The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, October 13

Jim Burroway

October 13th, 2015

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From Gay Community Center (Baltimore, MD), October 1979, page 5.

From Gay Community Center (Baltimore, MD), October 1979, page 5.

HardwickArrest

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Protest Against Bowers Decision at U.S. Supreme Court: 1987. Somewhere around 500,000 people had gathered for the second March on Washington that weekend, making it the largest gay-rights demonstration in U.S. history (see Oct 11). In the final act of the weekend’s demonstrations on Sunday, between two and three thousand people staged a demonstration outside of the U.S. Supreme Court to protest the Bowers V. Hardwick decision a year earlier (see Jun 30).

Police in riot gear and surgical gloves.

Police in riot gear and surgical gloves.

The protest itself was very orderly: after listening to speakers at the Capital Building’s East Steps, groups of between twenty and thirty protesters marched across the street to the Supreme Court plaza where they were met by police and arrested. This went on for wave after wave of demonstrators from 10:00 a.m. and about 2:00 p.m. Ignoring advice from health experts, police wore surgical gloves as they made the arrests, which only fueled shouts from the crowd of “‘Shame, shame!” and ”Your gloves don’t match your shoes!” Among those arrested was Michael Hardwick, whose 1982 arrest in Georgia on sodomy charges had led to the Supreme Court case (see Aug 3).

By the end of the day, the protest resulted in the largest mass arrest at the Supreme Court building since the May Day anti-war protest in 1971. It was also a remarkably disciplined act of civil disobedience.  “Civil disobedience is not new to gays and lesbians,” said Pat Norman of San Francisco, a co-chairman of the march. “Each and every day we commit the act of civil disobedience by loving each other.”

 France Approves Civil Partnerships: 1999. After spending two years debating one of the most bitterly-contested pieces of legislation in years, France’s National Assembly passed the Civil Solidarity Pact by a vote of 315-249. The bill allowed unmarried couples to register their union to access some of the tax, legal and social welfare benefits of marriage. The bill however explicitly excluded adoption rights, and it was broadened to include any pair of adults living in the same household — including brothers and sisters or an elderly parent and a child — in an attempt to placate the opposition. Following its enactment, most of couples taking advantage of the Solidarity Pact were heterosexual couples. In 2013, France legalized full marriage equality for same-sex couples.

The Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2009 (PDF: 847KB/16 pages)

The Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2009 (PDF: 847KB/16 pages)

“Kill the Gays Bill” Introduced into Uganda’s Parliament: 2009. It was introduced into Parliament by M.P. David Bahati, an evangelical Christian with extensive ties with a secretive American Christian movement known simply as “The Fellowship” or “The Family”. (The group is perhaps best known for sponsoring the annual National Prayer Breakfast.) The Anti-Homosexuality Bill itself was a particularly draconian piece of legislation. about as draconian as it could get. It called for life imprisonment for anyone convicted of homosexuality, which itself was defined in such a loose way as to endanger virtually anyone who touched another person, whether fully clothed or not. It also provided for the death penalty for anyone convicted of “aggravated homosexuality,” which included, among other things, anyone who was HIV-positive (irrespective of consent or safe sex practices) and anyone who was a “repeat offender.” That clause gave the bill its popular nickname, the “Kill the Gays Bill.”

But the bill went much further than just targeting gay people. It penalized anyone who “aided and abetted” gay people and their relationships, including landlords, medical practitioners, and potentially their lawyers. It also penalized anyone who advocated for LGBT rights, and anyone who didn’t report family members to police. It even had extradition and extraterritorial clauses, which endangered Ugandan citizens and legal residents abroad as well as at home.

The bill produced an immediate firestorm of controversy both inside and outside of Uganda. European, Canadian and U.S. officials roundly condemned the bill, and several countries threatened to cut aid if the bill should become law. It also split American Evangelicals, whose deep connections with Bahati, President Yoweri Museveni, and other Ugandan political leaders came to light. Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren, author of A Purpose-Driven Life and a significant player in missionary work in Uganda, at first refused to condemn the bill before eventually opposing the bill two weeks later. Many American religious leaders opposed the bill, but some lent their support, including

Scott Lively, whose talk at an infamous anti-gay conference eight months earlier that helped set the stage for the bill, said that, aside from the death penalty, it was “a step in the right direction.” Other avowed supporters of the bill included Andrew Wommack, World Net Daily’s Molotov Mitchell, pastor Lou Engle and American Family Association radio host Bryan Fischer.

The bill languished in and out of Parliament for the next several years, before being revived and passed just before Christmas in 2013. By then, the death penalty for so-called “aggravated homosexuality” has been removed and replaced with a life sentence (as though spending a lifetime in the notorious Luzira prison was much better). But other criminal sanctions remained in what soon became Anti-Homosexuality Act when Museveni signed it into law on February 24, 2014. The law remained in effect until August 1, when it was annulled by Uganda’s Constitutional Court, which faulted Parliament for passing the bill into law without a proper quorum. The bill’s sponsors have vowed to reintroduce it back into Parliament for another vote, although no such moves have been made yet.

You can see BTB’s extensive coverage of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill here.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

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