Four days ago, David Kato was brutally murdered in Mukono, a town about 13 miles east of Uganda’s capital city of Kampala.  He was one of Uganda’s leading gay rights activists.  Inspired by the time he spent in South Africa during its transition from apartheid, Kato courageously helped found and served as an officer for the gay rights group, Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG).  For this he was targeted by the Ugandan tabloid Rolling Stone (no affiliation with the American magazine by the same name), which regularly published the names and photographs of known Ugandan homosexuals and advocated for them to be executed.  Kato fought back.  He and two other SMUG members sued the magazine and won earlier this month.  For this, it appears, he was bludgeoned to death.

When I first learned of Kato’s murder, my initial reaction was a terrible sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach – the kind one feels when something horrifying has happened in a familiar, beloved place.  The same one I felt last July when I read that a bomb had exploded ¼ mile from my Kampala apartment.  You see, for the whole of 2009, the very year Uganda’s infamous anti-homosexuality bill was first proposed in parliament, I was working with a human rights organization in Mukono.  I regularly rode the matatu buses around town, walked the dusty roads in my ridiculously impractical yet requisite business attire, endured shouts of “muzungu!” (“white person!”) everywhere I went and dined on meals of matoke, chicken and rice in the small, simple restaurants that lined the main drag of Mukono Town.

Not unlike the rest of Uganda, the rule of law in Mukono is shaky at best.  Indeed, as one might imagine, homosexuals are not the only ones whose rights are being violated in Mukono.  For instance, my organization worked with victims of land grabbing – a group mostly made up of widows and orphans who had been illegally forced from their homes and land upon the deaths of their husbands or fathers.  And in September 2009 riots in Mukono and Kampala led to mob rule in areas charged by an ongoing feud between the Baganda tribe and the Ugandan government.  For days we heard gunshots in the distance as we hunkered down with friends and tracked real-time developments around the city using Twitter.  The Pearl of Africa, in all of its beauty and apparent stability, can change on a dime – and it does quite often.

The organization I was with in Uganda is a Christian organization.  While loosely evangelical in orientation, it maintains a commitment to ecumenism, placing itself “in the tradition of abolitionist William Wilberforce and transformational leaders like Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King, Jr.”  It provides assistance to victims without discrimination in regard to religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.  I point this out because almost every article I have read regarding the anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda links the bill to American evangelicals.  While it is indeed true that fundamentalist American pastors have had a nefarious influence in Uganda, to blame a nebulous and monolithic group called “evangelicals” is both unfair and inaccurate.  As an evangelical, I mourn for David Kato.  I mourn for all those whose opportunity for a peaceable life is precluded by those who would take advantage of a weak and often corrupt public justice system to bully the vulnerable.  We dealt with these bullies every day in Mukono.  They are indeed plentiful.

So what is the truth when it comes to US influence on this anti-homosexuality bill?  It appears that the influencers with whom we are dealing are not your run-of-the-mill evangelical pastors.  Indeed these individuals merit the special and distinct designation of fundamentalist.  For instance, many of the articles I have read on the bill traces US influence back to a conference in March 2009, in which three Americans traveled to Uganda to speak against homosexuality.  One of these individuals is Scott Lively of Abiding Truth Ministries, a malignantly homophobic group committed to “converting” homosexuals and “exposing the hidden false assumptions and deceptive rhetoric of ‘gay’ arguments.”  Lively’s written materials include such titles as The Pink Swastika, which blames much of the Holocaust on the presence of homosexuality in the Nazi party and denies Nazi persecution of homosexuals, Why and How to Defeat the Gay Movement and Seven Steps to Recruit-Proof your Child: A Parent’s Guide to Protecting Children from Homosexuality and the “Gay” Movement. These works beg for comparison with William Turner Pierce’s The Turner Diaries and Hunter – the former found in Timothy McVeigh’s car at the time of the Oklahoma City Bombing.  If Lively is representative of the other two speakers, these are certainly not evangelicals – these are members of hate groups.  And, in fact, The Southern Poverty Law Center has declared Abiding Truth Ministries to be just that.

Yet even these extremists have not endorsed the more severe elements of the Ugandan anti-homosexuality bill.  Abiding Truth Ministries has publicly denounced the use of the death penalty for the ill-defined charge of “aggravated homosexuality,” though Lively remains supportive of other portions of the bill, including life imprisonment for “touching someone of the same gender in a sexual way.”  In a country where homophobia is the norm and where mob rule often trumps rule of law, such measures would surely bolster a full-fledged witch-hunt.  Acknowledging this, other conservative groups have condemned the bill in its entirety.  Exodus International, a group that actively supports conversion of homosexuals to heterosexuality and which the media has also linked to the proposed Ugandan legislation, has publicly come out against the bill as a “deprivation of life and liberty [that] is not an appropriate or helpful response to this issue.”

The difficulty even with conservative groups like Exodus that oppose bullying, hate crimes and anti-homosexuality legislation, however, is that they actually reinforce such measures in places like Uganda by perpetuating the notion that there is a linkage between homosexuality and pedophilia, as well as the idea that homosexual adults actively “recruit” youth to convert them to a gay lifestyle.  Most of the Ugandans I knew used the terms “homosexual” and “pedophile” interchangeably.  Whether one’s religious convictions support a gay lifestyle or not, this kind of misinformation is unacceptable.

We have established that American influence on anti-homosexuality measures in Uganda has largely come from a fundamentalist impulse.  Yet the question still remains: how should an evangelical Christian respond to homosexuality?  I take my cues from progressive evangelical Tony Campolo here.  In his book, Letters to a Young Evangelical, Campolo argues that whether one’s interpretation of Romans 1:23-27 results in a conviction that Paul was speaking against homosexuality in general or that he was speaking against specific idolatrous practices in Corinth, the Christian love ethic remains intact.  This means acknowledging when a group becomes an oppressed minority and working to ensure that group receives access to justice.  Campolo advocates for equal rights for homosexuals to marry, teach in public schools, adopt children and serve in the military (his book was written before the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy).  In fact, Campolo and his wife – both evangelicals – hold differing interpretations of Romans 1.  Yet even with diverging theological opinions on this issue, they both recognize that to be called blessed in the Kingdom of God is to “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matt 5:6).  And so I mourn for Kato and I celebrate his life.  And I hold out hope that the church might one day love better and thirst harder after the justice that should have been afforded to Kato and all he represented.