Barbaric

The Ugandan government wants to murder gay people:

Uganda has announced plans to impose the death penalty on homosexuals.

The bill, colloquially known as “Kill the Gays” in Uganda, was nullified five years ago on a technicality, but the government said on Thursday it plans to resurrect it within weeks.

The government said the legislation would curb a rise in “unnatural sex” in the east African nation.

The death penalty is barbaric enough. Seeking to apply it to private acts between consent adults is utterly mind-boggling. That's simply not the proper domain of the state, let alone of state murder.

Last time Uganda's bigoted government tried to push this law through, the international community responded with sanctions. Hopefully we will do the same again.

The witch-hunt begins

Yesterday Uganda's president signed into law viciously homophobic legislation which would jail gays for life. punish advocacy of gay rights, and make it a crime to fail to report gays to the authorities. And today, we have this:

A Ugandan tabloid has named the country's "200 top homosexuals", a day after President Yoweri Museveni signed into law a bill toughening penalties for gay people.

Red Pepper's list appeared under the headline: "Exposed", raising concerns of a witch-hunt against gay people.

Hate-crimes against gays are common in Uganda. In 2011 gay rights advocate David Kato was beaten to death with a hammer after being named in a similar list. Red Pepper and the Ugandan government seem hell-bent on inciting further crimes.

Two steps forward, one big step back

Some good and bad news on marriage equality and gay rights over the weekend. Firstly, courts have ruled in favour of marriage equality in both New Mexico and Utah - resulting in the usual floods of happy couples to registry offices. The Utah decision is particularly important, as it saw a federal judge strike down a bigot-clause in the state constitution which defined marriage in exclusively heterosexual terms. Thanks to Republican attempts to boost election turnout a few elections ago, lots of backward states have such clauses - and now every one of them could be in legal jeopardy. As a result the decision is bound to be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. But if its upheld - and its hard to see how it can't be, unless "equal protection under the law" has an implicit "except for gays and other people rich white judges don't like!" - a lot of states are suddenly going to have to enter the 21st century.

And the bad news: Uganda passed its notorious anti-gay law, imposing penalties of life imprisonment for homosexuality and requiring people to report suspected homosexuals or face jail themselves. And we thought Russia was bad...

National: Homophobic bigots

At the moment several African governments are progressing virulently homophobic legislation. There's Uganda's "Kill the Gays" bill, which would impose the death penalty for homosexuality and require reporting of homosexuals to the government. And in Nigeria there's similar, though less brutal, legislation, which would (among other things) outlaw LGBT support groups.

Today Labour's Charles Chauvel tried to move a motion expressing Parliament's condemnation of this bigotry:

CHARLES CHAUVEL to move, That this House note with grave concern both the recently retabled legislation in Uganda, that would increase the penalties imposed in that country for certain consensual sexual activity between two consenting adults in private, and the legislation, passed recently by Nigeria’s legislature but not yet signed into law, which would criminalise freedom of association and advocacy for same-sex couples and organisations; and state its hope and expectation that the New Zealand Government will urge other governments to uphold the rights of all people to their privacy and dignity in accordance with international law.

National vetoed it.

I think this tells us exactly where National stands on gay rights. They'll send John Key along to the Big Gay Out, but at their core they're simply bigots, no different from Family First or the Sensible Sentencing Trust.

Catholic homophobia hits a new low

The Ugandan Parliament is currently debating a bill which would allow the death penalty for homosexuality.

The Catholic Church normally opposes the death penalty. But not, apparently, when the victims are gay:

In the rest of the world, the Catholic Church has always maintained that they are not against homosexuals, just homosexual acts, and that they are for human rights. Of course, the Church once supported the move by the Mussolini government to inter gays on concentration camps and kill as many as possible. So, it is not surprising that the Church, while saying one thing in, say, the United States is saying something else in, say, Uganda.

There, at the Uganda Joint Christian Council, Catholic Archbishop Cyprian Kizito Lwanga was joined by Anglican Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi and Orthodox Metropolitan Jonah Lwanga in backing the “Kill The Gays” bill.

The Catholic Church has marked itself as a deeply bigoted and homophobic organisation over the years, but this really is a new low, even for them.

Still collaborating in torture

When the UK's coalition government took power last year, it promised to end the intelligence services' collaboration in torture.

They lied:

An alleged terrorist says he has been interrogated by British intelligence officers after being severely mistreated at a notorious prison in Uganda, in what appears to be the first major challenge to the coalition government's renunciation of the use of torture.

Omar Awadh Omar, a Kenyan businessman, has been charged with involvement in the planning of suicide bomb attacks in Kampala last July in which 76 people died and more than 70 were injured.

Awadh was abducted in Nairobi two months after the attacks and illegally rendered to Uganda to be interrogated and charged. Since then, according to his lawyers and relatives, he has been repeatedly beaten, threatened with a firearm and with further rendition to Guantánamo by Ugandan officials, before being questioned by American officials. They say that on at least one occasion he was also questioned by men who identified themselves as MI5 officers.

This is exactly the sort of behaviour the UK has engaged in in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Bangladesh, in Morocco and Guantanamo: questioning people after foreign torturers have done their dirty work, so as to gain the fruits of torture. Its exactly the sort of behaviour David Cameron promised would stop. So, was he lying? Or do the UK's spies not accept that they are subject to democratic control?

Ugandan homophobia claims a life

David Kato was a Ugandan gay-rights activist. Three weeks ago, he won a court case against a Ugandan tabloid magazine which had published his photo, outed him as a homosexual, and called for him to be executed. On Wednesday, he was beaten to death in his own home.

Uganda is one of the most virulently homophobic countries in Africa, and in 2009 almost passed a law imposing the death penalty for homosexuality. This is what that culture of public homophobia leads to: murder. The politicians who have whipped it up have blood on their hands and ought to be deeply ashamed of their actions. But sadly, they won't be.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the government is trying to deport a lesbian woman to Uganda, where an MP is threatening to have her arrested if she returns. That alone should be reason to grant her refugee status - but the UK government has whipped up hatred of its own, this time against immigrants and refugees, and has an eviction quota to meet. And so they're intent on deporting her, on the pretext that she's not "really" gay, a panel of immigration judges apparently knowing her sexuality better than she does. This too is homophobia, and it has to change, otherwise it will claim another life.