Various news sites (e.g., the Pew Forum’s Religion News site) are reporting that the death penalty for gays is back on the table now in Uganda. It’s still in the bill before the Ugandan parliament because the bill's author David Bahati, identified by Jeff Sharlet as a member of the powerful secretive American right-wing evangelical group the Family, refuses to remove the death penalty from the bill. If Uganda passes this law, people will be susceptible to the death penalty solely because they are gay.Rowan Williams has now spoken out, faintly, noting the “shocking severity” of the proposed legislation and how it makes (surely the understatement of the century) pastoral care of gay folks by Christian churches impossible. As Chris Bodenner at Daily Dish suggests, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s statement underscores yet again the deafening silence of Benedict. As major world political leaders, including President Obama, and major religious figures of the world including Rowan Williams, voice concerns about the legislation before the Ugandan legislature, Benedict continues to say nothing. Nothing at all.
Jim Burroway reported at Box Turtle Bulletin on Saturday that three authors of the Manhattan Declaration—Chuck Colson, Robert George, and Timothy George—have now also condemned aspects of the legislation, while remaining silent (as Rowan Williams was in his condemnation of the bill) about the criminalization of homosexuality in general—something Rick Warren has explicitly condemned. I find the statement of the three gentlemen of the Manhattan Declaration remarkable for what it gives away about the ultimate game plan of both the Ugandan legislation and of the various anti-gay initiatives in which they are involved in the U.S., including the Manhattan Declaration itself.
After having stated that they deplore all sexual sin and leave sinners in the hands of a merciful God, Colson, George, and George offer the following strange, backhanded defense of the Ugandan legislation, and, implicitly, of the criminalization of homosexuality in Uganda and elsewhere:
We recognize that the scourge of AIDS has been devastating to the people of Uganda. Measures must be taken to encourage faithful marital love and to discourage sexual immorality of every type. It is critical, however, that these measures be shaped in a just and Christian manner, and not in a punitive spirit. Harshness and excess must be avoided. Those who experience homosexual desire and yield to it should not be singled out for extreme measures or for revulsion.
These three American anti-gay activists are arguing here that we in the West need to understand the urgency with which Ugandans feel compelled to curb homosexuality, because of the gravity of the AIDS epidemic in Uganda. Think for a moment about what their argument implies, what it wants us to suppose, when we consider why Ugandans are moving so brutally against the gay citizens of their nation.
The implication is that we in the West don’t realize how strongly and quickly Ugandans (and other African nations) need to move to deal with the AIDS epidemic, because that epidemic is nowhere nearly so severe in the United States as it is in Africa. But here’s the glaring problem with this argument, what it elides, the sleight of hand it wants to play to get us to sympathize with the move to impose harsh penalties on all who are gay in Uganda:
AIDS in Uganda isn’t a gay disease. It’s far and away a disease afflicting “normal” families, man-woman families and children born to these families. It’s a disease of families in much of the world, not because of homosexual promiscuity, but because of heterosexual lapses in marriage.
These three American authors want to take an argument that has long fueled homophobia in the United States, one that the organizations and people with whom they are affiliated in the Manhattan Declaration have long used to work up anti-gay sentiment—the belief that gay men are diseased and are, by their very presence in society, a social illness—and to apply this American argument to the African context. Where it doesn’t work. Where the facts point precisely in the opposite direction.
They want to take an American argument (and an American prejudice) and impose it on the social situation in Uganda, where AIDS is a terrible scourge, where people are dying in droves from AIDS, because heterosexual rather than homosexual people are spreading the illness—and to lay blame for this scourge on the group least responsible for the epidemic in the African context. Unwittingly, in advancing such an argument, the three Manhattan Declaration gentlemen are exposing for anyone who thinks—who wishes to move beyond prejudices and scapegoating—what's really going on with their anti-gay agenda in the U.S., which they and others have successfully exported to Africa. Think for a moment about how this dishonest argument actually undermines the rationale for the Ugandan legislation:
If the real motive of the Ugandan anti-gay legislation is to stop the spread of AIDS, the penalties this legislation is seeking to impose unilaterally on the gay population would obviously need to be applied to all citizens. Promiscuity of any kind would need to be harshly punished, and, above all, promiscuity that breaks the marriage bond, since it is in the context of everyday “normal” marriages that AIDS has spread rapidly across the continent. Any lapse in marital decorum ought to be subject to imprisonment and capital punishment, if the real object of those trying to apply such penalties solely to the gay citizens of the country is to stop the AIDS epidemic.
The utterly dishonest argument centered on AIDS advanced by Messrs. Colson, George, and George here reveals what is really at the heart of the Ugandan agenda—and of their own agenda: they want, anywhere that it is possible, to stigmatize gay folks, to make gay citizens appear to be unique threats to social morality and Christian civilization. To criminalize homosexuality itself, and to drive all who are gay and refuse to “confess” their “sin” into the shadows.
Those chest-beating confessions of sin in the Manhattan Declaration and the statement of Colson, George, and George about their failure to deal with heterosexual promiscuity and to move as strongly against it as against all homosexual behavior (and all homosexual people)? Absolutely insincere. There is and never has been an agenda, in these circles, to go after heterosexual sinners, to criminalize any kind of heterosexual activity, to acknowledge that the lapses of heterosexuals are far and away a more serious threat to the sanctity of marriage than same-sex marriage is.
It’s all about bashing the gays. To distract us from their real and ultimate agenda, which is to front for powerful economic interest groups with whom they and the church factions they represent are quite cozily in bed, who need to keep us worked up about the dirty, disease-ridden, evil gays as they continue picking our pockets.
