CONTINENTAL DRIFT

Report: U.S. Religious Groups Helping With Anti-Gay Legislation In Africa

We already knew about Rick Warren’s connection to Uganda’s odious “Kill the Gays” bill, but a new report claims some other big shots in America’s evangelical Christian community are pitching in behind-the-scenes to help push homophobic legislation throughout Africa.

Published by the progressive think tank Political Research Associates, Colonizing African Values: How the U.S. Christian Right is Transforming Sexual Politics in Africa connects evangelical superstars like Pat Robertson and mainstream Catholic and Mormon groups of setting up shop across the continent with the intention of “fanning the flames of the culture wars over homosexuality.”

In other words, Americans are no longer listening to their horseshit so they’re shipping it overseas.

Joseph Okia, nephew of Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, has spoken of “a close intellectual and mentoring relationship” between Christian conservatives in the U.S. and religious and political leaders in his homeland.

When religious indoctrination meets with local superstition, outrageous lies become common sense—like the idea that homosexuals recruit in schools. “Those kind of lies, when presented in Africa, become factual, so we need to worry that they are misleading people with these lies,” Rev. Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest in Zambia and author of the study.

As chief culprits, Kaoma singles out Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice, the Mormon-led Family Watch International and the Catholic Church’s Human Life International—all of which have expanded their reach in the region in the past several years.  In the same time frame, Malawi, Nigeria and Burundi have all passed anti-gay laws. And Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” law, once thought defeated, was reintroduced in parliament in February.

Ugh, can’t we tell Robertson et al there are homosexuals on Mars who need to be discriminated against?

 

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