Anti-Gay Legislation in Uganda Sponsored by "The Family"

Last Wednesday, CaitieCat posted about what is perhaps the most heinous anti-gay legislation I've ever seen:

Under current Ugandan law, homosexuality is a crime punishable by life in prison. The proposed law would not just condemn HIV positive gay men and "repeat offenders" to death, it would also jail for three years anyone who knows a gay man but refuses to report them to authorities. Further, anyone who defends in public the rights of gays and lesbians would be subjected to a seven year prison term.

Shaker Linkmeister mentioned in comments that Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power—a recent book on the secretive fundamentalist organization of which many Congresspeople are members and which has been associated with a number of recent Congressional sex scandals (see more here, here, and here)—had been on NPR's "Fresh Air" and reported that the legislation was sponsored by a member of The Family.

"[The] legislator that introduced the bill, a guy named David Bahati, is a member of The Family," he said. "He appears to be a core member of The Family. He works, he organizes their Ugandan National Prayer Breakfast and oversees a African sort of student leadership program designed to create future leaders for Africa, into which The Family has poured millions of dollars working through a very convoluted chain of linkages passing the money over to Uganda."

And how did Sharlet discover the connection? "You follow [the] money," he said. You look at their archives. You do interviews where you can. It's not so invisible anymore. So that's how working with some research colleagues we discovered that David Bahati, the man behind this legislation, is really deeply, deeply involved in The Family's work in Uganda, that the ethics minister of Uganda, Museveni's kind of right-hand man, a guy named Nsaba Buturo, is also helping to organize The Family's National Prayer Breakfast. And here's a guy who has been the main force for this Anti-Homosexuality Act in Uganda's executive office and has been very vocal about what he's doing, in a rather extreme and hateful way. But these guys are not so much under the influence of The Family. They are, in Uganda, The Family."

You know, one of the things that strikes me about "The Family" is that they're the very thing conservative Christians have always accuse Jews of being—some shadowy religious organization that tries to control governments in other countries. It's just like how that same flavor of Christian schemes to convert children by rewarding kids who bring friends to church and targeting the youth market with Christian wrestling and Christian rock concerts and Christian extreme sporting events, but they incessantly accuse gays and feminists of child recruitment. Projection, projection, projection. When you want to find out what they're doing, just consider what they're accusing us of doing.

[H/T to Shaker David.]