Uganda's Museveni signs new law prescribing death penalty for 'aggravated homosexuality.'
Comparisons with Florida's 'Don't Say Gay' laws are unavoidable.
But while Uganda remains under the spotlight for its anti-homosexuality act, Florida's purported 'don't say gay' bill is also back in the vogue for what critics have defined as the state's pandering to the conservatives. — WION
The cruel, authoritarian, homophobic policies of some African governments are being met with self-righteous indignation in the West. But comparisons between homophobic leaders like Uganda’s President Museveni and US anti-woke Republicans like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are inevitable.
REUTERS — Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni signed one of the world's toughest anti-LGBTQ laws, including the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality", drawing Western condemnation and risking sanctions from aid donors.
Same-sex relations were already illegal in Uganda, as in more than 30 African countries, but the new law goes further.
It stipulates capital punishment for "serial offenders" against the law and transmission of a terminal illness like HIV/AIDS through gay sex. It also decrees a 20-year sentence for "promoting" homosexuality.
Ugandan law doesn’t criminalize those who identify as LGBTQ, a key concern for campaigners, who condemned an earlier draft of the legislation as an egregious attack on human rights. But the new law still prescribes the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality,” which is defined as cases of sexual relations involving people infected with HIV, as well as with minors and other categories of vulnerable people.
LGBTQ rights campaigners say the new legislation is unnecessary in a country where homosexuality has long been illegal under a colonial-era law criminalizing sexual activity “against the order of nature.” The punishment for that offense is life imprisonment.
Meanwhile, American MAGAs and neo-fascists are promoting similar, if not as extreme, anti-LGBTQ policies wherever they can gain control of state houses and legislatures. Museveni’s policies in Uganda are the envy of MAGA Republicans like DeSantis who last year signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill into law in Florida as part of his anti-woke, agenda.
DeSantis, who announced his candidacy for president this week, is promising to make the rest of the country and the world, like Florida. Taking a page from Hitler’s Mein Kamph, he promised this week to “destroy leftism in America.”
To show he means business, he traveled to London this week to support UK business secretary Kemi Badenoch in her campaign to bring the “war on woke” to the UK.
In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, DeSantis said Badenoch had offered her support for his “war on woke”, which has included a bitter legal battle with Disney after the company questioned a Florida law aimed at limiting discussion of homosexuality and gender in schools. DeSantis said: “She complimented what we are doing in Florida. She committed that it is what they are trying to do in Britain.
According to the Telegraph:
The governor of Florida felt immediately comfortable in Britain, the birthplace of the philosophical principles that he holds dear.