Uganda Be Kidding Me. Part III

Ugandan Sylvia Tamale, Faculty of Law at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, draws a direct correlation between the visit of the far-right American evangelical leaders and the introduction of the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality bill.

In the documentary film, “Breaking The Chains,” Sylvia Tamale says, “A few months before the bill was introduced, there was a huge big conference organized by some American evangelicals, who came here specifically to “heal” people from homosexuality.”

To make “Breaking The Chains,” Northwestern University graduate and filmmaker Alyssa Eisenstein traveled to Uganda to film members of the Ugandan LGBT community and tell their story to the world, despite death threats the crew and cast encountered while filming.

Sylvia Tamale continued, “What is it that this bill is trying to do? It’s introducing stuff like criminalizing what they call, “promotional homosexuality.” Requiring family members and people that gay people trust to report them to authorities. Many of the provisions in that bill touch upon freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, the right to privacy and so on.”

What Ms. Tamale is referring to is the bill’s provision, which would lead to the imprisonment for up to three years of anyone who fails to report within 24 hours the identities of everyone they know who is lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. This proposed law would equally imprison any person who voices support for LGBT rights.

Another Ugandan interviewee in the documentary, Julius Kaggwa, of the Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights and Constitutional Law, said, “We felt, as a civil society, that the character of our nation was at stake by the very content of that bill, the fact that it was making every Ugandan a potential criminal and it was treading on very, very pertinent rights of privacy of almost every Ugandan.

Sylvia Tamale powerfully summed up the issue of the Anti-Homosexuality bill in Uganda by saying, “This is a human rights issue and not about homosexuals.”