John Oliver describes how some US evangelicals, likely frustrated by steadily losing ground in the battle for equal rights for the LGBT community here, have shifted their hate campaign to other countries and have found fertile ground in Uganda which, although it has anti-gay laws dating back to the British colonial period, had not intensified the bigotry until the recent push by people like Scott Lively.
Oliver also told the story of, and interviewed, Ugandan LGBT activist Pepe Julian Onziema.
Pepe seems like an exceptional person. Poor Uganda, still dealing with the aftertaste of colonialism. After the shit they’ve had to deal with thanks to christianity, it’s amazing there are so many believers there. 🙁
Great clip thanks. Major respect to the heroic Pepe Julian Onziema and I’m now cheering for Mississippi* legalising equal marriage pronto -- even more than I was before!
* Plus Uganda and everywhere else too.
The long, long reach of Henry VIII’s Buggery Act 1533 -- one of the first chapters in the English Reformation to replace canon law with civil law (as a mechanism to privatize the wealth of a convicted sodomite after their execution.)
But England-Wales abandoned the death penalty for buggery in 1861 (Offences against the Person Act) and repealed criminal sanctions in 1967 ; returning to the pre-reformation status of sodomy as ‘sin’ -- not crime.
From the Wolfenden Report, 1957:
“unless a deliberate attempt be made by society through the agency of the law to equate the sphere of crime with that of sin, there must remain a realm of private that is in brief, not the law’s business”
As Canadian Justice Minister Trudeau noted in 1967:
“There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”
Uganda is choosing to follow the US talibanigelicals instead of the Parliamentary trajectory.
Disastrous.