Friday 11th December 2009
A leading Christian lobby group, while not endorsing all the provisions of a new anti-sodomy bill in the nation's parliament, has urged fellow-believers to support the Ugandan people in their determination to rid their nation of foreign homosexual proselytisation.
Peter Tatchell's extremist gay rights organisation 'Outrage' protested outside the Ugandan High Commission last month against a proposed new law criminalising sodomy in the country.
They said, wrongly, that it was a law 'to execute and jail gays'.
In fact, the death penalty in David Bahati MP's 'Anti-homosexuality Bill', which has drawn the most criticism, is for aggravated sodomy, knowingly infecting others with AIDS, sodomy with minors and homosexual rape. Promoting homosexuality would however be punishable by a jail term, as would concealing an act of sodomy.
It is far from clear that the Bahati Bill will be enacted as is, because the Ugandan government is afraid of bad publicity scaring away investors. Equally, there is a groundswell of opinion in
Uganda
against the cultural imperialism of Western secularism, and the promotion of sodomy in particular is causing great concern.
EUROPEAN HOMOSEXUALS ARE RECRUITING IN
AFRICA
On 15th November last year President Museveni indicated he was sympathetic to Bahati's concerns, although he did not endorse the bill, "I hear European homosexuals are recruiting in
Africa
," he said, in an address to a youth awards banquet, warning against 'foreign' corrupt practices. He added "We used to have very few homosexuals traditionally. They were not persecuted but were not encouraged either because it was clear that is not how God arranged things to be."
American pro-family activist Scott Lively is opposed to the death penalty for sodomy but observes there used to be a pro-homosexuality law in
Uganda
under which Christians were executed:
'By official count 22 young men were executed under
Uganda
's law on homosexuality,' he writes. 'The law in question required that all men and boys in
Uganda
be willing to submit to the homosexual seduction of its ruler, King Mwanga. When Ugandans began to convert to Christianity in the 1880s, a group of Catholics, led by Charles Lwanga, refused to allow themselves to be sodomized by the King. Enraged, King Mwanga had them torturously bound, marched 37 miles and then roasted alive in a fire pit. The date of their execution was June 3rd, 1886, and is today a national holiday commemorating
Uganda
's rejection of homosexuality and commitment to Christian values.'
'It should be no surprise, therefore, that modern Ugandans are very unhappy that homosexual political activists from Europe and the
United States
are working aggressively to re-homosexualize their nation. Ugandan citizens report a growing number of foreign homosexual men coming to their country to turn desperately poor young men from the slums into their personal houseboys, and that some girls in public schools have being paid to recruit others into lesbianism. Foreign interests have exerted intense pressure on
Uganda
's government to compromise its laws regarding sexual morality, often using their control over foreign aid funding for leverage.'
UNDERSTANDABLE RESPONSE
Bahati's Bill, says Lively, is an understandable response to growing public demand that something be done about this problem. He was in
Uganda
last year arguing for reparative therapy to be offered by the Church to homosexuals.
Outrage claim that the Bill is 'a colonial hang-over', but the reverse is true. It is they who are the colonial hang-over, trying to return to an era in which rich Westerners told Ugandans what to do. Ugandans are simply not going to put up with homosexual men going there to put into practice Outrage's policies on reducing the homosexual 'age of consent' to 14 - or even lower. The African revulsion to sodomy is one aspect of a very strong pro-family attitude in the continent, which also views the Western practice of abortion with disgust.
In
Britain
, the Government's Equality Bill is going in the other direction, requiring public authorities from government departments to the police to primary schools actively to promote homosexuality. The Equality Bill was passed by the House of Commons and is now in the Lords, where Christians are praying it will be heavily amended.
TWO OR THREE WITNESSES
Christian Voice National Director Stephen Green said today:
'I do not like the idea of putting anyone to death, but I have to recognise that the Bible calls for the ultimate penalty for sodomy (Lev 20:13) and for rape (Deut 22:25) as maximum penalties, and that our Lord upheld the death penalty when He called for the accusers of the woman caught in adultery to cast the first stone (John 8:7) - if, that is, they were not implicated in adultery themselves. Clearly Almighty God does not view sodomy and rape with the equanimity of some of us in the West, tainted as we are with our twenty-first-century liberal prejudices.
'It is probably of little comfort that the Bible also calls for there to be 'two or three witnesses' (Deut 17:6) before anyone is convicted of a crime, so in practice, whatever penalty were in place for sodomy, men committing it consensually in private would not be affected. But homosexual men seem drawn to commit sex acts in public, and with strangers, leaving themselves open to all kinds of danger and corrupting public places with obscenity and the detritus of sexual encounters.
'I know what Peter Tatchell's position is on sex with minors - he was a contributor to a book in the 1980's called Betrayal of Youth which openly advocated paedophilia. But I should be interested to know what the Outrage position is on homosexual rape and infecting others with AIDS.
JESUS CHRIST HEALS TODAY
'Put bluntly, Western liberals do not want any law against sodomy, so if David Bahati were proposing a slap on the wrist, they wouldn't like it, and the outpouring of negative opinion to his Bill - even from Christians - just shows how brainwashed we have become by evil.
'The Bahati Bill should be enacted, but it would be good for it to be amended to offer the Christian alternative of healing through Jesus Christ. Men and women have walked away from homosexual desires and the homosexual lifestyle, as Scott Lively's website testifies. No-one has to 'stay gay'. But if that is to happen, provisions in the Bill requiring acts of sodomy to be reported under pain of criminal sanctions strike at the heart of the Christian confessional, and should be removed.
'But with all said and done, the contrast between our politicians and those of
Uganda
could not be more stark. A Parliamentarian in
Uganda
is trying to protect his nation's children. The House of Commons of the
United Kingdom
is trying to corrupt ours. Which country is the more civilised, I wonder, in the eyes of Almighty God?'
UGANDA'
S
STATUS AS A SOVEREIGN NATION
Scott Lively has said: 'In the mean time, despite all of the hysteria in the liberal media, it is important to remember that there is no death penalty for homosexuals in Uganda, only a bill under debate that will hopefully be modified before passage. The only Ugandans who have been executed for their beliefs and actions about homosexuality have been Christians. '
Stephen Green concluded: 'I too hope the Bill will be amended, but
Uganda
's status as a sovereign nation and its Christian morality is also at stake here. Will Ugandans allow themselves to be bullied by Western secularists, or will they stand by their Christian heritage and the traditional African way of life? I hope and pray it will be the latter, and that the Western homosexuals and abortionists who are trying to corrupt Ugandan young people will be sent packing. If they start from the premise that sodomy is evil but that the King of kings Jesus Christ saves and heals, and out of that execute justice with mercy, they will not go far wrong.
