American evangelicals tied to Ugandan anti-gay bill

The New York Times has a pretty unsettling story out about three American evangelicals who were brought to Uganda preceding the now infamous anti-gay bill that country is on the verge of adopting which would outlaw homosexuality under penalty of death:

Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks.

The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Soon after the conference the Ugandan government began drafting the bill.

The three Americans who spoke at the conference — Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads “healing seminars”; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality” — are now trying to distance themselves from the bill.

I have no doubt that these men never thought the Ugandan government would go so far, but I do think their surprise is a little unwarranted.  In America the culture wars may be fought in courtrooms and on pulpits and television screens.  It may be over as mundane a thing as the right to legally wed. That’s how far we’ve come. In many other parts of the world, however, the culture war is a life or death matter. It’s playing with fire. At a certain point, when you see people playing with enough fire you have to wonder if they really don’t know its potential to burn. You begin to question whether or not maybe they’re aware that it will spread into a conflagration. You begin to think that maybe they are aware, that maybe their intention goes beyond what they claim – only they haven’t thought through the repercussions all the way. The long-term ramifications of their words and actions are uglier than they had at first imagined. The abstractions, when they solidify, becoming a little too grim.

Certainly the path toward stripping away basic human rights is the same road that leads to executions and imprisonment. The same hand that strips us of our dignity and liberty can as easily strip us of our lives.