How American Christians help kill African gays

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So Uganda has decided to execute homosexuals.  Crazy Ugandans.  But what if their craziness, their foaming at the mouth, queer-hating policies are actually being sold to them by leaders of conservative Christianity in the US?

I’m not saying that Ugandan political leaders can’t come up with blaming the gays on their own.  Obviously they’re as smart as the GOP.  I mean, if you can’t blame the Jews or the Blacks, then Gays are the next obvious choice.

But what if Christian missions and US Anti-AIDS funding have helped foment the idea that homosexuality is a “foreign disease,” a form of Imperialism brought to the African continent by the decadent North and so a sort of foreign invasion?

A report released by Political Research Associates says that there are direct connections between seeing Homosexuals as a foreign enemy and American religious groups and the US government, especially with its PEPFAR funds.

Apparently the American conservatives have sold homophobia as a sort of liberation movement.  Kill the Homos and Protect the Motherland (note how easily “Jews” or “Blacks” or “Foreigners” could replace “Homos”)

“When it comes to homosexuality… many African religious leaders view progressive social witness on LGBT equality as a ‘Western agenda,’” writes Kaoma. “In many respects, their denunciation of homosexuality is an attack on the West rather than a statement about human sexuality.” That’s one reason the anti-gay rhetoric prevalent in Africa often resembles modern European anti-Semitism: gay people, like Jews, are seen as subversive, foreign, and enervating, threatening the nation’s unity and virility.

Uganda’s Radical Anti-Gay Measure and the American Religious Right | International | ReligionDispatches.

As Allison Kilkenny points out today on True/Slant, anti-gay American ministers like Rick Warren have close ties with Ugandan ministers and have repeatedly refused to take a stance against the Ugandan death penalty for gays.

Well, hell yeah.   Imagine if we could kill the homos here?  We’d have so much more time to focus on hetero marriage and getting rid of not just abortion, but birth control too.  Damned homos are messing up the mission of the far right in the US and unlike many African countries, they cannot say that homosexuality is a foreign invasion.  Or maybe they could.  Sure, why not?  Homosexuality would go away if we just successfully shut down the border with Mexico and Canada, because they’re so gay.

And real Americans and real Ugandans are manly and virile and do not take it up the ass.

This sort of conflation of gay sex and national security has been around for a long time, at least since the time of King Edward II, if not before.  But what is different about making homosexuality a national threat now is the way post-colonial narratives of liberation get married to older, colonial narratives of the White Man’s Burden, all in an age where the boundaries of the nation state are nearly meaningless since communication and actual humans traverse them with few impediments.

The result is a world where Rick Warren cannot kill gays at home, but he can virtually kill them in Uganda.  A postmodern story of politics and desires played out on gay bodies that will soon be dead.