A spokesman for Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has announced that the president will sign the country’s draconian “Anti-Homosexuality Bill.”
The legislation was crafted and passed with the help and support of US-based Religious Right activists who have increasingly focused on exporting their anti-gay views abroad.
American groups including the Family Research Council, American Family Association, Liberty Counsel have applauded Uganda’s anti-gay bill.
J. Lester Feder reports:
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has decided to sign a law imposing up to a lifetime jail sentence for homosexuality, announced government spokesman Ofwono Opondo via Twitter on Friday. NRM caucus spokeswoman Evelyn Anite confirmed Opondo’s announcement to BuzzFeed.
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Museveni made his announcement during a retreat with members of his party, the National Resistance Movement, which has primarily focused on the party’s leadership as it prepares for elections in 2016. Museveni had been facing stiff pressure from his colleagues to accept the bill.
The deciding factor may have been that a panel of party members with medical backgrounds Museveni convened to study the cause of homosexuality presented a report concluding homosexuality is not an in-born trait. Museveni had told lawmakers he would sign the bill if “I have got confirmation from scientists that this condition is not genetic.”
The committee chairman told BuzzFeed on Thursday, “Speaking as a medical doctor … homosexuality is just deviant behavior. It can be learned, and it can be unlearned.”
