witch hunt

I should warn my readership right away that my attitude towards the gay rights movement is maybe not as enlightened as would be strictly dictated by an unfettered liberal conscience. I'm a fucking neanderthal, to put it bluntly, and my embrace of the gay rights movement is similar to my embrace of an actual live gay dude: a hug, at first, which morphs into a bro-hug with back-thumping, upon which I step back ever so slightly, stand there for a second, then mutter a quick, joking, "no homo", followed by nervous laughter, followed by an awkward silence.

I know you know about the whole Uganda thing. The bill, presented before parliament with the tacit approval of President Museveni, defined homosexuality as a crime against the state, and recommends nothing less than the death penalty for the splendidly named act of "aggravated homosexuality." It also prescribes a life sentence for the crime of "attempted aggravated homosexuality," which I guess is basically just hitting on a dude. You can read the full, original text here. The bill has been slightly toned down since then, but yeah it's still terrible, it's a human rights violation, and blah blah blah, but I wanted maybe to provide a little context.

Writing on his blog in the UK Guardian, Andrew Brown called the Uganda bill a "gay witch hunt," and it's an interesting choice of words. Brown is using the phrase "witch hunt" to mean a "campaign of persecution against a person or group of society holding unorthodox or unpopular views," similar to the "communist witch hunt" of McCarthyite America. And he's right, sort of, the gay thing is a "witch hunt", and it is bad to have a "witch hunt".

But what Brown and a lot of other Western commentators are ignoring is that there are a lot of witch hunts in Uganda, and indeed throughout Africa. And I mean witch hunts in the literal sense, as in citizens accusing somebody of being an actual, literal witch practicing witchcraft, then forming a lynch mob and killing them. This happens all the time.


So that's layer one, which in the US we associate with the Salem witch trials and pre-enlightment values and mass hysteria and what have you. This is history as interpreted by "The Crucible," in which a bunch of rural yahoos go nuts and start accusing each other of absurd crimes and a bunch of innocent people end up burnt at the stake. And it's a common enough occurrence, so common that even little kids are accused of being witches. Sometimes even toddlers. This all fits the standard Western interpretation of the phrase "witch hunt", in which the real criminals are not the accused, innocent victims, but their hypocritical prosecutors.

But even that interpretation is flawed, at least as applied around here, because here's the thing: there really are witches in Africa. Tons of them actually, and they really do practice witchcraft of the most profound and disturbing kind, including poisoning, kidnapping, animal mutilation and child sacrifice. The child sacrifice thing in particular is a really serious problem in Uganda, approaching an epidemic. Just watch this BBC mini-doc.



So while the whole witch hunt thing, by which I mean literal witch hunts, is obviously hysterical, it is also grounded in some kind of response to some actually very serious problems. Really there are two independent problems: little kids being killed by witches, and little kids being killed for being witches. And the (very real) incidence of the first case produces a disproportionate, hysterical response, which leads to the second case.


That's the context against which the gay "witch hunt" has to be understood. Yeah, this bill is a piece of shit, and of course no one should get the death penalty for delivering a BJ in the locker-room (if anything, they should be rewarded.) It's an absurd and hysterical overreaction. But Uganda really does have a gay problem, or rather gay problems, and let me just briefly enumerate them.

First is the unfortunate but true fact that homosexual men are in the highest risk group for contracting HIV, by a full order of magnitude over everyone else. And Africa, particularly sub-Saharan has the highest HIV positivity rates in the world. Now those are medical facts, not policy prescriptions, but they're a partial source of the hysteria; one of the legal definitions of "aggravated homosexuality" in the Uganda bill is deliberately conducting a same-sex relationship while knowingly having tested positive.

Second is the gay priest thing. This hasn't been that widely reported in the West, so let me put this in context: Uganda is a Catholic country, and a very serious one, with about 40% of the population observing regularly. And, due to HIV, famine, disease, and the world's highest birthrate, there are a lot of unwanted kids running around, and there are a lot of Catholic-run orphanages. You can see where I'm going with this, and if recent headlines in the US and Ireland are any guide, we are talking about a perfect storm for child molestation.

(You can get a good overview of the basic facts in this excellent article from Red Pepper, Uganda's top tabloid. Just kidding, there is no factual information there, but it should give you a general sense of the hysteria, and the headline is "HOMOS WANT TO KILL ME", and it does have this quote:

“We writhed in a homosexual frenzy. My eyes nearly came out of my head that night. It was severe sex like I'd never seen before, really angry sex. We both got off on it. That Priest is an amazingly ambitious and extra-ordinarily action-packed homosexual addict,” said Oundo.

BTW that is not even the tenth best quote from the article, which is really despicably filthy and incredibly entertaining, and should give you an idea of the general tenor of the debate.)

Lastly, there is the cultural arrogance of the West. This is a big problem in Uganda, where practically every government decision is tied to some Western donor's pursestrings. A common local viewpoint is that a bunch of decadent Westerners are coming in and promoting homosexuality as some kind of Trojan horse assault on the African family. Of course, they feel this way in central Texas, too, and as a result there have been several half-assed attempts by left-wing US media to link the entire bill to the sordid influence of the US evangelical movement. (This, by the way, is horseshit. Extreme homophobia predates US evangelism by about fifty millenia, and Ugandans are gonna hate the shit out of homosexuals with or without the West's help.)

But let's do a thought experiment, yeah? Imagine a world where Uganda had all the money and was donating it to the U.S. of A, but culturally everything else is the same. Well, polygamy is very widespread here. And one thing that the Ugandans would want to know, basically immediately, is why the US takes such an narrow view of it. After all, it's a victimless practice conducted by consenting adults who genuinely love each other, right? And there has been a history of violent persecution against polygamists in the US, hasn't there? And it's even practiced in the animal kindgom! It's normal! And natural! I'm envisioning a TV show, "Poly Eye for the Mono Guy," where a bunch of wacky Ugandan polygamist personalities take a normal monogamous dude and give him tips on grooming, etiquette, sexual stamina, settling inter-wifely disputes, et cetera.



Of course the context doesn't excuse the insane overreaction, but maybe it makes it less surprising? I mean even the nicest people I've met in Africa are insane homophobes; many of them also believe in witches. And all I mean to suggest, gently, is that maybe in a country where children are being slaughtered by witch doctors, and where old ladies are drowned in rivers to cure them from demonic possession, and where cattle rustlers are beheaded on sight, and where I once met a man with no less than five wives, and over fifty kids, all I'm saying is that maybe they're just not ready for the homo-tolerant ways of the west. And I'm not even saying that; I'm just saying.