What he said: Parliament committee member says Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill is “useless”

According to this report from News 24, the bill is not as important as, well, important things.

Kampala – A Ugandan parliamentary panel said on Friday there is little backing for the country’s widely-condemned anti-gay bill and no timetable had been set for its debate.

“I think it is useless and will not achieve what it intends to achieve,” said Alex Ndeezi, a member of the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee tasked with reviewing the bill before it can be presented to the house.

The bill imposes drastic penalties for homosexual offences, including the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” in cases of rape of a minor by a person of the same sex, or where one partner has HIV.

The panel’s chairman Stephen Tashyoba said the draft law was not a priority.

“As far as I am concerned, we really have more urgent matters to discuss like electoral reforms, which are already behind schedule,” he said.

Homosexuality is already illegal in Uganda and offenders can be jailed for life.

– AFP

h/t gug

3 thoughts on “What he said: Parliament committee member says Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill is “useless””

  1. I am Ugandan, Anglican,and heterosexual. So Maazi as an informed Ugandan could you enlighten me about what constitutes Ugandan culture? Would you say Christianity and Islam are a Ugandan cultural innovation? Is homosexuality a western import? Is the existing law against “unnatural acts” a Ugandan creation or a holdover from the British colonial code? While you’re at it, could you point me to factors that would cause an individual to “choose” a lifestyle that would more probably lead them to be ostracised, physically abused and derided by the society they are born into? What are the pull factors, benefits or perks for someone to “choose” to be gay?

    It’s ironic that those who claim to defend/protect our indigenous heritage, more often than not end up defending foreign imports that the foreigners who brought them in the first place have largely discarded. The missionaries from the west and east were quick to demonise and suppress our indigenous culture and practices and surgically transplant their own beliefs onto the converted by persuasion, both gentle and coercion. It’s a tribute to their efforts that, in these times, Africans are taking up arms to defend practices and philosophies that are prostheses from the old west, relics of a different epoch. And they now have erstwhile partners too, we have now substituted the European colonialists for the conservative American evangelicals, and are now fighting their fight. They have managed to drag us into their mess as the fresh foot-soldiers while the armchair generals direct the war effort from across the pond, we are pawns in a high stakes game, we are the expendables. And the sad thing about it, we may wake up too late to smell the coffee that’s a brewing!

  2. Warren,

    If I were you I would not pop the champagne bottles yet. To borrow from your beloved Bible : the Ugandan State “works in mysterious ways”. You will be shocked when the revised form of the Bill suddenly becomes law. There is simply no way the Ugandan people will allow their desire to protect their culture from Western debauchery to be vetoed by Euro-American Gay Lobby Groups (using European and US governments as proxies).

  3. Hopefully….

    Now, can we or the people of Uganda hope to stop Museveni from spending $300 million of his country’s anticipated petro-shilings needlessly on six Russian Su30MK2 multirole jet fighter planes instead of need improvements in his country?

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