How anti-gay Christians evangelize hate abroad..

 

Strangely enough, you don’t see the teachings on adultery leading to people being beaten, imprisoned, or murdered over, and yet we can see that happening all around the world over the ‘teachings’ they spread about homosexuality.

Op-Ed- ‘How anti-gay Christians evangelize hate abroad’, by Kapya Kaoma. Rev. Kaoma is an Anglican priest and the senior religion and sexuality researcher at Political Research Associates in Boston. He wrote the reports “Colonizing African Values” and “Globalizing the Culture Wars.”

If you live in the United States, it’s easy to be lulled into thinking that the battle for broader civil rights for gay people is nearly over. The last few years have brought important victories in courts, legislatures and at the ballot box, and momentum is firmly on the side of increased equality.

That’s not true, however, in other parts of the world. The hateful vitriol that has fueled U.S. culture wars for so long is now being exported, and some of our most ardent culture warriors are finding a far more receptive audience abroad.

The people of Uganda, Nigeria, Russia and elsewhere are leading their own struggles for human rights. Their fight is difficult enough without campaigns of vilification designed by American preachers who distort the meaning of the Gospels to justify the criminalization , and even murder, of innocents.

In nations such as these, an insidious homophobia engineered in America is taking root. I have seen this hate being spread with my own eyes.

People who are gay, or suspected of being gay are being rounded up, beaten, murdered, and even burned to death by ‘Christian’ mobs who have learned such hatred from preachers and pastors in the U.S., who have exported such teachings abroad.

In a country where 85 percent of the population identifies as Christian, Ugandan pastors have been the most vocal supporters of the new bill that mandates life-imprisonment for gay people. As a result, homophobia has become almost universal. Several prominent American evangelical pastors, including Scott Lively, a minister and self-proclaimed expert on ‘the gays’, traveled to Uganda and were the main reason for the creation of this horrific legislation.

In March 2009, while in Kampala, Uganda, researching reports of U.S. right-wing evangelical involvement in attacks on LGBTQ equality and reproductive justice, I was invited to a three-day conference on homosexuality hosted by the Family Life Network, which is based in New York. The keynote speaker was Scott Lively from Springfield, Mass., who introduced himself as a leading expert on the “international homosexual agenda.” I filmed Lively over the course of two days as he instructed religious and political leaders about how gays were coming to Uganda from the West to “recruit children into homosexuality.”

Some of his assertions would have been laughable had he not been so deadly serious. He claimed that a gay clique that included Adolf Hitler was behind the Holocaust, and he insinuated that gay people fueled the Rwandan genocide.

In the United States, Lively is widely dismissed as an anti-gay firebrand and Holocaust revisionist. But in Uganda, he was presented — and accepted — as a leading international authority.

The public persecution of LGBTQ people escalated after Lively’s conference, with one particularly high-profile incident, a Kampala tabloid, Rolling Stone, outing several gays and lesbians under the headline “Hang Them” after passage of the bill. Among those pictured were an Ugandan bishop supportive of the gay and lesbian community and a lesbian who was later stoned to death by her neighbors.

Lively was also invited to private briefings with political and religious leaders, and to address the Ugandan parliament during his 2009 visit. The next month, Ugandan lawmaker David Bahati unveiled his Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which in its original form called for the death penalty as punishment for a new crime of “aggravated homosexuality.”

Kampala, Uganda – Auf Usaam Mukwaya is a 26-year-old gay man and human rights activist. Because of that, he has been arrested, jailed, abducted and tortured. He endured constant homophobic taunts from his neighbors since he was outed in one of the local papers and his face was shown on television following creation of the anti-gay bill that was created at the request of American pastors. It became impossible for him to fight back, so he had to flee the country for his own safety. In June 2010 he arrived in France, where he received political asylum.

In recent years, millions of dollars have been funneled from anti-LGBTQ evangelical conservatives to Uganda, funding local pastors and training them to adopt and mirror the culture-war language of the U.S. Christian right. Bahati and a notorious anti-gay pastor, Martin Ssempa, were personally mentored by U.S. conservatives. And powerful Christian right organizations such as the Family Research Council lobbied Congress to change a resolution denouncing the Uganda legislation.

Other prominent right-wing evangelicals have also made Uganda appearances, including California’s Rick Warren and Lou Engle, who founded TheCall ministry. They met with politicians, hosted rallies and public meetings, and used their influence and credibility to contribute to a culture war in Uganda much more intense and explosive than anything seen in the United States; Lively himself described the work as a “nuclear bomb” in Uganda.

In December, the Ugandan parliament finally passed the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, and last month President Yoweri Museveni signed it into law. The death penalty provision was removed, but the law includes life sentences for homosexual “repeat offenders” and criminalizes advocacy on behalf of LGBTQ Ugandans.

Uganda has deservedly received widespread attention, but it’s not the only country with a culture war that carries the fingerprints of U.S. campaigners. Nigeria has passed a bill almost identical to Uganda’s, and Cameroon and Zambia are enthusiastically imprisoning LGBTQ people.

And let’s not forget Russia. In 2007, Lively traveled throughout Russia to, as he put it, bring a warning about the “homosexual political movement.” He urged Russians, among other things, “to criminalize the public advocacy of homosexuality.”

Last year, President Vladimir Putin signed a bill into law that criminalizes distribution of “gay propaganda” to minors, including any material that “equates the social value of traditional and nontraditional sexual relations.” In Russia, because of this law, gay people are being beaten and even murdered now, with no response from the authorities.

Later this year, the World Congress of Families — an Illinois-based conservative umbrella organization — will convene in Russia. As the group’s leader, Larry Jenkins, put it: “We’re convinced that Russia does and should play a very significant role in defense of the family and moral values worldwide. Russia has become a leader of promoting these values in the international arena.” U.S. religious culture warriors have strategically focused on countries already suspicious of America, often ones with authoritarian leaders eager to turn public attention away from issues of corruption or economic inequality.

As to churches here in the U.S., here’s just one example: Pastor Steven Anderson, a Baptist pastor from Tempe, Arizona; is going viral for a sermon he preached 2 months ago. No, the sermon isn’t going viral because of him preaching the good news of scripture. It’s going viral because the pastor called for the murder of every LGBT person as a solution to end HIV and AIDS, even though HIV infections among women are primarily attributed to heterosexual contact (84% in 2010) or injection drug use (16% in 2010).

His sermon titled “AIDS: The Judgement of God,” which was given the day before World AIDS day, evoked Levitical law saying “gays should be killed.” And soon in order to have an “AIDS-free Christmas.”

“Turn to Leviticus 20:13 (which is completely mistranslated in most English bibles) because I actually discovered the cure for AIDS,” he said as his congregation laughed. “This is the cure for AIDS. Everyone is talking about ‘let’s have an AIDS free world by 2020.’ Look, we can have an AIDS free world by Christmas,” which evoked more laughter from the congregation.

The following is a list of U.S. Christian-based organizations and churches who have either called for death, destruction, condemnation, and/or rejection of gay people and which have been classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as anti-LGBT hate groups. The SPLC defines hate groups as those that “… have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.” The SPLC states that hate group activities include speeches, marches, rallies, meetings, publishing, leafleting—and criminal acts such as violence. The SPLC classifies organizations that propagate known falsehoods – claims about LGBT people that have been thoroughly discredited by scientific authorities – and repeated, groundless name-calling” as anti-gay hate groups.

The SPLC clearly states that “viewing homosexuality as unbiblical does not qualify organizations for listing as hate groups.” President of the SPLC Richard Cohen clarified “By ‘known falsehoods,’ we mean such things as asserting that gays and lesbians are more disposed to molesting children than heterosexuals – which the overwhelming weight of credible scientific research has determined is patently untrue.Nowhere in our report do we equate taking a position against same-sex marriage with hate speech.”

Abiding Truth Ministries

Bethesda Christian Institute

Chalcedon Foundation

Dove World Outreach Center

Faithful Word Baptist Church

Family Research Council

Family Research Institute

Illinois Family Institute

Sons of Thundr (Faith Baptist Church)

Tom Brown Ministries

Traditional Values Coalition

True Light Pentecost Church

United Families International

Westboro Baptist Church

Windsor Hills Baptist Church

World Congress of Families

You Can Run But You Cannot Hide International

As you can see, there are many ‘Christian’ organizations and churches that daily spread teachings of condemnation, hatred, rejection, persecution and violence towards an entire naturally and eternally reoccurring variant of our fellow Humanity.. merely over how God created them, and who they love.

Tags: bigotry, christianity, hatred, homophobia, homosexuality, murder, social issues