In 2009, Ugandan lawmaker David Bahati introduced an Anti-Homosexuality Bill that carried the death penalty for “serial offenders” of the “offense of homosexuality.”
Under intense international pressure including threats to withhold foreign development aid, the bill was defeated in May 2011. The defeat was widely perceived as a case study of power politics in the international system with the poor Ugandan nation bending to the will of rich nations upon which it depends for hundreds of millions of dollars of annual development aid. Upon closer analysis, however, it is clear that the rise and fall of the bill cannot be fully explained without accounting for the role of religion in global civil society. As such, if Mr. Bahati’s February 2012 decision to reintroduce the bill ultimately results in a vote by the Ugandan parliament, keen observers will be tracking the influence of transnational Christianity on the process.
In response to the original 2009 Anti-Homosexuality Bill, Canon Gideon Byamugisha, a prominent Anglican priest in Uganda, helped the transnational advocacy group Avaaz sponsor an online petition to stop the “kill the gays bill” that was signed by 1.2 million citizens from 192 countries and 10 territories and sent to Uganda’s western allies to bring international diplomatic pressure to bear on the bill.
The initiative was a high technology evolution of the classic transnational advocacy network (TAN) strategy known as a boomerang effect described by scholars Keck and Sikkink. In a boomerang effect, weak groups in a country with a repressive regime appeal to sympathetic groups in one or more outside countries through a transnational advocacy network to push their governments to apply pressure to the oppressive regime. It was through the boomerang effect that Byamugisha and global civil society organizations like Avvaz were able to transform a domestic policy debate into a highly organized internet and global media campaign that would reach networks such as CNN, the BBC, and MSNBC, and capture the attention of world leaders.
The impact of the boomerang was clear in January 2010 when Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni advised advocates of the bill in his ruling NRM party to slow down because the matter had become a sensitive foreign policy issue. Sweden had threatened to cut aid and several foreign leaders had called him to discuss the bill including a 45-minute phone call from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Museveni stated: “The prime minister of Canada came to see me and what was he talking about? Gays. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown came to see me and what was he talking about? Gays. Mrs. Clinton rang. What was she talking about? Gays.”
As such, the defeat of the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill in May 2011 cannot be explained away as simply the result of rich states making bilateral or polylateral threats toward poor states but must take into account the “translateral” diplomacy involving non-state religious actors like Byamugisha whose local moral authority as a respected religious leader was amplified by the internet and global media, activating transnational advocacy networks between states, and thereby applying a new technological paradigm for religious members of global civil society to influence state behavior. International public opinion was able to be harnessed and channeled to change policy without resorting to violence.
According to global governance scholar Mary Kaldor, civil society actors are the guarantors of “civil behavior.” By definition, they do not advocate violence, exclusivity, criminal or corporate self interest. It implies a shared commitment to common human values which the international human rights polity has interpreted to include gay rights. Religious leaders like Byamugisha, when aided by the international communication savvy of global civil society actors like Avaaz can therefore function as legitimate religious guarantors of global human rights culture in the post-Cold War international system.
In the era of globalization, religious guarantors must not only contend with states but with other non-state actors including religious rogues who aim to undermine human rights, including those of the LGBT community. As has been detailed by author Jeff Sharlet and Zambian Anglican priest Kapya Kaoma, it was conservative U.S. evangelical Christian proselytizers such as Scott Lively and Paul Cameron who traveled to Uganda and nurtured the climate of homophobia at anti-gay rallies in 2009 that shaped the thinking of David Bahati and his subsequent development of the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill.
It is yet another globalization-era example of how readily international forces can influence domestic affairs within the borders of states. Instead of outsourcing jobs to India and China, homophobia had been outsourced to Uganda. In this environment, legitimate members of global civil society, including religious guarantors of global human rights culture are needed to counter the hate exporting movements and their local manifestations wherever they might emerge in the world.
Global consensus regarding LGBT human rights has never been as primed to support the advocacy of religious guarantors as it is today. On June 17, 2011, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution that for the first time was aimed at combating violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Later that year, on December 6, 2011, the United States took unprecedented steps to fully integrate gay rights into U.S. human rights foreign policy. President Barack Obama issued a presidential memo outlining for the first time a global LGBT strategy that ordered all government agencies involved in foreign affairs to promote LGBT rights across the world and encourage the decriminalization of LGBT people and the humane treatment of LGBT refugees and those requesting asylum. Later that day, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a landmark speech at the United Nations in Geneva persuasively framing gay rights as human rights.
With these fortifications in place, religious guarantors of global human rights culture appear well positioned to once again oppose David Bahati’s reintroduced Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Indeed, on July 24, 2012, an open letter signed by 46 American Christian leaders was issued expressing solidarity with LGBT Ugandans facing “increased bigotry and hatred.”
As they stated: “Regardless of the diverse theological views of our religious traditions regarding the morality of homosexuality, the criminalization of homosexuality, along with the violence and discrimination against LGBT people that inevitably follows, is incompatible with the teachings of our faith.” How effectively TANs will translate these voices into political pressure on the Ugandan president and parliament remains to be seen.
Photo by Ben Sutherland, via Flickr Creative Commons.