If the tweet embed fails, here's the House link
I'm about an hour behind the live-stream, but this is my live thread of the House Oversight Committee's hearing on "The Rise of Anti-LGBTQI+ Extremism and Violence in the United States."
— Heron Greenesmith, Esq. 🐀 (@herong) December 14, 2022
Watch live or along with me here: https://t.co/3yKnrJ4TaE
In Tanzania, the Dar es Salaam regional commissioner has asked the public to report gay people. "Give me their names," he said on Oct. 29. "My ad hoc team"—a committee of 17 police and media officials—"will begin to get their hands on them" in just one week. The next day, he reported that he'd already received over 100 names in over five thousand messages. Although the Tanzanian government clarified that this regional effort does not represent the national government's official policy, it was not clear if the national government intended to stop the Dar es Salaam regional purge.
The organization Jinsiangu, supported by the International AIDS Alliance (donate), has helped people relocate internationally to Nairobi, Kenya for their personal safety.
Tanzanian law, an inheritance from British colonialism, punishes men who have sex with other men with 30-years-to-life in jail.
"According to 2014 UNAIDS data, 17.6% of men who have sex with men in Tanzania are living with HIV — a rate more than four times higher than the 4.5% in the nation's general adult population. * * * Being forced into hiding also means people do not want to engage in any way with health services and will not test for infections or go to collect HIV treatment. People will avoid anything that will link them to being LGBT and subject to identification, [International HIV/AIDS Alliance executive director Christine] Stegling said."
Recently, LGBT organizations have been shuttered. In February 2017, Tanzania's deputy health minister claimed that homosexuality is not found among animals, only exists among people who live in cities, and is a social construct. The health ministry prohibited HIV/AIDS clinics from running their programs, and then arrested 13 people—including deporting three South African lawyers—who met to discuss how to challenge that new policy. The shutdown of the clinics and the arrest of the activists was done on the grounds that it is illegal to promote homosexuality.
According to a Guardian article: Geofrey Mashala, an activist who is "making a documentary about the Tanzanian LGBT community," said that, considering “all the steps we made as LGBT activists" over the past several years, "it’s like we have to start over again.” Erin Kilbride of the human rights group Front Line Defenders interviewed 80 LGBT people and sex workers earlier this year; "all but two said they had been sexually assaulted or raped by police in custody."
See: A harsh climate for many LGBTQ people in Africa is getting worse. Some blame the US, Nimi Princewill, CNN, March 16, 2026
Scott Lively is a Christian pastor and will be a gubernatorial candidate on the Massachusetts Republican primary ballot on Sept. 4, 2018. I encourage Massachusetts voters especially to pay attention to his personal record on LGBT issues. Here's some of his views as he currently represents them on his own campaign website (accessed May 12, 2018) where he also identifies himself as a Trump supporter.
On his homepage, he says that society must support the "primacy" of the "natural family" (which he defines by "life-long" monogamous heterosexual marriage and the getting of children "through birth or adoption") and should practice "tolerance for those who choose to live discretely [sic] outside the mainstream." (This is on his campaign homepage under "Seven Issues that Define My Campaign and My Life," Item 3, "Devotion to Family.") He does not define what it would mean for someone to live discreetly (i.e. unobtrusively to others), why that request does not infringe upon someone's dignity and right to free expression, and exactly what kind of intolerance he is threatening against them if he should notice their gay existence.
On his Issues page, under "My Position on LGBT Issues," he refers to "the LGBT movement" as "the anti-church". He wants to see "a new legal doctrine creating the 'Separation of LGBT and State'," meaning that the government would not be able to fund any organization that promoted "LGBT ideology" and that government officials would not be able to march in Pride parades. He says that so-called "Sexual Orientation Regulations" often have been used "as a sword to attack religious freedom and freedom of speech," though he gives no examples or references on this webpage, and that Massachusetts should have a policy that these "sexual orientation regulations" shall never "supersede the First Amendment rights of individuals, churches and religious organizations to freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion," though he gives no indication of why he believes that such conflicts (if they exist) can be resolved on the level of Massachusetts policy and are not rather a matter of how the U.S. Supreme Court interprets First Amendment and anti-discrimination laws.
He thinks such a restriction would be equivalent to the "separation of church and state" (hence why he names it "separation of LGBT and state"), yet he does not cut out theism from his own speech in the same way that he wants other people to cut out their beliefs about human sexuality. He says that government officials should not be able to lend their speech to a Pride parade, but he doesn't square this with why he, as candidate for governor, is entitled to write on his campaign homepage: "I believe the Bible is the Word of God, and the best source of guidance in every aspect of human life...God will prove Himself to every person who honestly seeks Him."
His Issues page also says: "I will work to pass a law following the Russian model of banning the promotion of non-traditional lifestyles to minors, a law for which I advocated while in Russia and the former Soviet Union in 2006 and 2007." Indeed, in 2013, Russia passed a law against distributing LGBT-normalizing "propaganda" to minors, meaning that it may be dangerous for anyone in Russia to simply acknowledge the existence of gay people in front of a child under 18 since they could be accused of promoting LGBT ideology. Lively wrote an open letter to Putin congratulating him for passing the law.
He was also involved with Uganda's "anti-homosexuality act," a bill that originally called for the death penalty for same-sex relations, which you can learn about on the Wikipedia page for Scott Lively.
Update: See this May 5, 2023 article: "The steady rise of anti-LGBTQ sentiment in Uganda is the direct result of a deliberate campaign engineered by attorney, author, and professional hate monger, Scott Lively. The Southern Poverty Law Center categorizes Lively’s Abiding Truth Ministries as an 'anti-gay hate group.'" — Rand Bishop, "America’s #1 Export to Africa: LGBTQ Hatred", Prism & Pen. (Hitting a paywall? Consider a paid membership on the platform.)
Same-sex relations have been illegal in Uganda for years, but in 2014, President Museveni signed stiffer penalties into law. Some activists say they are the worst in the world.
Much of the world was shocked to learn of the draconian law against same-sex relations that was recently passed in Uganda. People in Uganda can be sentenced to life in prison for even attempting to have sex with a person of the same sex.
Homosexuality, considered to be an act "against the order of nature," was already illegal in Uganda (as it is in 38 of 54 African countries, according to Amnesty International) and carried a jail term of up to 14 years. Gay people were already routinely subject to harassment. Considering that many countries are improving their treatment of gay people and allowing more sexual freedom, one might have hoped that Uganda would head in that direction, too, but it has not.
In one high-profile case, gay rights activist David Kato was murdered in his home on Jan 26, 2011, bludgeoned with a hammer, following the publication of his photograph in a newspaper with the inflammatory words "Hang Them."
Although the murderer was sentenced to a lengthy jail term, and although Ugandan activists staged the nation's first Gay Pride parade the next year, the social and political climate for gay people did not improve. In September 2012, a British man was jailed for producing a play with a Ugandan cast, "The River and the Mountain," about a gay businessman whose mother tries to cure his homosexuality and who is subsequently murdered by his own employees.
Uganda has been mulling more severe penalties for same-sex relations ever since a bill was introduced in 2009 by a member of parliament, David Bahati, that would have declared some same-sex activities to be capital crimes, earning the bill its nickname "Kill the Gays". European nations threatened to withdraw aid from Uganda - a nation of 31 million people that receives 10 percent of its gross national income from foreign aid - and the bill was not pursued at that time.
Nonetheless, in December 2013, Uganda's parliament passed a version of the bill, also known as "The Anti-Homosexuality Act," that dramatically increases the length of prison sentences and the reasons for which they can be given. Any attempt to have sex (possibly including flirtation, or a "1984"-like kind of "thoughtcrime"); any "counsel" provided to someone else about sex (as a sexual health educator would typically provide); any performance of a same-sex marriage ceremony (as a religious clergyperson would typically perform, although the marriage would not have legal standing anyway in Uganda); or simply "promoting homosexuality" (as, perhaps, through the advocacy of tolerance) can result in seven years in jail. If any sort of physical contact is involved in an alleged attempt to have sex, the penalty is increased to life in prison. Needless to say, there is also life imprisonment for "aggravated homosexuality" - a charge defined as having sex with a minor; having sex at all, even with protection, if one is infected with HIV; or simply having sex multiple times.
The law is open for abuse because the alleged "perpetrators" may be forced to pay unlimited compensation to their alleged "victims," in addition to serving jail time. Therefore, the "victims" have a great incentive to report people for such attempts; it may be an effective form of blackmail, putting one's personal enemy in prison and simultaneously extorting money from him.
Additionally, an alleged "victim" is permitted to commit any crime - presumably including assault - against an alleged "perpetrator," with impunity. Landlords have incentive to evict gay tenants, as there is a five-year prison penalty for allowing same-sex activity in one's house.
The bill's religious promoters referred to it as a "Christmas gift" to the nation.
After the Anti-Homosexuality Act was passed, Uganda's president Yoweri Museveni initially declined to sign it, suggesting that gay people needed treatment rather than punishment and claiming that there was a procedural problem because not enough members of parliament were present when the bill was passed. Nonetheless, on Feb. 15, 2014, Museveni announced to a conference of the ruling political party, the National Resistance Movement, that he would indeed sign the legislation, as he declared "a war with the homosexual lobby in the world".
Museveni signed the bill on Feb. 24, warning his "friends from the West" against "social imperialism - to impose social values of one group on our society." The day after that, a Ugandan newspaper called Red Pepper "outed" the names of 200 people it claimed were gay.
Undeterred by the complaint that other countries should not "impose" their values on Uganda's president, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry immediately warned that the United States might cut aid to Uganda, citing the bill's signing as "a tragic day for Uganda and for all who care about the cause of human rights." Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird said that he was "extremely disappointed."
Europe took more direct action: About $27 million in aid from Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands was either frozen or redirected away from the Ugandan government to charities in Uganda.
Within a few days, World Bank president Jim Yong Kim said that the bank would suspend a $90 million loan to Uganda. The loan had been intended for health services, and those projects could have been impacted by the law insofar as discussing sexuality in a healthcare context can now potentially run afoul of the law.
He wrote a column for the Washington Post acknowledging that 81 countries criminalize homosexuality, and he connected this discrimination with sexism more broadly. "Eliminating discrimination is not only the right thing to do; it's also critical to ensure that we have sustained, balanced and inclusive economic growth in all societies," Kim wrote. He also said, pointedly, that the fact that millions of Africans today receive medical treatment for AIDS may be credited to the activism of gay men and women throughout the world.
The Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa compared the "Anti-Homosexuality Act" to the former racial apartheid system in South Africa. If Uganda wished to take action against sex crimes, he suggested, why not focus on criminal penalties for rape, child molestation and human trafficking?
People in Uganda unfortunately have to cope with this restrictive law for the time being. A few are said to have fled the country for their own safety. Sexuality is part of human nature and human experience, and criminalizing it does not make it go away, so this law will surely be revisited in the near future.
This article was originally posted to Helium Network on March 5, 2014.
Photo: Africa Source 2 meet at Kalangala Island, Uganda. Taken by Frederick "FN" Noronha. © GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version Wikimedia Commons.
The Unholy Relationship Between Uganda's Anti-LGBTQ+ Law and US Evangelicalism, Emma Sanderson, blog for Chicago Council of Global Affairs, June 8, 2023
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