Uganda Imports Anti-Gay Bigotry From The U.S.
Written by Jesse Singal Tuesday, 19 January 2010 08:35
It's not an export to be proud of. Even as top officials in Uganda have slowly backed away from a bill to impose the death penalty on homosexuals, it’s become clear that three American evangelical Christians helped inspire the measure during their travels there in March.
During their time in Uganda’s capital of Kampala, the trio addressed crowds of thousands that included teachers, police officers, and politicos. And they raised the specter of a gay-rights movement that seeks, as they put it in speeches quoted in The New York Times, “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.’’
The reactions in the United States have been predictable: Folks from across most of the political spectrum have expressed outrage, and the evangelists have professed bafflement that their words could have led to such a chilling turn.
Yet there are strong parallels between what the preachers told Ugandans and what American pundits tell TV viewers every night. And despite the similarities, Americans have come to accept the pundits’ bile as part of the “reasonable’’ debate over gay rights.
To prop up the notion that there are two valid sides to every policy argument, Americans have accepted that there is a meaningful divide between those who stand against gay rights for “principled’’ reasons and those who are bigots. We shuffled the latter, led by the likes of Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church and his group’s immensely offensive protests of soldiers’ funerals, off to the side. But the former regularly appear on cable news shows to “debate’’ the issue.
After the Iowa Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage last April, Glenn Beck told his viewers, “I believe this case is actually about going into churches and going in and attacking churches and saying you can’t teach anything else,’’ as though gay militants were set to storm the Hawkeye State’s houses of worship and swap out the Bible for Harvey Milk’s biography.
Bill O’Reilly has long described a slippery slope between gay marriage and interspecies marriage, mentioning, on separate occasions, that the legalization of gay marriage could lead to people marrying goats, ducks, turtles, and dolphins. (Would a single court ruling cover all species?)
And during the Proposition 8 controversy in California, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told O’Reilly, “I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion.’’
In their popularity and reach, Beck, Gingrich, and O’Reilly are mainstream figures. Yet even though they use approximately the same narrative as the evangelicals in Uganda - gays aren’t just doing something morally wrong, but are leading a dangerous movement that could corrupt society at large - Americans hesitate to call their views unacceptable.
None of this means that news networks should yank the bigots off the air. Nothing will be gained if anti-gay sentiments simply scuttle underground to a million online forums. But at some point, we’re going to have to realize that the “principled’’ opposition to gay rights coming from some prominent pundits is a thinly disguised version of the hatred that the anti-gay movement helped bring to Uganda. Americans export the stuff because we have a surplus at home.
Jesse Singal is a frequent contributor to the Globe opinion pages. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Read the original article in The Boston Globe
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