Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Friday, February 24

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Is This The Day Marriage Equality is Signed Into Law? Annapolis, MD. Maybe. Yesterday, the Maryland Senate passed a bill providing marriage equality by a vote of 25-22, following a 72-67 vote in the House. Gov. Martin O’Malley, who sponsored the legislation and made it a priority for this year, applauded the Senate vote yesterday, saying “The common thread running through our efforts together in Maryland is the thread of human dignity; the dignity of work, the dignity of faith, the dignity of family, the dignity of every individual.” The bill won’t go into effect however until January, 2013. Opponents vow to collect the 55,736 signatures needed to place a referendum on the November ballot overturning the law. Polls show that such a ballot measure would be very close.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
President George Bush Backs Federal Marriage Amendment: 2004. The push for the President’s re-election campaign was already heating up when Bush’s announcement made official what had been long anticipated. With Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling that nothing short of marriage would provide full equality for same-sex couples as required in the state’s constitution, and with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s order that the county clerk begin issuing marriage licenses to gay couples, Bush declared that “The voice of the people must be heard,” and declared his support for a constitutional amendment that would take marriage out of the hands of the people’s representatives forever. He urged Congress to “promptly pass… an amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of a man and woman as husband and wife,” during televised remarks from the White House’s Roosevelt Room. After urging that the nation consign gay Americans to permanent second-class citizenship, he called on the nation to begin the debate “without bitterness or anger.”

Later that year, the proposed amendment would fail in the House, 227 to 186, with 290 votes needed to cross the two-thirds requirement to send a Constitutional Amendment to the State for ratification. The Senate failed to take up the proposal.

American Evangelicals Announce Anti-Gay Conference In Uganda: 2009. BTB was the first Western outlet to discover and report the shocking announcement that Exodus International board member Don Schmierer and a little-known staffer at Richard Cohen’s International Healing Foundation, Caleb Lee Brundidge, would join Holocaust revisionist and anti-gay extremist Scott Lively for a three day conference in Kampala. Lively was already known to regular BTB readers for his involvement with the international anti-gay extremist group Watchmen On the Walls (not to be confused with an unrelated Family Research Council initiative by the same name) and for his book, The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, in which he writes that “the Nazi Party was entirely controlled by militaristic male homosexuals throughout its short history.” Knowing that Lively was bringing his brand of extremism to Uganda was very worrying. As I wrote at the time:

Lively’s brand of rhetoric is unusually vitriolic, even by some of the more ardent anti-gay standards. He regularly describes gays as being sick and“followers of the Father of Lies.” When the Watchmen On the Walls held a rally in Novosibirsk, Russia, Lively excused Satander Singh’s murder in Sacramento. Lively contends that “civilization and homosexuals” are engaged in a full-blown war, which is part of the Devil’s design to destroy civilizations.

The Kampala conference was organized by Steven Langa, director of Kampala-based Family Life Network. Lively had struck up a friendship with Langa during a tour of the African continent in 2002. Throughout the decade, Ugandan pastors adopted increasingly violent rhetoric against gay people, with one pastor, Martin Ssempa, leading hundreds of his followers in 2007 through the streets of Kampala demanding harsh punishments against gay people, and publishing the names and addresses of Ugandan gay rights advocates. Many were forced to go into hiding.

With Lively’s incendiary rhetoric being thrown into the mix, I didn’t know what would happen, but feared the worst. My worst fears, however, were nothing compared to what actually followed: a long series of anti-gay rallies, vigilante campaigns, and reports of violence which ultimately culminated in the introduction of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, otherwise known as the “Kill the Gays Bill,” in Uganda’s parliament in October, 2009. That bill still threatens LGBT Ugandans today. Since February 24, 2009, BTB has followed every twist and turn of the events in Uganda. Our compilation, Slouching Toward Kampala: Uganda’s Deadly Embrace of Hate, is a timeline and index of the nearly 500 posts that we have written documenting the events in Uganda since then.