closed doors to American Religious Right wingnuts.
Bahati is an aspiring genocidal maniac, and continuing American support from fundamentalist Christian leaders just proves what so many have always said: They are our American Taliban, and the only reason they haven’t started bombing things is because they live in a developed country where the Enlightenment and secularization have had a civilizing effect on the most grotesque applications of Deep Religious Faith. Bahati just has more “freedom” where he lives than our American mullahs do.
[h/t Jim Burroway]
