By Melanie Nathan, August 18, 2014.
Whereas the churches in Uganda have helmed the battle against gays, as triggered by the shenanigans of the likes of Scott Lively, an American fringe radical right Christian pastor, who tried to re-brand Christianity for the Ugandan Christian market and other global communities, now some may be turning toward relative ‘tolerance’, despite continued harmful rhetoric. Is this for the sake of love or is it for the love of money?
The Daily Monitor of Uganda is reporting:
Gulu- The Archbishop of Gulu Archdiocese, John Baptist Odama, has asked Ugandans to avoid harming homosexuals despite the fact that the Constitutional Court nullified the anti-homosexuality law on a technicality of lack of quorum.
Bishop Odama said homosexuals are also human beings created in the image of God who only deviated from the Godly way of life.
“Let us learn to love God’s human creatures. It is not that I am advocating for homosexual practice in the country, but we should not take laws into our hands to harm and hate the homosexuals because we all have weaknesses,” the Archbishop said.
He made the remarks at Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Gulu Municipality at weekend while presiding over a wedding ceremony of Mr Patrick Omony and Ms Margret Akello.
While on the one hand the Ugandan LGBT community may see some relief, should we be skeptical of this sudden call for love?
The Archbishop nonetheless saw fit to exacerbate the rhetoric:
Archbishop Odama said the fight against homosexuality should focus on sensitising youth on the negative impacts of the practice since the vice contravenes cultural settings and norms.
Earlier this month, the Constitutional Court did not rule on the substance of the anti-gay measure which allowed jail terms of up to life for homosexual offences, but threw out the law because it was passed during a session that lacked quorum.
This sudden love for gays and call for ‘no harm’ must veiwed in light of the recent withdrawal of funding for churches from the USA.The Inter Religious Council of Uganda has just suffered a huge knock by the withdrawal of USAID which may impact some luxury living for some! We have no doubt from well sourced reports that the money sent by USAID does not always hit its target in any event and that the Ugandan churches are rife with corruption.
While some may try and pin the withdrawal of USAID entirely on the Anti-Homosexuality milieu in Uganda, it is believed that USAID has viewed its withdrawal in the context of much more that goes on in IRCU.
READ MORE about withdrawal of USAID:-
As I have labored to explain over and again, the issue of sexuality in Uganda is artificial to the context! A society that is still struggling to finance the basics of human dignity, namely life, food, health, education, shelter, and clean water, is really in no position to be indulging in the quite complex dialogue on sexuality and sexual politics.
Further, Uganda, like many countries in Africa, is still at the early stages of transitioning from a traditional tribal and clan based society, into a modern nation state governed by the rule of law. Our historical understanding of rights, is that they are communal, and usually attached to land and ethnicity. As such, emphasis tends to be on conformity with the group, which is the the traditional guarantor of safety.
Within such a paradigm, many abuses have taken place and are best exemplified by horrific practices such as female genital mutilation, which is still widely practiced across Africa. It is in this context, that this ‘advanced’ dialogue on sexuality is taking place, and if I may say so, the entire matter is quite inappropriate and ill suited to the rock bottom condition of the average Ugandan.
In the west, a tradition of individual rights has been well established over the past century, and coincides with the transition of western societies, from being agricultural and rural, to being industrialized and urban.
Taking advantage of these apparent weaknesses in the African state, is always likely to produce adverse consequences, usually arising out of a knee jerk African response of either defensiveness or desperation. People the world over ought to be ashamed about the reckless manner in which a poor and fragile society like Uganda has again, after the Idi Amin debacle, (who incidentally was a western made and sponsored dictator), been turned into a political football by external parties. It amounts to a not so subtle and quite pathetic gloating by the western world about its economic superiority. In other words, why not pick on somebody your own size, say Russia, India, or China!! The reason you don’t, is because they will tell you exactly where to go!!!
What a shame that so much of what you say is true and then you curb your comment with the old and tired “dont look here if you cant look there rhetoric” ” pick on the other abusers” so you can leave us alone? Well FYI this BLOG and many others constantly shed light on anti-LGBT laws and milieu of Russia, India etc.
Nonetheless you are absolutely right about most of what you say except you fail to address the big elephants in this room:
1) The export of the USA re-brand of fundamentalist Christianity in the form of hate to Uganda;
2) The use by Ugandan politicians to scapegoat a minority so that the eye of the west is diverted from the real ills of the country such as corruption and political oppression;
3) The fact that the colonialists brought the old Anti-homosexual penal codes in the first place to African countries; and
4) The spread of Christianity as set to mission by the Church of White Men religion in Africa.
The pink elephants you mention are the context in which ordinary Ugandans live. Uganda is not a democracy. It is a military dictatorship/kleptocracy masquerading rather absurdly as a democracy. You are correct. If this issue, rather than sexuality were to become the main focus of the outside world’s attention and opprobrium, then perhaps we would not have to deal with idiotic laws such as the ‘anti gay’ law in the first place. The fact that there is an attempt to take human rights away from any group, should tell you what our government thinks of human rights in general. Today it is gay people, tomorrow, who knows?