THE GUARDIAN: American groups have helped to establish global web who share ideas and funding in bid to restrict gay and trans rights
When the US evangelical preacher and anti-LGBTQ+ crusader Scott Lively landed in Uganda in 2009 to warn of the “gay agenda”, he was arriving after a series of culture-war defeats at home.
More and more US states were recognizing same-sex marriage, and opinion polls were showing fewer and fewer Americans objected. Lively was there to offer Uganda’s lawmakers some advice on how to drum up outrage. “Emphasize the issue of the homosexual recruitment of children,” he advised.
Five years later, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni signed a law that made same-sex relationships punishable by death, asserting that western groups and gay people were “coming into our schools and recruiting young children into homosexuality”.
As wave of anti LGBTQ+ legislation sweeps the US, some may hear echoes of Lively’s messaging. Fine-tuned in Africa and elsewhere, arguments used to attack rights overseas have been re-imported to the US as the religious right warns again that the left and gay people are “grooming seven-year-olds” and “promoting pedophilia”.
The spread across the world illustrates how America’s evangelical and Catholic right has globalized over the past 15 years by helping establish a vast web of anti-LGBTQ+ zealots who share ideas, messaging and funding. » | Tom Perkins | Sunday, July 9, 2023
Gosh! It’s so amazing how ignorant the Evangelical right are in America and around the world. They want to be able to live their own lives freely, lives based largely often on myth and fable, yet want to deny others the right to pleasure and self-fulfilment.
I really hope that these women, these throwbacks, are giving serious consideration to returning to the home to procreate, look after their children, do the housework and bake cookies. For isn’t that the life that the Bible expects of these women? Kinder, Küche, Kirche and all that! – © Mark Alexander
