The Crater

As I plugged on here a couple weeks ago, I’ve recently joined the staff at ShortFormBlog, posting on most weekday mornings. It’s a microblog, which means brevity is the essence of success, and as my writing here perhaps attests, I find myself having to reign in my long-winded screeds. Something happened yesterday, though, that I posted a photo and paragraph caption about, and in a twenty-four hour period it was liked/reblogged on Tumblr over one thousand times, which by any general understanding I have of Tumblr (I had not been too familiar with it prior to starting) is a staggering number. It struck me especially, reading many of the comments people attached to the short piece on their own blogs, that something distinctly emotional and evocative had sparked in people when they read the post, and truthfully,  it isn’t hard to understand. The same feeling washed over me when I read the news early yesterday morning. So, I decided I would take to The Crater today to try to expand on the story.

The Ugandan Parliament, for those of you who aren’t aware, is currently mulling over a rather famous and very heinous piece of legislation. Its official name is the “Anti-Homosexuality Bill,” though in American media circles you may be most likely to have heard of it through political host Rachel Maddow, who coined it the “Kill The Gays Bill,” which is sadly in no way hyperbolic. The legislation stipulates that somebody who is HIV-positive and engages in gay sex, somebody who engages in gay sex with a person under eighteen years old, or somebody who simply engages in repeated, or “serial” offenses of homosexuality, is subject to execution. The bill’s author and chief promoter, Ugandan Member of Parliament David Bahati, has recently floated the idea that he might remove the death penalty and replace it with a simple life imprisonment, which is the most sub-zero of all cold comforts. Additionally, your responsibility as a witness in this matter is considerable; if you know of a person engaging in homosexuality, you must report it within twenty-four hours to the authorities. Failure to do so invites a possible maximum conviction of three years in prison.

It goes without saying that what’s at stake is quite literally the freedom and justice of thousands upon thousands of Uganda’s homosexual men and women. This is not arguing a piece of legislation in a vacuum, or trying to highlight logical extremes- it is an inherently evil (so far as we can understand the word) action that MP Bahati has taken to sponsor this bill, and whatever the outcome may be, he will ideally be held responsible in some form of international criminal proceeding. His justifications for this authorship hinge on a number of tired, vicious canards about homosexuals, predominantly that they are praying on children and trying to recruit them into what Bahati considers a mortal sin.  And, as he stated in this simultaneously chilling and infuriating interview (with the aforementioned Rachel Maddow), “the wages of sin is death.”

The bill comes at a time of profound terror and intimidation for Uganda’s gay community, thanks in large part to the claims of a necessity for biblical godliness, misinformation about the targeting and recruitment of children, and bullshit like this. A critical turn in the story of David Kato, though, came when a small time Ugandan tabloid, titled “Rolling Stone” (much to the chagrin of the proper version’s editors, who denounced the paper as horrific and sought legal action against them), published this cover:

"100 Pictures of Uganda's Top Homos Leak," "HANG THEM"

To summarize, for those who can’t make out the text:

The two men pictured on the cover, examples of the leaked list of Uganda’s “100 top homos?” The one on the left is David Kato, one of Uganda’s only openly gay activists, and a loud and forceful voice against David Bahati’s efforts to implement execution and life imprisonment for Ugandan gays (you can listen here to a segment Kato recorded for NPR on the topic). He sued the tabloid for this presentation, as well as for their outing and targeting of homosexuals, and on January 3rd, a high court ruled he had won that case. “Rolling Stone” was told they could no longer identify homosexuals in their pages. After this ruling, his friend Julian Pepe Onziema says, Kato complained that people had been making threats against him, harassing him and stating they’d “take care of him.” You may fear where this is going, and you’d be right to do so.

Somebody broke into David Kato’s house on Thursday, and struck him twice in the head with a hammer, according to reports. He died from the injuries en route to the hospital (another NPR story, remembering Kato, here).

David Kato, murdered January 26th, 2011

The next day, at Kato’s funeral service, an Anglican priest presiding over Kato’s funeral decried homosexuality before gay rights activists, according to BBC, “stormed the pulpit and prevented the priest from continuing.”

The Ugandan authorities have said that there is yet no evidence that Kato’s murder had anything to do with his sexuality. This seems at best dubious, and at worst deliberately negligent; and while I admit a general ignorance of Ugandan civil structure, the government that considers David Bahati’s legislation instead of drumming him out of parliament in shame isn’t one I have an overwhelming measure of trust in to prosecute David Kato’s murder.

To be continued…