Anti-Gay Group Launches New Campaign To Promote Uganda’s ‘Kill Gays’ Bill

Box Turtle Bulletin’s Jim Burroway points to this Daily Monitor story about a new campaign headed by anti-gay activist Steven Langa to press forward with Uganda’s ‘Kill Gays’ bill. The measure would impose the death penalty or life imprisonment for some homosexual acts (which are already illegal), require people to report every LGBT individual they know, and criminalize so-called LGBT advocacy:

Parents under the Family Life Network and Uganda Coalition for Moral Values (UCMV) have opened a fresh campaign to force the government abandon economic and foreign policy considerations and pass the Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009.

Mobilising under the ‘Uganda National Parents Network,’ the “Pass the BILL Now Campaign” the parents addressed journalists in Kampala yesterday and outlined their course of action, following revelations lately that Cabinet had abandoned the bill owing to international pressure from donor countries.

“We urge you to do what is right even if it is not politically correct. Remember that your first obligation and loyalty should be to the citizens of Uganda and our children who are our future,” they urged government in a statement signed by Mr Steven Langa, the executive director Family Life Network.

“We ask you not to betray and abandon the parents who voted you into public office. Remember that is the Ugandans who elected you and not donors or foreign governments,” the statement added, noting that Uganda should make friends with nations that share common values. The parents called for formation of an African coalition with common cultural norms and values.

Langa is a proponent of “ex-gay” therapy and has outed alleged gay Ugandans on local radio stations and called for their mass arrest. He is closely connected to prominent American anti-gay conservatives like Scott Lively, who leads a Christian organization in California. The group, Abiding Truth Ministries, has been classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Lively himself has claimed that “homosexuals [are] the true inventors of Nazism and the guiding force behind many Nazi atrocities.”

Reports have long indicated that the Ugandan Parliament may take up the measure before the end of the year, despite international pressure to abandon it. The bill was initially championed by the American religious far right — most prominently the secretive group The Family, also known as the Fellowship — but many backed away from publicly supporting the measure in the wake of the international controversy. Republican Sens. Tom Coburn (OK) and Susan Collins (ME) co-sponsored a Senate resolution condemning the bill and several Republican representatives had written a letter to the Ugandan president urging him to do everything within his constitutional authority to stop the legislation.