More American Christian Groups Named As Fomenting Anti-Gay Hate In Africa

As been exhaustively documented on this blog, for years US-based evangelical groups have been lobbying governments across Africa to create or increase penalties for merely existing as a homosexual person. These shining examples of Christian Love™ have resulted in the persecution, imprisonment, rape, and even murder of LGBT people across the continent. Today Britain's Times newspaper added more names to a evil rogues gallery already known to us.

Conservative U.S. Christian groups are setting up fronts in Africa to fight for anti-gay and anti-abortion legislation to promote their fundamentalist convictions, a report by a Boston research group said Tuesday. It accuses evangelical stars such as Pat Robertson and Rick Warren as well as Catholic and Mormon groups of setting up institutions and campaigns in Africa that are "fanning the flames of the culture wars over homosexuality and abortion by backing prominent African campaigners and political leaders." [snip]

Kaoma's report identifies groups belonging to a loose network of right-wing charismatic Christians. They include Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), the Catholic Church's Human Life International (HLI) and the Mormon-led Family Watch International. All have launched or expanded offices in Africa over the past five years. Robertson's organization has spawned the Zimbabwe-based African Center for Law and Justice and the East African Center for Law and Justice in Kenya.

"By hiring locals as office staff, ACLJ and HLI in particular hide an American-based agenda behind African faces, giving the Christian Right room to attack gender justice and (the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual people) as a neocolonial enterprise imposed on Africans and obstructing meaningful critique of the U.S. right's activities," the report said. Anti-gay laws passed in Burundi in 2009, Malawi in 2010 and Nigeria in 2011.

Uganda's so-called "Kill the Gays" law, which would levy the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality," was thought to have been defeated after Kaoma and Political Research Associates exposed the legislation's American instigators in 2009. But it was reintroduced in Uganda's Parliament this February. That was a year after the killing of David Kato, of Sexual Minorities Uganda, who was found bludgeoned to death in his Kampala home. Amnesty International has reported an increasing intolerance in Africa that has resulted in "harassment, discrimination, persecution, violence and murders" against homosexuals in Africa.

Much more on this repulsive story will doubtlessly be coming. (Tipped by JMG reader Straight Grandmother)