With Christmas coming, Copenhagen a failure and the British economy still sliding merrily down the shitter, I can’t blame anyone right now for wanting to barricade themselves in behind a wall of dirty snow, swaddle themselves in tinsel and crack open the sherry/port/meths.  Personally I am really looking forward to a few days of placid, cow-like self-indulgence and cabin fever with my family – I deserve it.   But that said, I would still like to get down on my knees (I am on them now – honest) and BEG people not to forget about what’s going on in Uganda right now.  Being anything other than straight may be no walk on the heath in this country, but we still don’t face:

1. Life imprisonment for homosexual sex
2. the death penalty for homosexual sex with a minor (that old, spurious connection of homosexuality and paedophilia again)
3. Imprisonment if you know a LGBT person and don’t report them to the authorities.

These new laws look set to make life for Uganda’s already excluded, persecuted sexual minorities a living hell.  But do we have the right to meddle in another country’s affairs?  Isn’t all this, in Chamberlain’s word’s about Hitler, “a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing”?

No, it isn’t.  To suggest that the Ugandan government’s plans to let the state murder gays for having sex are not our business is callous and short-sighted.  After all, Uganda’s current anti-gay laws (which threaten penalties of up to 14 years for gay sex) were created when the British ruled the country as a colony, in an attempt to stamp out practices that were acceptable before their arrival.

While the British didn’t create the current bill, we did introduce the skewed moral template that made it possible in the first place.  And that damaging meddling has continued.  The American evangelist group Family Life Network is one of the major forces behind the bill, having created an anti-gay taskforce in the country during workshops this May.

This cancerous organisation has been peddling homophobic hate for years.  One of its prime movers has even written a book claiming Nazism was a homosexual plot, both a sick joke and an insult to the thousands of gays imprisoned or murdered in Nazi camps.   These are exactly the same bigots who have tried to make gays lives a misery in the West – that they have resoundingly failed is a testament to the strength of gay activism.  Now they are cutting their losses by trying to ruin lives in countries where civil society is weaker.  Uganda does have groups actively fighting the law – such as the courageous Sexual Minorities Uganda – but they don’t have the anything like the resources to fully fight groups like the FLN.  Which is why they need us – badly.

And yes, we can make a difference.  Already President Museveni has “threatened” not to sign a bill that would make Uganda an international pariah. If we step up pressure, then the Ugandan government may well change its mind.  Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has already called for Uganda to be expelled from the Commonwealth – Brown and Cameron need to follow suit.  And while temporarily cutting aid to Uganda may seem cruel given the country’s poverty, how can we validate governments who would like to see us banged up for life or hanged?

Please write to or email your MP urging them to take action on this – while they don’t have the highest of reputations right now, I find that ending letters with the sentence “please write back to me informing me of the steps you have taken on my behalf” invariably wrings some action out of them.   You can also email the Ugandan High Commissioner, Joan Rwabyomere, at info@ugandahighcommission.co.uk

If that sounds like a lot of effort, imagine what it feels like to be a queer Ugandan now.  Already subject to persecution, they are now being slandered to their own neighbours as predatory paedophiles, threatened with life in prison or even death simply for having sex.  Confiding their problems to anyone, meanwhile, only puts those people themselves at risk of being locked up.  I expect they’re terrified, feeling that they’ve got no one in the world to help them.

But they do have someone, don’t they?  Us.

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