In a speech to the Family Research Council yesterday, National Organization for Marriage chairman John Eastman said that he hoped Uganda’s supreme court would “in short order” reconsider a harsh anti-gay bill that it threw out on a technicality last year. The law would impose life imprisonment in some cases and would criminalize the “promotion” of homosexuality.
Eastman quoted Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s insistence that the new law was “provoked by western groups who come to our schools and try to recruit children into homosexuality.” Noting that US aid restrictions prevent assistance from going to governments that commit human rights violations, including the failure to take “appropriate and adequate measures” to “protect children from exploitation,” Eastman implied that the real “exploitation” was coming from gay rights advocates recruiting children.
He also suggested that US opposition to laws criminalizing homosexuality hinders efforts to fight HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa. (In fact, experts say that the criminalization of homosexuality hurts the effort to fight the epidemic.)
