Peter LaBarbera, Bryan Fischer, Matt Barber, and the rest of the usual suspects, are triumphantly asking for apologies from the mainstream media and gay activists for bringing up the rhetoric of Scott Lively in connection with the murder of Ugandan gay activist David Kato.  Why are they so happy?  Media reports are coming out that seem to possibly tell a slightly different story, at first glance, if you’re not paying attention, and if you read this story in a vacuum without any foreknowledge of what’s been going on in Uganda.  Here’s Bryan Fischer:

According to Reuters, a man has now confessed to the killing, and police are saying a “personal disagreement” let to Kato’s untimely death. Meaning, of course, the whole thing had nothing to do with Lively or any other pro-family leader in America.

In fact, the police spokesman said quite pointedly that the murder “wasn’t a robbery and it wasn’t because Kato was an activist.” So the whole hate crime meme is out the window, gone, history, in the archives.

The confessed murderer, one Nsubuga Enock, is a “well-known thief,” according to police, and had been in prison until January 24. He had been staying with Kato since getting out.

Okay, “police are saying” that it was a personal disagreement. I can’t imagine why we’d have any reason not to believe the police in a nation that is seriously considering a bill that would criminalize homosexuality, and where political and religious leaders routinely tell citizens the sorts of malicious lies about gay people that they’d never get away with in a first world nation. Indeed, Scott Lively was sort of the one who kicked all of this off in Uganda, as he ran across the pond to find perhaps the only people brainwashed enough to believe his disturbed, malicious bullshit about gays causing the Holocaust and gays causing the Rwandan genocide.

Let’s look real quick at the Reuters article Fischer references, to see if he’s leaving anything out:

Kato had been featured in an anti-gay newspaper in October that “outed” people it said were gay and called on the government to kill them. His photograph was published on the cover under the headline: “Hang Them.”

The activist said he had received death threats since the publication.

[…]

Gay rights activists told Reuters they feared police may try to cover up a motive of homophobia to protect the Western aid upon which the country relies. They said they wanted proof from police that Kato was not killed over his sexuality.

And has that proof been forthcoming? Nein.

The rest of the story that’s being floated by Ugandan police smells a lot like the “gay panic” crap we’ve been hearing for years in cases like that of Matthew Shepard [which Religious Right wingnuts still try to absolve themselves of responsibility for]:

A man whom police arrested yesterday on allegations of killing David Kato, a human rights activist, has reportedly told police that the deceased coerced him into sodomy. David Kato, 46, an advocacy officer for the gay rights group, Sexual Minorities Uganda, was found with head wounds at his home in Bukusa, Mukono District but died on his way to hospital last Wednesday.

Police spokesperson Judith Nabakooba said the suspect had been hiding in Nakabago village, Mukono District. “It is true the suspect has been arrested but we need to record his statement first before giving a formal statement,” Ms Nabakooba said yesterday. But a police source, who preferred anonymity because he is not authorised to talk to the press, said the suspect confessed to killing Kato because he was reportedly tired of engaging in homosexual practices.

“We have taken him to Mukono Magistrate’s Court to record an extrajudicial statement,” the source said. “He told us that he killed Kato after he failed to give him a car, a house and money he promised as rewards for having sex with him,” the source said.

Anonymous sources to the extremely bigoted Ugandan police are good enough for Matt, Pete and Scott if they allow them another day of blissful ignorance of the people they hurt every day.

Take over, Joe Jervis:

Surely you can understand the predicament the Ugandan government finds themselves in. They couldn’t ignore or even sanction the murder of a gay man, as they normally would, due to the international publicly surrounding the case. But they also couldn’t allow the murder to be construed as politically motivated, lest the resultant outrage dry up those annual millions in foreign aid.

And don’t overlook that this so-called “motive” precisely fits the long-running Christianist claim that evil local gays are using using Western-supplied money to recruit Uganda’s helpless youth into homosexuality, a charge repeated in the very issue of the newspaper that called for Kato’s murder.

We will never get the truth, you can bet on that.

No, we won’t. But here’s what we DO know. An anti-gay crusade is being waged in Uganda, aided by American Evangelicals who, in that climate of hatred and ignorance, are allowed to express their true fear and bigotry more clearly and dishonestly than they get away with in the United States. A people suffering from poverty, malnourishment, disease, the Lord’s Resistance Army, and a corrupt government are, of course, being led to scapegoat their problems on people who haven’t done a damn thing to hurt them and who never will, and idiot American Evangelicals are okay with that. Why? Because no one in the First World gives a damn what they say anymore! This is why they spend so much money on “missions” in the first place! Give impoverished people economic empowerment and education and medical care and tools to pull themselves out of poverty and they’ll have a better life, but they’ll become less and less likely to drink the religious Kool-Aid, and they might just get smart enough to realize that their goverment has been screwing them over for decades.

But if you go over there with a Bible and a scapegoat for all their problems, you protect the power of the people screwing them and you win converts without having to help a single person.

Anyway, since we’re supposed to be “apologizing to Scott Lively,” let’s see what the poor dear has been doing the past couple of days. Oh, look, as Alvin McEwen points out, Scott wrote another anti-gay screed about Uganda! Let’s see what it says:

Uganda is being murdered. The nation once called “The Pearl of Africa” by Winston Churchill, a lush and beautiful country as fertile as the Nile Delta.

By whom?

The murderers are the lavender Marxists, the now-global network of sexual revolutionaries bent on remaking the entire world in their own perverted image, whose juggernaut has toppled even once mighty Britain, crushing under their lavender boots after eight centuries the symbol of its Christian power: the Magna Carta, whose first principle had proclaimed “The English church must be free!”

These revolutionists of Sodom, who march triumphantly through all the major cities of the western world to flaunt their defeat of moral law, and who hold both Hollywood and the heart of America’s president in their iron grip: These very same zealots have fixed their malevolent gaze on Christian Uganda.

Uganda is the only country in the world with a national holiday commemorating its rejection of sexual perversion. Every June 3 it honors the 22 young men and boys who were tortured and roasted alive in 1886 by homosexual King Mwanga, because they refused to submit to sodomy. Is it any wonder, then, that Uganda has reacted violently against the army of agitators, led by George Soros, who now seek to re-homosexualize Ugandan culture?

It is as if the militant ranks of “Code Pink” were transported back to 1890s America to agitate for “sexual freedom.” Our great grandparents would not have countenanced this. There would have been violence, as there has now been in Uganda.

[…]

There is indeed evil in Uganda today, but it is not the reaction of Christian and Moslem citizens to the rape of their culture. It is the pink-gloved hand of western powers that are cutting the throat of Africa’s most God-fearing country, and one of the world‘s most promising Christian democracies.

He actually believes his own crap. He’s not even a good imperialist white man preying on the downtrodden. He actually believes that a gay army, led by George Soros [wingnut dogwhistle!], is traveling to Uganda to “re-homosexualize” the culture. Even though we know, from SCIENCE, that there are gay people in every country, tribe, religion, or any other population group you can think of. That’s sad, pathetic and sick. Get help, Scott Lively, for your own good.

So again, there will be no apologies forthcoming, from me or any other writer with a soul and an ability to use Google, analyze information and sleep at night with a good conscience.

But keep running away from it, guys. Keep running away from the consequences of your worldview. Every time you open your mouths, a few more people fall onto the side of fairness and equality and away from your fearful bigotry.