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Ugandan Newspaper Publishes Pictures of Homosexuals and Calls For Them To Be Hanged

The homophobia in Uganda has long been an international scandal. However, nothing prepared most of us for a front-page story in one of Uganda’s leading papers entitled “100 Pictures of Uganda’s Top Homos Leak.” Slapped next to the headline was a banner reading “Hang Them.”

Since the newspaper ran, at least four gay Ugandans on the list have been attacked and many others have fled into hiding. The role of the newspaper reminds one of the state-owned newspaper Kangura in the Rwandan genocide.

We recently saw how legislation was introduced a year ago in Uganda to execute homosexuals — legislation drafted after a visit by U.S. conservative ministers and activists.

Almost two dozen homosexuals have been attacked over the last year and over a dozen have been arrested.

The Ugandan Rolling Stone ran the cover one year after the introduction of the legislation and further claimed that homosexuals were raiding schools. Managing editor, Giles Muhame, said the article was “in the public interest. We felt there was need for society to know that such characters exist amongst them . . . they take advantage of poverty to recruit Ugandans. In brief we did so because homosexuality is illegal, unacceptable and insults our traditional lifestyle.’

Source: Washington Post

Jonathan Turley

21 thoughts on “Ugandan Newspaper Publishes Pictures of Homosexuals and Calls For Them To Be Hanged”

  2. Amy Goodman interviewed Jeff Sharlet on Democracy Now today.

    Anti-Gay Fervor in Uganda Tied to Right-Wing U.S. Evangelicals
    http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/21/anti_gay_fervor_in_uganda_tied

    Summary from Democracy Now: Human rights activists in Uganda are warning that the lives of gay people are in danger after a newspaper published a front-page story featuring the names and photographs of what it called Uganda’s 100 “top” gays and lesbians alongside a yellow banner that read “Hang Them.” We look at the ties of the anti-gay movement in Uganda to the far-right evangelical movement here in the United States with Jeff Sharlet, author of “C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy.”

  3. raflaw,

    What would juan do….that is the cry of the posse comatatus…

  4. This type of “journalism” reminds me of the main stream media here in the states. I have no doubt that Fox News or any of the Republican rags would do the same story if they thought it would advance their plans to regain control of the country. What wonderful Christians! WWJD?

  5. Did Jim “Mountain” Infofe write this?? No, let me guess again…. humm.. Tom Coburn??? No? …hummm… How about that guy Ensign from Nevada??? No…. hummm… So does the “Family” go into secret session to decide how this newspaper was going to spew this demand??

    Just astounding stuff… Humans truly know how to treat other humans now days…

  6. I hate to think of Christians being blamed for these publications. I hope the Pope and the leaders of other religions denounce these publications.

  8. “I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.
    Kahlil Gibran (1883 – 1931) “

  9. I should be ashamed of myself….aren’t all buttmen hung….just differently…..by Juan Long….

  10. Tom: As someone who gets to wear both the yellow and pink triangles I could not agree with you more. Even without the “kill the gays” law in effect they are arresting gays and getting them to “repent” in the state-owned media.

    I recall that one poor schnook said that he was paid by a European pedophile gang to recruit children into homosexuality. His picture and “testimony” were in the newspapers.

    Astonishingly, in this country, we have a gay organization (GOProud) supporting anti-gay Tea Party Christianist crackpots. As Tea Baggers they are supporting O’Donnell, Angle and even Paladino. Their most energetic endorsement is the jerk who opposes Barney Frank in the MA-5 CD. He opposes the repeal of DADT and even opposes civil unions.

  11. Screw Goodwin’s law… Anyone want to track down German newspaper headlines from, say, the leadup to Kristallnacht?

    Look at the “sub-headlines”:
    “We Shall Recruit 1000,000[sic] Innocent Kids – Homo”
    and
    “Parents Now Face Heartbreaks as Homos Raid Schools”

    They’re clearly learning their moral panic skills from the worst of the UK “newspapers.” It’s interesting that they are making reference to schools – neighboring Kenya just fired more than 1,000 male teachers under allegations that they had sexually abused girls from 12 to 15 years old.

    I’d love to joke about this horrible “journalism” (I keep expecting to see a story about Bat Boy on that cover page) but this is really scary.

    Also, what percentage of the US population sees the world this way? 1%? 5%? 20%?

  12. anon nurse,

    “Crazy for God” is one of the books I have on my list. I’ve seen the book’s author, Frank Schaeffer, interviewed a few times on TV.

  13. No, I was the one who implied that it’s only about “The Family”, which isn’t correct and is not what I intended.

    This runs deep in our culture. Chris Hedges lays it out well in one of his books about “the fascism of the religious right”. Another book, “Crazy for God”, is a look at right-wing fundamentalism from someone whose roots are in “the movement”, with all its disparate groups.

  15. Elaine: It is more than just “The Family.” Look to the Arlington Group and the related Council for National Policy. The Family is presumably part of both. So, by the way, are groups like The Unification Church (Moonies) and The Church of Scientology (both of which have representatives attending Arlington Group meetings).

    The anti-gay, anti-choice religious right is far more pernicious than most people realize. Why do you think that EVERY Tea Party Candidate is a Christianist crackpot while the Tea Party is supposed to be a secular libertarian movement?

  16. Well said, DCHart. (This garbage has, in fact, hit the streets of America, albeit in a different way. Joe Miller’s “goons” in Alaska are a part of it, IMO.)

  17. Yep. Elaine beat me to the punch. “The Family.” This has “The Family” written all over it.

  18. Jeff Sharlet, author of “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,” talks about The Family’s link to anti-gay legislation in Uganda:

    From Harper’s Magazine (9/29/2010)
    Inside C Street–Six Questions for Jeff Sharlet
    By Scott Horton
    http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/09/hbc-90007656

    QUESTION: As Harper’s readers know, you have linked the Family to harsh anti-gay legislation in Uganda. Speaking to The New Yorker, the Family denies the links. How do you make out their fingerprints on the kill-the-gays bill?

    ANSWER: By asking them. Bob Hunter, designated by the Family as a spokesman to respond to the Uganda fiasco, has referred to David Bahati, the author of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, as a member of the Family. Hunter and Bahati both told me that Hunter had paid a visit to Bahati in Kampala to assure Bahati that he remains in good standing, despite Hunter’s personal opposition to the bill. I give Hunter credit for being vocal about that; but there’s a profound lack of accountability at every other level. The Family built the prayer group structure from which the bill emerged. For readers not familiar with it, by the way, “harsh” is an understatement: life imprisonment for gay sex, death for “serial offenders,” seven years for “promotion,” and three years for failing to turn in a known homosexual.

    When I asked Bahati, in Kampala, whether there was a connection between the Family and the bill (he calls the group the Fellowship but also acknowledges it as the Family), he said, “There is no ‘connection.’ They are the same thing. The bill is the Fellowship. It was our idea.” An idea, he added, that he’d believed in alignment with the biblical principles they shared, based on his multiple visits to the National Prayer Breakfast and to the Cedars, their Arlington headquarters, and on the many visits to his Family prayer group in the Parliament by Family men such as Sen. Jim Inhofe and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who emphasize there what Inhofe calls the “political philosophy of Jesus,” something he says he learned from the Family. Bahati brought the bill to a private meeting of international Family leaders before he introduced it; he says he got a green light. The Family says they expressed caution. It’s possible both things are true, after a fashion—the Family rarely risks its access by holding its members accountable. I thought Bob Hunter had tried to do so, but we spoke as I went to press with the book, and, perhaps trying to distance himself from Bahati, he told me that Bahati’s group of MPs wasn’t even their most influential—that’d be the “power group,” as he put it, that meets every Friday.

    Tim Kreutter, an American associated with the Family who lives in Uganda, has repeatedly said he neither supports nor condemns the bill. That’s not exactly speaking truth to power, but then, Kreutter doesn’t see that as his job. He’s the author of that document, “Eight Core Aspects,” that speaks of Acts 9:15. He’s also Bahati’s mentor. He’s not a hateful man, himself, and he certainly doesn’t share Bahati’s dream — in a “perfect world,” Bahati told me one day over lunch at his house, every gay person would be killed. But Kreutter builds up the power structures that make such dreams possible. When I asked him why the “kings” the Family cultivates are so often corrupt or worse, he said, “Because that’s what’s there.” He seemed puzzled by the implication of the question, that power isn’t its own justification. Which strikes me as a shame, because as a non-Christian who writes a great deal about Christianity, that’s what I’m ultimately attracted by—not perversions of the faith like C Street’s or Bahati’s, but the prophetic tradition it carries on from Judaism, the idea that faith is itself a challenge to power.

  19. This is an export of hate courtesy of our domestic Taliban who are aggressive participants in Uganda’s misadventures. This is a vision of what the Christian right would like to see in America.

    This is what sharia really looks like; You don’t have to be Muslim to play.

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