CLERGY: REMOVE GAY DEATH PENALTY
According to Afrol News, the Ugandan Clergy has called for a clause imposing the death penalty in a new draconian anti-gay bill to be removed, but has otherwise supported the legislation.
While homosexuality already carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, the proposed law would hand down a death sentence to anyone found guilty of “aggravated homosexuality”; defined as sexual assault committed against a member of the same sex who is under 18 or disabled.
The leaders from the dominant religious groups in the country have, however, affirmed their support for the rest of the bill describing homosexuality as “evil” and “un-godly”, said the news service.
The law also proposes a seven-year jail term for anyone who “attempts to commit the offence” or who “aids, abets, counsels or procures another to engage in acts of homosexuality”.
The legislation was tabled earlier this month and is now under public discussion in Parliament. According to the text of the bill, it aims to strengthen “the nation’s capacity to deal with emerging internal and external threats to the traditional heterosexual family”.
Local and international human rights organisations have condemned the proposed law and demanded that it be immediately withdrawn.
Welcome. Welcome to the gay Ugandan… they shall come in South Africa for refuge and maybe help us to make sure that our freedom will remain durable.
That is a shame to read this article. You think the world is improving and you realise that actually no improvement is secured!
…. Geez, how kind of them!? While calling for the death penalty to be removed from law for being gay is a good thing but isn’t life imprisonment indirectly sending them to their deaths anyway? How many gay men or women will survive in a Ugandan prison – where conditions can only be imagined as insuffrable – before they meet an untimely death? They will have no protection, the guards will probably turn a blind eye, and I’m sure they will be targeted by inmates and officials.
It is a sick, sick country. Someone asked me the other day to support a charity in Uganda and I laughed. I’d rather flush my money down the toilet than help any charities in such a inhumane, violent and disgusting country. It’s just as Nector stated, we think the world is improving when in reality we are slipping ever more and more backwards.