KAMPALA, Uganda — The Episcopal priest who first documented links between U.S. evangelicals and an anti-gay bill in Uganda, the Rev. Kapya Kaoma, says that the “only person who can make a difference now in Africa is Pope Francis.”

On Tuesday, Uganda passed a private member’s bill making some same-sex acts punishable by death. The law includes punishments for the “recruitment, promotion and funding” of homosexuality. The legislation passed nearly unanimously but tees up a broader cultural war between nonprofit and advocacy groups in Africa, Western countries and global religious denominations.

Reuters reported that more than 30 African countries, including Uganda, already ban same-sex relations. But the new law emerging in Uganda would be the first to outlaw people identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer, according to Human Rights Watch.

The law bans same-sex intercourse, promoting and abetting homosexuality and conspiracy to engage in homosexuality. Punishments would include death for what the law calls “aggravated homosexuality” (sex with people under age 18 when a perpetrator is HIV positive) and life in prison for gay sex.

“Homosexual acts are already illegal in Uganda but this bill introduces many new criminal offences,” the BBC reported. “As well as making merely identifying as gay illegal for the first time, friends, family and members of the community would have a duty to report individuals in same-sex relationships to the authorities.”

An evangelical project

Kaoma, from Boston University’s Centre for Global Christianity & Mission, who went to a conference in the Ugandan capital Kampala in 2009 attended by Western evangelicals, has urged Francis to write a letter to his bishops and priests in Africa.

Kaoma had filmed undercover at the conference, documenting Christian evangelist Scott Lively’s appearance at the conference as well as Don Schmierer, who has worked with “homosexual recovery groups” and written books on “ex-gay therapy.” Caleb Lee Brundidge, an “ex-gay” who has experience working as a “sexual reorientation coach,” joined forces with them. Kaoma and others showed how the men treated Uganda as a beacon for their activism to criminalize homosexuality and people who are not heterosexual.

Some lawmakers introduced broad legislation into the country’s Parliament weeks later in 2009, before a Uganda court nullified the legislation on a technicality only six months later. Now, 14 years later, the east African country faces a repeat of this legislation, after a draft bill introduced into Parliament on March 9 was passed Tuesday.

In 2017, a landmark case against Scott Lively was filed in his home state of Massachusetts for crimes against humanity by nongovernmental organization Sexual Minorities Uganda, or SMUG, and the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights.

The court case was eventually thrown out on jurisdictional grounds. Judge Michael Ponsor of the U.S. District Court in Springfield, Massachussetts, ruled that the case could not be tried in the country as Lively acted entirely in a foreign territory. But he said that he was behind “crackpot bigotry” and “a vicious and frightening campaign of repression against LGBTI (“I” referring to intersex) people in Uganda.” LGBTQ+ activists in Uganda and beyond took this as a victory.  

SMUG Executive Director Frank Mugisha, a leading gay activist in Uganda, described the case as a “huge win for SMUG.” The organization was deregistered last August in a new regulatory blitz targeting LGBTQ+ groups in Uganda.

An appeal to Pope Francis

“The only solution to the plight of LGBT persons in Africa is Pope Francis,” Kaoma told ReligionUnplugged.com. “If Pope Francis would say that he doesn’t want any Roman Catholic priest, nor any Roman Catholic Bishop, to sign onto a law that criminalizes LGBT people in Africa, then the bill in Uganda dies. All the bills in Africa will die. His bishops, his priests are the ones championing the criminalization of LGBT people in Africa.”

Kaoma urged Francis needed to act quickly before innocent LGBTQ+ people die or committ suicide in refugee camps, such as Dadaab Refugee Complex in Kenya, which is Africa’s biggest camp and one that is home to hundreds of thousands of refugees from the continent, including some members of LGBTQ+ communities.  

Kaoma said that across the continent, “Roman Catholic bishops are on the forefront of these bills. ”Despite his plea to Francis, Kaoma said that he was not holding out hope for the pope to intervene in the legislation because he wouldn’t want to contradict bishops in Africa.

“Is it because we are black?” he asked. “Is it because we Africans are too black to be seen, our blood is different?” He also pointed out that the speaker of Uganda’s Parliament, Anita Among, who has been championing the bill, is Catholic.

Speaker Among has criticized Western liberalism for imposing its values on her country and on Africa regarding sex and gender. In recent days, she rejected intimidation tactics such as threats to impose travel bans on Ugandans because of the legislation.

“This business of intimidating that ‘you will not go to America’ — what is America?” she said.

Some historical context

Uganda is home to two martyr shrines dedicated to some of the male martyrs publicly executed in the late 1800s for refusing to have sex with a Ugandan king after converting to Christianity. The story has been appropriated by Christian leaders, most recently the Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, Stephen Samuel Kaziimba. He said that the martyrs “stood firm in their Christian faith and were martyred for it.”

When Pope Francis visited Uganda in November 2015, he spoke to thousands of Ugandans and Africans at the memorial site of the martyrs. To some Africans, Christianity and a traditional view of sex, gender and family provide stability and a defense from sexually transmitted diseases, economic weakness and sexual harassment or abuse from powerful leaders or chiefs. Polygamy is still practiced in some parts of Africa.

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, a conservative Christian who has been in power since 1986, scolded Westerners for trying to impose their norms, culture and politics on his countrymen and his continent. ”Western countries should stop wasting the time of humanity by trying to impose their practices on other people,” he said in a national address this month. “Homosexuals are deviants.”

Lawmakers celebrated their victory this week as a way for Uganda to assert its own governance and norms on topics of morality, family values and religion.

LGBTQ+ activists and related organizations, meanwhile, aim to appeal to religious leaders and power structures in the Catholic and Anglican churches to advocate for some harmony between the rights of LGBTQ+ people and religious people with differing views on sex and gender.

Kaoma told the Anglican Consultative Council — ACC-18 — which took place in the capita of Accra, Ghana, last month, that ”God does not make mistakes.”

“I challenged the Archbishop of Africa to tell me if God made a mistake when God created intersex kids,” Kaoma said. “Because people in our church, Africans in Kenya, in Uganda, with kids who are born intersex, did God make a mistake?”

Representatives of the Anglican church in Uganda declined to comment for this article.

An ongoing culture war

Uganda’s most prominent LGBTQ+ activist warned that it had a lot of influence in the multifaith Inter-Religious Council of Uganda. “I am willing to be in the parliamentary gallery, watching every process happening around this legislation,” Mugisha said.

Kaoma said that the truth was that religious fundamentalists from America and other places have not cut off their relationship with Africa.

“They only look for opportunities to strike back,” he said. He said one of the progressives’ weaknesses is that they sometimes think the game is over when they win a round. “The conservatives believe in this concept of ‘we continue to fight,’“ he said. They “wait for a moment to strike when you are looking the other way.”

Amy Fallon is an independent journalist based in Kampala, Uganda.