The Ugandan president recently signed into law a bill passed by parliament that criminalizes homosexuality and imposes harsh penalties on homosexuals. This action was strongly urged by some American evangelicals who have taken their anti-gay hate message global, looking for countries that might be open to their message given that the people back home are increasingly rejecting it.
But there has been a strong backlash against American evangelicals for what happened in Uganda and now they are trying to say that they have no responsibility for it.
Media reports have connected the bill to a 2009 conference in Uganda, at which three Americans condemned homosexual behavior and promoted therapy for same-sex attraction. One of the men, Scott Lively, a Massachusetts pastor and head of Abiding Truth Ministries, said that he is not responsible for the bill.
“It’s a very insulting argument, that somehow an American evangelical pastor is so powerful that I’ve overwhelmed the intelligence of an entire government and turned them out to do my will, “Lively said. “The Ugandans knew what they wanted to hear.”
…[Grove City College professor of psychology Warren Throckmorton] said he would have expected a more vigorous response from evangelicals who have a stake in Uganda.
“Evangelicals have missionaries there, televangelists have shows on TV there. There is a substantial American Christian presence there,” Throckmorton said. “From the Ugandans’ point of view, the bill was passed as a way to make Uganda a more Christian nation; evangelicals could’ve been more vocal by saying, ‘This is not how it’s done.'”
It should be a source of great shame to American evangelicals that their message of Christianity is such that the Ugandans who supported this awful bill thought they were becoming a more Christian nation by doing so.
If American evangelicals like Lively knew what the Ugandans wanted to hear, and believed that what they wanted to hear was wrong, then they should have clearly said so, and not allowed them to interpret their words that way.
So I guess Christian fundamentalists aren’t Republican.
Because Republicans are the party of responsibility.
Or so they say often enough.
The evangelical American pastor is powerful because of God, no?
I haven’t noticed this.
There has been a strong backlash against American fundie xians (so called evangelicals) but this has been happening for decades. The fundies created the New Atheists and are holding the knife that is killing US xianity.
now they are trying to say that they have no responsibility for it.
I haven’t seen this either. Most of them seem delirously happy about it. Finally, they get to kill people again. Just like the good old days. Xianity has left a trail of millions of dead people all the way back to their beginning. It’s what they do when they can.
One of them would be me if they could. Like a lot of scientists I’ve been getting death threats from them for over a decade.
Hitchens paraphrasing: Xianity lost its best defense when it lost the power of the stack of firewood, noose, and gun.
One of the main reasons religion persists is the power to simply kill defectors. In the bible, being a defector is a death penalty offense. And there weren’t many open atheists until a few centuries ago. It was, after all, a death penalty offense.
They are well aware of this. The Enlightenment is their enemy and they hate it.
And if they ever regained their power, they would kill again. They say so themselves and often. The founder of xian Dominionism is a psychopath named Rushdooney. Under Rushdooney’s biblical law, 99% of the US population would end up dead under a pile of rocks.
It’s not uncommon for fundie xian leaders to advocate murder or mass murder. They do it all the time. It is who they are. And why not? If you can’t hate and kill, might as well be an Episcopalian or something.
The only theologian of note the fundies ever produced was Rousa Rushdooney, the founder of xian Dominionism, which now all but owns the GOP.
Rushdooney was a psychopathic genocidal maniac who wanted to kill 297 million Americans by instituting biblical law.