Anti-gay protesters in Kampala New York Times photo by Marc Hofer

This article in Sunday’s New York Times posted by Jeffrey Gettleman from Uganda’s capital, Kampala, details the important role that three US anti-gay activists played in promoting the spirit—and even, Gettleman reports, some of the language—of the country’s proposed “Anti-Homosexuality Bill”. It’s a draconian bill that, if passed, would impose the death penalty in some cases for people convicted of having sex with someone of the same gender.

In the article, Gettleman quotes the Anglican priest, Rev. Kapya Kaoma, who published  one of the most important recent background paper on American homophobia in Africa.

Gettleman reports, of course, that the three Americans who peddled their over-the-top homophobia at a March conference in Kampala, have tried to distance themselves from the bill. But he also reports:

[T]he Ugandan organizers of the conference admit helping draft the bill, and Mr. Lively has acknowledged meeting with Ugandan lawmakers to discuss it. He even wrote on his blog in March that someone had likened their campaign to “a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.”

Scott Lively’s fellow American conference speakers—Caleb Lee Brundidge and Don Schmierer—now claim they didn’t know that their anti-gay rhetoric would be translated into such a draconian law in Uganda. But Lively cannot claim such innocence.

Gettleman doesn’t mention it, but Lively’s previous homophobic missionary-activism was in the Baltics. In Latvia and especially in Lithuania, he learned that American homophobia translates easily into law when taken to foreign shores.

Gettleman writes:

Human rights advocates in Uganda say the visit by the three Americans helped set in motion what could be a very dangerous cycle. Gay Ugandans already describe a world of beatings, blackmail, death threats like “Die Sodomite!” scrawled on their homes, constant harassment and even so-called correctional rape.

Read there: Article details vital role of US right wing in Uganda’s kill-gays bill [contd.]

“Now we really have to go undercover,” said Stosh Mugisha, a gay rights activist who said she was pinned down in a guava orchard and raped by a farmhand who wanted to cure her of her attraction to girls. She said that she was impregnated and infected with H.I.V., but that her grandmother’s reaction was simply, “ ‘You are too stubborn.’ ”

Despite such attacks, many gay men and lesbians here said things had been getting better for them before the bill, at least enough to hold news conferences and publicly advocate for their rights. Now they worry that the bill could encourage lynchings. Already, mobs beat people to death for infractions as minor as stealing shoes.

“What these people have done is set the fire they can’t quench,” said the Rev. Kapya Kaoma, a Zambian who went undercover for six months to chronicle the relationship between the African anti-homosexual movement and American evangelicals.

Mr. Kaoma was at the conference and said that the three Americans “underestimated the homophobia in Uganda” and “what it means to Africans when you speak about a certain group trying to destroy their children and their families.”

“When you speak like that,” he said, “Africans will fight to the death.”