"This Is The Face Of Hatred..."

From the archives...

Uganda’s David Bahati admits he wants to “kill every last gay person”

08/31/2010 by JR Russell

Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family and C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy,went to Uganda and spoke to the author of the much discussed Anti-Homosexuality Bill, David Bahati.

Sharlet has written an article about his visit for Harper’s Magazine (you’ll have to be a subscriber or find a hard copy to read it) and has done an interview with NPR. In the interview, he talks about the opportunity he had to meet with David Bahati, and even visit him in his home.

He warns that — while the bill is currently on the back-burner as a result of international pressure — it is still there and is still an actual threat, as is the violence and rhetoric that has been inspired by the bill and the discourse around it.

And essentially what it is right now is sort of a tiger on the leash. It’s something that the dictator can – if he feels he’s threatened and he needs to rally public support and distract them – he can get this thing passed in probably about four weeks. So it remains incredibly dangerous.

And while the likes of Martin Ssempa have been saying that the bill is about HIV prevention, Bahati made his motivations clear when he invited Professor Sharlet to his home.

[Bahati] spoke more bluntly than he had before, about what he wanted to do.

And what he wanted to do was kill every last gay person. And this came up because he said, well, the death penalty may come out of it but, you know, democracy will bring it back…

Towards the end of this genial visit, Bahati threatened to arrest Professor Sharlet if he came back to Uganda, on the grounds of promoting homosexuality.

And he said, yeah, of course I’ll have you arrested. And, you know, he sort of made that clear to the Ugandan journalist I was with, too.

The only thing holding [the Anti-Homosexuality Bill] back, right now, is Museveni, who is afraid of losing support from Western donors. If there was a vote on it tomorrow, it would pass almost unanimously. To vote against it would be political suicide in Uganda.

But that said, Museveni is holding it back. He’s trying to kind of play both sides. On the one hand, says we got to go slow on this; may be this isn’t the right way. And then he’ll go and give a public talk about the gay menace. His wife, who is also very powerful, the first lady, has also talked about sort of purging Uganda.

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It was promised that the bill would be passed by Christmas of this year as "a gift to the people of Uganda."  Thankfully, for now, international pressure from the U.S. and U.K. has at least temporarily derailed it.  Thousands of GLBT Ugandans today can enjoy one more Christmas without the threat of "legally sanctioned" death hanging over their heads.

"Fear Eats the Soul"

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