In Uganda, the country’s legislature is now considering a law—one that might pass this week—that would lead to life imprisonment for gay sex, and death for those having same-sex relations if they are HIV positive or have sex with someone under 18. The law would also criminalize any human rights organizing by or on behalf of LGBT people.
It’s not an accident that the anti-gay culture war being waged in the US by right-wing preachers and politicians is echoed in many African countries with even more draconian anti-gay laws and government crackdowns. Instead, the anti-gay agenda promoted by many African clerics and politicians—especially in sub-Saharan English-speaking countries—is influenced directly by US fundamentalists, a new report by Public Research Associates (PRA) alleges.
Uganda’s proposed law is being strongly supported by allies of politically conservative US churches who have established a powerful network missionaries to Africa. One of them is megachurch preacher Rick Warren, who told Ugandans in a widely quoted March 2008 statement that homosexuality is not a natural way of life and thus not a human right. “We shall not tolerate this aspect at all,” Warren said in the statement issued to support Uganda’s Anglican bishops who were joining a conservative boycott of a major church conference.
Report: LGBT Africans are ‘collateral damage’ of US culture war exported by Right [contd.]
In October, Warren—under pressure from US progressives—distanced himself from one of the most virulent of Uganda’s anti-gay activists, but he’s so far declined, according to PRA, to speak out against the law being considered by Uganda’s legislators.
But Warren is not alone in preaching a violently anti-gay message in Africa. Language in the Ugandan bill echoes the false and malicious charges made in Uganda by notorious US antigay activist and Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, who has traveled from the Baltics to Africa to tell church groups that that western gays are conspiring to take over Uganda and even the world.
PRA executive director Tarso Luís Ramos writes in the foreword to PRA’s new report:
Just as the United States and other northern societies routinely dump our outlawed or expired chemicals, pharmaceuticals, machinery, and cultural detritus on African and other Third World countries, we now export a political discourse and public policies our own society has discarded as outdated and dangerous. Africa’s antigay campaigns are to a substantial degree made in the USA
The report, called Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia, was released today by PRA according to statements from the group. The full report is available in PDF format from PRA.
The report was written by Rev. Kapya Kaoma, a PRA project director, and an Anglican priest from Zambia who is now leading churches in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.
The website
OutTravelerG.P.S offers this map (somewhat
higher-res here) of the often daunting situation for gay travelers to African countries.
Kaoma found that US religious/political conservatives, who once ignored or scorned the continent, have managed in the past few decades to build strong coalitions in Africa. They’ve done it though US-supported social welfare projects, Bible schools, and distribution of educational materials. The US conservatives use the extensive communications networks they’ve established to preach about what they say are the “dangers” posed by LGBT people.
In the process, according to Kaoma, the conservatives have re-established themselves in Africa as the true representatives of US evangelicalism. They’ve also managed to marginalize Africans’ relationships with more socially progressive mainline Protestant churches and to use the African branches of those mainline churches to re-export back to their American counterparts a reactionary politics and theology.
In the report’s forward, Ramos writes:
Globalizing the Culture Wars challenges American human rights activist to confront the difficult reality that our African brothers and sisters are being made to suffer for our hard fought freedoms. Indeed, as a result of the US Right’s Africa campaigns, Kaoma warns, sexual minorities on that continent have become a kind of collateral damage in our culture wars.
According to Kaoma, the political/religious missionaries sent by conservative US churches to Africa preach that the traditional commitment of mainline Protestants to human rights is “imperialistic” and reminiscent of colonialism. To reinforce that message, they tell their African audiences that homosexuality is purely a Western-imposed phenomenon.
That message is reinforced for the missionaries, according to Kaoma, by the work of a well-funded neoconservative US “think tank” called Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD).
Kaoma explains how the IRD’s work in Africa boomerangs back to the US:
IRD supports renewal movements, theologically conservative groupings in mainline US Protestant churches that promote antigay and other socially conservative positions. These renewal movements, IRD, and conservative US evangelicals have built relationships with African religious leaders of all denominations to oppose progress on LGBT issues—sometimes through deception but always through substantial financial incentive to African religious leaders.
US conservatives are waging a proxy war in Africa to promote their US anti-gay and reactionary political agenda.
Through those proxy wars, anti-gay elements within mainline US denominations have been able to woo Africans to support them in their American fight against marriage equality and ordination of LGBT clergy.
Kaoma focused mostly on three African countries—Uganda, Nigeria, and Kenya—where US conservatives have built the strongest alliances. He found that the US conservatives, who hadn’t held much sway among mainline US Protestant congregations, have managed, through alliances with African clerics, to sway policies in at least three US denominations—the Episcopal, United Methodist, and Presbyterian (USA) churches.
Arnie Newman, managing editor of RH Reality Check, a reproductive health advocacy site, offers an excellent summary of Kaoma’s PRA report in a post put up yesterday. Newman writes:
According to the report, American conservatives, by involving African clerics in these three countries, have managed to almost completely halt recognition by these churches of the full equality of LGBT individuals in the US including the ordination of LGBT clergy. But, of course, this crusade by US conservatives is having even more dire consequences on African soil, leading to a growing and increasingly violent homophobia throughout Uganda, Nigeria and Kenya; violence that is typified in the Ugandan bill before Parliament.
At the conclusion of his report, Kaoma offers seven recommendations to progressives in the US and other Western nations:
- Confront IRD and US renewal movements
- Expose and confront US religious conservatives who foment homophobia in Africa
- Support the African activist and scholars to lead the struggle for LGBT rights and the study of sexuality in Africa.
- Build relationships with upcoming African church leadership.
- Work across denominations and around hierarchies.
- Expose the covert financing of African conservatives by various American sources.
- Disseminate reliable information and continue the research.
Unfortunately, of course, the Right has a huge head start in spreading their message of hate and fear.
Source: PublicEye.org - Website of Political Research Associates