NigeriansTalk

You may won­der why I am choos­ing to address what is osten­si­bly a Ugan­dan mat­ter on a Niger­ian blog. I will not bother to go into how the Ugan­dan politi­cians to whom this bill is due have even risked the sov­er­eignty of their leg­isla­tive process by ally­ing them­selves to Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cals (Sokari at Black Looks does a great job on this sub­ject) in their bid to bring gays to book, nor will I expand on the nitty-gritty of the bill itself (Not a lawyer, sorry), but what wor­ries me most about the anti-gay bill in Uganda is how eas­ily it can be repli­cated across the continent.

Many among us in Nige­ria accept that gays deserve pun­ish­ment or at least live sin­ful lives. Oth­ers would take the extra step and say that peo­ple who are known to be gay do not deserve the same con­sid­er­a­tion, the same rights, as those among us who are not. This bill comes from the lat­ter view, and this think­ing has been allowed hege­monic preva­lence. It has been mad­den­ing to read report after report on the issue and hear peo­ple talk about it with­out point­ing out the most basic prob­lem, which is that this bill refuses to acknowl­edge the very human­ity of gays and that it threat­ens their human rights.

Curi­ous about the bill’s inten­tions, I read the mem­o­ran­dum (it’s linked above, with the rest of the bill) where the mem­ber of Ugan­dan par­lia­ment Hon. David Bahati explained why he was putting this bill for­ward. The meat of it:

“The Bill aims at strength­en­ing the nation’s capac­ity to deal with emerg­ing inter­nal and exter­nal threats to the tra­di­tional het­ero­sex­ual family.

This leg­is­la­tion fur­ther rec­og­nize the fact that same sex attrac­tion is not an innate and immutable characteristic.

This bill fur­ther aims at pro­vid­ing a com­pre­hen­sive and enhanced leg­is­la­tion to pro­tect the cher­ished cul­ture of the peo­ple of Uganda against the attempts of sex­ual rights activists seek­ing to impose their val­ues of sex­ual promis­cu­ity on the peo­ple of Uganda.

There is also need to pro­tect the chil­dren and youths of Uganda who are made vul­ner­a­ble to sex­ual abuse and devi­a­tion as a result of cul­tural changes, uncen­sored infor­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies, par­ent­less child devel­op­men­tal set­ting increas­ing attempts by homo­sex­u­als to raise chil­dren in homo­sex­ual rela­tion­ships through adop­tion, fos­ter care, or otherwise.”

What one notices is the repeated attempts to ‘oth­er­ize’ gay peo­ple. If gay­ness is “not an innate and immutable char­ac­ter­is­tic”, but is one that presents an exis­ten­tial threat to the “tra­di­tional fam­ily” and the “cher­ished chil­dren of Uganda”, then it stands to rea­son that gay­ness must come from an exoge­nous source. Surely, these “uncen­sored infor­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies” (i.e. porn) is a cre­ation of peo­ple– yes, peo­ple– and it surely had to have crossed someone’s mind for it to gain such audi­ence! If peo­ple, and from any­where who are not any less peo­ple as the aver­age Ugan­dan, are not the source of this homo­sex­u­al­ity, then what? A pill? A food? Who cre­ated it? How do we know where “the gay” comes from? If we do know and we choose to take homo­sex­u­al­ity as ill­ness, then that is a dif­fer­ent mat­ter. But no, homo­sex­u­al­ity here is pre­sented as a face­less evil that haunts flesh. If you say that chil­dren and fam­i­lies need to pro­tected from the gays, you are then imply­ing that the threat does not come from within, but from with­out. These gay forces lurk some­where beyond the realm of soci­ety, wait­ing for one to stray out­side the pack before they pounce into inno­cent bod­ies that they may dwell and infest and become legion. The gays are Lazarus, and since there is no Jesus among us who has been suc­cess­ful at cast­ing out this most cursed legion from inno­cent bod­ies, then per­haps it would be best to just dis­card of these bod­ies that host this evil in its entirety, with the State doing the hon­ors, act­ing as our prophet. In this belief lies the link to the brand of Chris­tian­ity espoused by many among the pop­u­la­tion of many an African nation. We have some­how planted the seed of this kind of illog­i­cal think­ing every­where, and it’s troubling.

Also trou­bling is that if you have to pro­tect “the cher­ish cul­ture of the peo­ple of Uganda” from homo­sex­u­al­ity, then you are imply­ing that Ugan­dans can’t be gay, which– not to be glib, but still– means that this bill is unnec­es­sary for Ugan­dans. For if these peo­ple can­not be both Ugan­dan and gay, then why the need to cre­ate a bill that pro­hibits some­thing that does not already exist?

Law, after all, works with the help of prece­dent to ensure that best prac­tices are put in place for all known cir­cum­stances. We have laws that deal with crim­i­nal acts like mur­der, but we do not have any immi­gra­tion laws that deal with extrater­res­trial aliens com­ing into our coun­tries, for exam­ple, because that has not hap­pen before, nor do we expect that ever to hap­pen. But can what is being said here be much darker? Are they insin­u­at­ing that gays are not cit­i­zens? If one takes takes this line of think­ing to term, and in as young a coun­try as all African coun­tries are, this can set a bad prece­dent for human rights within the pop­u­la­tion and for whichever minor­ity a gov­ern­ment may choose to dis­en­fran­chise next.

I will not argue as to whether or not being gay is a sin– beliefs by their very nature are not to be rea­soned out because they can­not be proved– but I will argue that gays are human beings. Another hid­den theme here is that when we human beings com­mit human sins there need not be a call for our death. But homo­sex­u­al­ity is so egre­gious because it belies our human­ity. Humans don’t act that way. If they were con­sid­ered fully human and their sins on par with other human sins, then two con­sent­ing adults hav­ing sex– not one rap­ing the other, not one impos­ing him/herself on some­one who does not have the power to con­sent, not one hav­ing sex with ani­mals who do not com­mu­ni­cate as we do and there­fore can­not con­sent– might raise an eye­brow, but not a call for their heads.