Uganda's Daily Monitor raises its voice on behalf of defenseless

While the three American anti-gay activist and Exodus International are either too cowardly or callous to speak out against the latest proposed Anti-Homosexuality bill before Uganda’s Parliament, the opposition newspaper The Daily Monitor today raises its voice on behalf of the defenseless. Everyone in Uganda well knows the abject terror of the nighttime knock on the door, and The Monitor reminds all of us of the legacy behind Uganda’s latest drive to add the death penalty for homosexuality:

Do you know the fear which arrives with the knock on the door in the middle of the night? If you were an outspoken opponent of any government from 1962 until today you felt it even if it never happened to you. Do you know the terror of women who lived through the civil war in Luweero or LRA atrocities in the north? They went out every day knowing they faced rape and murder, suffering because they were women.

If you are a gay man or woman living in Uganda today, then you carry the same burden of persecution for your identity. You risk death or torture or public humiliation at the hands of a community blinded by hate and religious dogma. Your plight is about to worsen, since another bill making you illegal will soon pass into law.

Gay people are not the only ones who should fear the new bill criminalising homosexuality. Measures which make who you are a crime are easy to manipulate. It’s easy to persecute gay people in Uganda because they are a very small group which has no political or mainstream social support.

If you think those two groups deserve what they get, then recall the days not so long ago when you felt unfairly targeted for what you are. The last 47 years were not kind to many of us. So it is astonishing that we seem to have learned nothing about the importance of diversity to stability and development.