[ updated: see below ]
The incursion of anti-gays into Uganda to stir up homophobia was first noted here back in early March 2009. As most readers are aware, the situation has gone from bad to worse to completely fucking nuts.
Egged on by American fundamentalist Christians, the Ugandan Parliament is now poised to pass a draconian law that would not only punish the “crime of homosexuality” with lengthy prison terms, it would also provide the death penalty for repeat offenders and for people living with HIV/AIDS who so much as touch another individual with “intent to commit homosexuality.”
Michael Airhart, writing at Truth Wins Out, has two must read pieces on the spineless response of Eric Goosby, the Obama-appointed head of PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) — the organization that oversees American taxpayer funds sent to fight AIDS in Africa.
- U.S. Official Defends Gross Misuse of AIDS Funds in Uganda – 27 November 2009
- While Britain and Canada Stand Up to Uganda, U.S. Races to the Bottom – 30 November 2009
In the first of these, Airhart notes that Goosby “has finally spoken out regarding U.S. taxpayers’ support for the pogrom in Uganda.” Specifically the Obama appointee told Newsweek:
My role is to be supportive and helpful to the patients who need these services. It is not to tell a country how to put forward their legislation. But I will engage them in conversation around my concern and knowledge of what this is going to do to that population, and our ability to stop the movement of the virus into the general population.
Airhart responds:
Goosby appears to be both ignorant of HIV/AIDS in Uganda, and determined to use taxpayer dollars to undermine the very same education programs that PEPFAR was created to support:
- HIV/AIDS in Uganda is primarily a heterosexual phenomenon; Goosby falsely contends that it is a homosexual phenomenon that threatens the “general population.”
- The Anti-Homosexuality Bill would criminalize key aspects of comprehensive HIV/AIDS prevention education and imprison health-care workers who refuse to report sexually active gay patients to the police.
Airhart concludes:
Goosby’s use of federal funds to subsidize the punishment of HIV/AIDS education and health-care workers, and to push LGBT Ugandans deep underground, is inexcusable.
The appointment of Goosby to replace Bush-appointee Mark Dybul — an openly gay man, MD and more than competent administrator of PEPFAR — was yet another Obama administration concession to the radical religious right which, of course, objected to Dybul’s sexual orientation.
In a January 2009 editorial in The San Francisco Chronicle called A bad start on AIDS, the firing of Dybul was labeled “unexpected, unceremonious and undeserved.” The Chronicle accused the Obama administration of scapegoating Dybul for the Bush Administration’s emphasis on abstinence — a policy not supported by Dybul. During his tenure, Dybul turned Bush’s PEPFAR into a program the British medical journal Lancet called “the largest and most successful bilateral HIV/AIDS programme worldwide.”
In his second piece, Airhart points out that, in contrast to the US, the governments of Great Britain and Canada have aggressively and officially protested the Ugandan bill:
The prime ministers of Britain and Canada last week protested, in the strongest terms, Uganda’s plan to execute its sexually active LGBT and HIV-positive citizens — and to imprison their families, doctors, clergy if they fail to turn in patients and loved ones to the police.
The two nations’ top leaders implied that Uganda might lose foreign aid and membership in the Commonwealth if it proceeds.
[ ... ]
Americans must take urgent action to let the State Department know that it IS their job to prevent the misuse of taxpayers’ HIV/AIDS dollars to slaughter gay people, enrich evangelicals, and deny Africans access to condoms.
(emphasis: mine)
Truth Wins Out provides contact information for US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and urges readers to thank Representatives Tammy Baldwin and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen for their support and attention to the crisis in Uganda.
UPDATE (30 November 9:37am):
Well, this should come as no surprise. Here’s Obama’s good buddy pop-pastor, homophobe and pathological liar Rick Warren, toeing the Obama Administration’s party line:
Rick Warren, the pastor who delivered the invocation at President Obama’s inauguration, is once again on the defensive — this time for his work with a Ugandan pastor who would like homosexuality to be punishable by death.
Newsweek tried to get Warren’s reaction to the anti-gay work of Martin Ssempa, a Ugandan pastor who has come to his Saddleback Church multiple times. (Warren has distanced himself from Ssempa in general terms, saying the Ugandan minister does not represent him or his church.) Warren wouldn’t reject the idea:
According to Rick Warren:
The fundamental dignity of every person, our right to be free, and the freedom to make moral choices are gifts endowed by God, our creator. However, it is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the political process of other nations.
Cluephone, Rick! Nobody’s talking about invading, embargoing or arranging a coup in Uganda. This is about leveraging US aid dollars to save lives. Saving lives was the original purpose of those dollars. Not intervening means those US bucks will be used to end lives. On the other hand, intervening means avoiding the expenditure of American tax dollars to entrap, imprison and execute people running USA-funded HIV/AIDS programs and those in need of these programs, who happen to be gay, bi or transgender, and who will unwittingly show up for testing or treatment, tell the truth and be thrown into Ugandan jails or executed.
So much for that whole pro-life pose.
UPDATE (30 November 2:22pm):
Via John Aravosis, Andrew Sullivan rips Rick Warren a new orifice:
This is an act of terror and murder against an already beleaguered minority, and Warren is an accessory to it. As a powerful figure in distributing AIDS funding in Uganda, he cannot bring himself to oppose a law that would condemn someone in a gay relationship to death, and imprison him or her for touching another human being, and inciting a wave of informing on family members and friends and acquaintances in order to terrify a sexual minority. This alleged man of God cannot speak out on this – except to protect his own p.r. His schtick of actually being the nice evangelical – a schtick that got him to Obama’s inauguration – is a lie. If he cannot condemn this fascist act of violence against a tiny minority of vulnerable human beings, then his position in this struggle is clear enough.
Sullivan closes with:
He lies. He has taken sides, whenever possible, to stigmatize, demonize and now physically threaten the lives of gay people in his own country and abroad. And his silence on this issue means the deaths of others. Warren needs to come out and condemn this law as evil, which it is. And to stop hiding his own enmeshment with the most virulent forms of fundamentalist hatred under the veil of media-savvy benevolence.
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