Box Turtle Bulletin

Uganda Law Society Opposes Anti-Homosexuality Bill

This morning’s Daily Monitor, Uganda’s largest independent newspaper, reports that the Uganda Law Society has warned that the Anti-Homosexuality Bill would institutionalize discrimination against those “who are, or thought to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.” The law group warned:

“The bill would further purport to criminalise the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality, compel HIV testing in certain circumstances, impose life sentences for entering into a same-sex marriage, introduce the death penalty for ‘aggravated’ homosexuality, as well as punish those who fail to report knowledge of any violations of its provisions within 24 hours,” said the ULS.

…Mr James Mukasa Sebugenyi, the ULS president, said the bill would violate rights to freedom of expression, thought, peaceful assembly, association, liberty and security of the person and privacy among others.

In a statement issued last week, ULS warned:

Generally, the bill would violate the principle of non-discrimination and would lead to violations of the human rights to freedom of expression, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom of association, liberty and security of the person, privacy, the highest standard of health, and to life. These rights are guaranteed under the Constitution of Uganda and in international and regional treaties to which Uganda is party, which include the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Charter).

The statement goes on to cite several articles of the Uganda Constitution which the proposed bill would violate.

Opening Statements Given in Dahrum Ravi Trial

The prosecution and defense teams gave their opening statements this morning in the trial of Dahrum Ravi, who is charged with invasion of privacy, bias intimidation, witness tampering, and hindering arrest in connection with a series of events which led to the suicide of Tyler Cleminti, Ravi’s Rutgers University dormmate. In opening statements, Ravi’s defense lawyer Steven Altman said that what Ravi did was “stupid” but not criminal:

“You’re going to see evidence that Dahrun is not homophobic, not anti-gay. Evidence that he never recorded, never broadcast images of his roommate. He never harassed his roommate, or ridiculed or spoke negatively about his roommate. He thought he was nice guy and had no problem with him,” Altman said.

Instead, Altman said, the jury should keep in mind that Ravi was a “boy” who was 18 at the time and who occasionally acted immaturely when discussing his roommate’s perceived sexuality among his friends.

“He might be stupid at times, but he’s 18 years old and he’s certainly not criminal,” Altman said.

Ravi is charged with setting up a webcam on his computer and inviting friends via Twitter to watch his roommate, Tyler Clementi, spending an intimate evening with another male via iChat. Ravi had modified his settings on iChat so that anyone could automatically activate the webcam by contacting Ravi through the video chat application without “waking” the computer screen. Clementi committed suicide three days after the first incident and one day after the second attempt. Prosecutors accuse Ravi of invading Clementi’s privacy and exposing him to public ridicule:

“He’s seeking to brand Tyler as different from everybody else, as gay, to set him up for contempt and ridicule,” she said. “These acts were not a prank, not an accident, not a mistake, and certainly were not good natured… These acts were purposeful, intentional, planned. I would suggest to you beyond that they were mean spirited, malicious, and criminal.”

The Brave Little Hairdresser

Oh good heavens.

More detail has been provided on the tale of the poor little hairdresser who stood up to the vile gay-hating governor and who bravely stood on principal and refused to cut her hair. Turns out that this wasn’t exactly what happened.

Actually, Gov. Martinez didn’t ask him for a haircut. He had cut her hair once but wasn’t her regular stylist. Rather, he called her to inform her that he had discovered her position on marriage and was no longer available. He informed the press as well.

Oh, and while he was at it, he thought he’d throw in a insult based on her ethnicity. Cuz nothing proves that you have the moral high ground and are the injured party like engaging in a little racism.

Geez, thanks buddy.

As for Susanna “that Mexican” Martinez, I don’t know much about her but she has gotten some heat lately from the wingnuts for a gay appointment and she took the opportunity to tell the press that she opposes discrimination and thinks people should be judged on their merits.

Just a thought… Please don’t put yourself forward as a champion for our cause if you just now discovered that your governor doesn’t support marriage. If this hasn’t registered til just now, odds are that you may not be the ideal spokesman. Because you’re dumber than a box of sanatorium santorum.

The Establishment Clauses For The Ugandan Inquisition

The proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2009. (Click to download, PDF: 847KB/16 pages)

Uganda’s proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill has been re-introduced into Parliament and is currently in the hands of the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee. As the Committee considers what to do with the bill, there has been considerable confusion over what would happen if the bill were to become law. Most of the attention has focused on the bill’s death penalty provision, but even if it were removed, the bill’s other seventeen clauses would still represent a barbaric regression for Uganda’s human rights record. In this series, we will examine the original text of bill’s eighteen clauses to uncover exactly what it includes in its present form.

A couple of the clauses in the Anti-Homosexuality Bill are administrative:

15. Jurisdiction.
Save for aggravated homosexuality that shall be tried by the High Court, the magistrates court shall have jurisdiction to try the other offences under this Act.

19. Regulations.
The Minister may, by statutory instrument, make regulations generally for better carrying out the provisions of this Act.

On first blush, both of these clauses look rather innocuous. Clause 15 sets out which courts will have jurisdiction over which portion of the bill. Uganda’s High Court hears the most serious cases, and Clause 1 gives it sole jurisdiction over “aggravated homosexuality” (Clause 3) which currently carries the death penalty under the proposed bill. Magistrate Courts generally sit below High Court in terms of the severity of criminal cases that they hear. As far as I know, it appears that Clause 15 is probably fairly typical given the kinds of penalties that would be under consideration.

Where Clause 15 is uninteresting, Clause 19 is something entirely alarming. Someone will be tasked to issue further regulations to ensure that the Anti-Homosexuality Bill is enforced. And who is that Minister charged with that task? To find out, you will need to find the definition in Clause 1:

“Minister'” means the Minister responsible for ethics and integrity;

In the current regime, that would be Ethics and Integrity Minister Simon Lokodo, a defrocked Catholic priest who last week led a group of armed guards in a raid of a hotel in Entebbe where a LGBT advocacy conference was taking place. He summarily ordered the arrest of LGBT advocate Kasha Jacqueline Nabageser, but Kasha slipped away and was able to avoid Lokodo’s thugs. If Lokodo could break up a meeting with no legal basis whatsoever, imagine the reign of terror he would engineer once he has the Anti-Homosexuality Bill with all of the opportunities for abuse it provides.

Lokodo’s predecessor, James Nsaba Buturo, also saw his office as enforcer-in-chief of Uganda’s particular brand of “ethics and integrity.” And he, like Lokodo, also saw himself as the nation’s pastor, writing lengthy op-eds in Ugandan newspapers intoning on the moral evils he saw plaguing the country. Before President Yoweri Museveni came to power in 1986 following a civil war, Buturo served in Milton Obote’s bloody regime as an enforcer who was adept at making Obote’s enemies disappear. In Museveni’s government, he wielded a softer touch, but was no less insistent in his goal of making gays disappear. While Buturo has apparently fallen out of favor with the Museveni government, having been forced to resign in early 2011, he set a pattern that Lokodo would emulate. In December 2010, Buturo banned the screening of a documentary film which depicted, in part, the work of LGBT human rights workers.

One senses that should the Anti-Homosexuality Bill becomes law, the Ministry of Ethics and Integrity could very well change its name to the Ugandan Inquisition. And why not? There are many parallels. An early draft of the bill included a paragraph in its accompanying memorandum extolling the virtues of ex-gay therapy. That paragraph was dropped when the bill was introduced into Parliament in 2009, but that didn’t stop the bill’s supporters to trot out a supposedly ex-gay person as a modern-day converso. And the witch-hunts which would be unleashed by Clause 14, the ban on all deviation from the Ugandan Inquisition via Clause 13, the startling ease with which someone could be put to death in Clause 3 with the High Court being put in charge of the auto-da-fé — these are the measures that Tomás de Torquemada himself would appreciate.

Clause By Clause With Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill:
Clauses 1 and 2: Anybody Can Be Gay
Clause 3: Anyone Can Be “Liable To Suffer Death”
Clause 4: Anyone Can “Attempt to Commit Homosexuality”
Clauses 5 and 6: Anyone Can Be A Victim (And Get Out Of Jail Free If You Act Fast)
Clauses 7 and 14: Anyone Can “Aid And Abet”
Clauses 8 to 10: A Handy Menu For “Victims” To Choose From
Clauses 11, 14, 16 and 17: Nowhere To Run, Nowhere To Hide
Clause 12: Till Life Imprisonment Do You Part
Clause 13: The Silencing of the Lambs
Clause 14: The Requirement Isn’t Only To Report Gay People To Police. It’s To Report Everyone.
Clauses 15 and 19: The Establishment Clauses For The Ugandan Inquisition

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.

Mob Storms LGBT Seminar In Kenya

NTV Kenya reports on a HIV/AIDS educational seminar that was broken up in Mombasa, Kenya’s second largest city.

In February 2010, mob violence broke out in Mombasa over rumors of a same-sex wedding. But compared with its neighbor Uganda, Kenya is a relative safe haven for LGBT people. In October 2010, a Kenyan Cabinet minister called on the government to address the wider concerns of the country’s gay community if it is to make headway in its fight against HIV/AIDS, and in September 2011, Kenya’s Chief Justice denounced the marginalization of the gay community saying “gay rights are human rights.” Nevertheless, homosexuality is illegal in Kenya, punishable by up to fourteen years’ imprisonment.

It’s on in Maine

It is official. The Secretary of State has reviewed the signatures and confirms their adequacy. In November, Maine voters will decide whether that state will recognize the rights of gay citizens to be treated equally by their government in marriage.

Voting on marriage equality is not a new thing. Thirty some states have already done so and four more are likely this year. But for the first time, the vote has been initiated by gay and supportive residents. And rather than the message being “stop those gay people from having rights”, it will be a positive “please recognize my rights.”

Maryland Senate Approves Marriage Bill

It’s on the governor for his signature.

The Maryland Senate passed HB 438, a bill legalizing marriage equality in the Free State, by a 25-22 margin after its third reading Thursday afternoon, sending the measure to Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) for his signature into law.

Marriage opponents made six attempts to amend the bill, which would have forced it to be sent back to the House for another vote. The House last Friday very narrowly passed the bill, and opponents hoped that by sending it back, they could have a second shot at defeating it there. The bill finally passed after several filibuster attempts by Republican lawmakers.

The bill won’t go into effect until January, 2013, allowing opponents enough time to collect 55,736 signatures to place a referendum on the November ballot overturning the law. Polls show that such a ballot measure would be very close.

Simpson on Santorum

Back in the days when the motto of the Wyoming Republican Party could have been “mind your own damn business”, Alan Simpson was an ideal representative. Senator from 1979 to 1997, Simpson was outspoken in the press, popular at home, and powerful in Washington, serving as Republican Whip from 1985 to 1995. When he was replaced as Whip with Trent Lott, he figured it was time to retire. It was the party’s loss.

Simpson has not disappeared into obscurity. He currently serves as co-chair, with Erskine Bowles, of President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. His job is to craft policy which will address the nation’s short term and long term financial needs and which are immediately ignored by both parties.

He also has not mellowed. And he has a few choice words to say about presidential candidate Rick Santorum while speaking with Bob Schieffer on Face to Face.

I know Santorum, I served with him and I served with Newt.

I am convinced that if you get into these social issues and just stay in there about abortion and homosexuality and even mental health they bring up, somehow they’re going to take us all to Alaska and float us out in the Bering Sea or something, if we’re going to do that..

Here’s a party that believe in government out of your life, the precious right of privacy, and the right to left alone. How then can they be (the hypocrisy) fiddling around in these social issues? We won’t have a prayer.
…
The Republicans, I voted for Ike, my first vote. And the Taft people said Ike is a commie, he’s a pinko. And the Ike people said that Taft was a right wing nut. So I’ve watched Republicans; they give each other the saliva test of purity and then they lose and then they bitch for four years.

Schaffer then asked if Santorum is too identified with social issues.

Well I tell ya, he is rigid and a homophobic. He believes that gays and lesbians, he mentioned in an interview in 2003 about bestiality and gays and lesbians. I think that’s disgusting.

And they asked him, he said, ‘I want a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage,’ and they said, ‘Well, what about the people who are already married?’ And he said, ‘Well, they would be nullified.’

I mean what is, what’s human, what’s kind about that? We’re all human beings, we all know or love somebody who’s gay or lesbian so what the hell is that about? To me it’s startling and borders on disgust.

Well Simpson served with him. So I guess he knows the man’s character.

Ten Women Arrested in Cameroon, Accused of Being Lesbians

The same Associated Press story which reported on Liberia’s Senate taking up a bill making gay relationships a felony, also reported on the arrests of ten women in the west African nation of Cameroon and are being held pending trial. Alice Nkom, founder of the Association for the Defense of Homosexuals, says that detainees in Cameroon are often tortured by police to force confessions from them:

“It’s getting worse,” Cameroon gay rights defender Nkom said of homophobia. “People accused of homosexuality are put in jail straight away” she told reporters in November after three men were each sentenced to five years in prison for homosexual acts.

Nkom told AP that she has received numerous death threats. Cameroon law provides a five year prison sentence for those convicted for homosexuality. A draft proposal floating around last December would have increased the penalty to fifteen years imprisonment.

Liberia Senate Takes Up Anti-Gay Bill

The Associated Press is reporting that the Liberian Senate is expected to debate today a bill which would make homosexuality a first-degree felony, which would provide a penalty of between ten years and life in prison, or the death penalty at the discretion of the judge. Liberia’s former first lady, Senator Jewel Taylor, submitted a bill last week that would also criminalize same-sex marriage.  The AP reports that Liberia’s president, Nobel Peace Prize Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said she will not sign any such bill into law.

UPDATE: Warren Throckmorton has the text of the proposed bill here. I tried to get to it this morning but his web site was down.

Legal Uncertainties Increase For Orosco, Babeu

The Arizona Daily Star looked into the 10-year tourist visa that Jose Orosco holds:

Tucson immigration attorney Mo Goldman explained to me that no 10-year visa would permit a visaholder to stay in the country longer than six months at a time.

A border-crossing card is valid for 10 years but permits a holder to stay in the country only up to 30 days. The holder must remain in the border zone, which does not stretch as far north Phoenix, Goldman said. If the person fills out an I-94 form and is permitted into the country with a 10-year tourist visa, the holder can stay up to six months at a time but then must return to their country of origin. Neither visa permits the holder to work while in the country.

There is a way for a person to extend his stay beyond six months, but even that extension only allows six additional months, Goldman said.

All of this raises some serious questions about whether Orosco is in this country legally. It is also raising questions about whether Babeu, who made a huge splash as an anti-illigal immigration spokesperson, harbored an illegal immigrant:

“I think the sheriff’s got a problem if that’s what was going on. He’s got a big problem,” (immigration attorney David) Leopold said. “If they indicted him and charged him, there might be some meat to it.”

It’s possible that Babeu could say that the subject never came up or that he was fooled by his ex-boyfriend. But even that might be a hard sell, given Babeu’s expertise on immigration matters and his role as an investigator.

Plus, Leopold said, the subject almost always comes up. “Based on my experience with families with people that don’t have documents, it comes up pretty quickly,” he said. “It’s rare that it doesn’t. And especially if you’re involved in an intimate relationship.”

Going After Ugandan Gays a Convenient Government Diversion

In a New York Times blog post, Journalist Dayo Olobade sees Uganda’s LGBT community a convenitent diversion whenever government leaders have too many other problems to grapple with.

Last year, the government spent more than $500 million on new military planes while failing to build, staff or maintain maternity hospitals. This year, parliament approved payments of 103 million Ugandan shillings (about $45,000) per representative in order for each to buy a new car. A recent wave of influence-peddling scandals has left seven cabinet positions vacant. In this climate, it seems curious that (Ethics and Integrity Minister Simon) Lokodo, whose portfolio includes both “gay issues” and dealing with corruption in government, should invest such personal interest in the former and not the latter.

…The long-serving President Yoweri Museveni, meanwhile, has disavowed parliament’s activity both times the (Anti-Homosexuality) bill has been considered, primarily, it seems, out of fear that gay-bashing might endanger foreign aid from rights-conscious donors like the United States and Britain. That’s not to say he and his cohort don’t benefit from this culture-war sideshow: three days before Bahati’s bill resurfaced this month, the president signed a controversial new oil contract. Last year, after a series of opaque agreements with foreign companies, parliament had ruled that no new production-sharing agreements were to be signed until a comprehensive regulatory regime had been established. The president’s office, insisting that an engagement with the British energy company Tullow Oil pre-dated the moratorium, went ahead anyway.

“You’d think that the government, given pressure regarding the oil sector, would begin the legislative session with the oil reforms,” says Angelo Izama, an experienced Ugandan journalist on the oil beat. “But they began with the gay bill. It’s not accidental.” The semi-successful diversion, coupled with disregard for parliamentary procedures, illustrates the lack of checks on the behavior of the Museveni government.

Museveni, who has held power since winning a civil war in 1986, has spoken out against the bill. But it doesn’t take a political genius to see that he finds having the bill around benefits him politically. He elevated Lokodo, a defrocked Catholic priest, to his cabinet and Lokodo immediately set about raiding a workshop on LGBT advocacy. Museveni also undoubtedly had a hand in raising MP David Bahati, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill’s sponsor, to the position of acting chairman of the ruling party’s caucus in Parliament. It’s inconceivable that Bahati would have reached that position without Museveni’s solid support, and its very difficult to read that move as a reward for providing Museveni with a convenient diversion that he can use whenever he needs it.

Meanwhile, Museveni appeared in a BBC television interview to deny that gay people are being persecuted in Uganda. “Homosexuals — in small numbers — have existed in our part of black Africa. They were never prosecuted, they were never discriminated,” he told BBC’s Stephen Sackur just days after his government’s raid on Entebbe. Museveni made those comments during a visit to London to launch a tourism innitiativeand attend a summit on Somolia.

The Requirement Isn’t Only To Report Gay People To Police. It’s To Report Everyone.

The proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2009. (Click to download, PDF: 847KB/16 pages)

Uganda’s proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill has been re-introduced into Parliament and is currently in the hands of the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee. As the Committee considers what to do with the bill, there has been considerable confusion over what would happen if the bill were to become law. Most of the attention has focused on the bill’s death penalty provision, but even if it were removed, the bill’s other seventeen clauses would still represent a barbaric regression for Uganda’s human rights record. In this series, we will examine the original text of bill’s eighteen clauses to uncover exactly what it includes in its present form.

We’ve talked about Clause 14 twice before in this series. We described how the mandatory reporting clause is a threat to doctors, lawyers, social workers, pastors, and anyone else who “aids and abets” gay people (in conjunction with Clause 7) and how the law is a particular danger to landlords, friends and family members of gay people (in conjunction with Clause 11). But after having looked at the previous thirteen clauses in the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, with all of the crimes and all of the penalties that those clauses provide, let’s look at Clause 14 again, except this time I want to highlight something I’m not sure was noticed before (my apologies in advance to anyone who did notice what I’m about to talk about):

14. Failure to disclose the offence.
A person in authority, who being aware of the commission of any offence under this Act, omits to report the offence to the relevant authorities within twenty-four hours of having first had that knowledge, commits an offence and is liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding two hundred and fifty currency points or imprisonment not exceeding three years.

Did you catch it? Look again: “A person in authority, who being aware of the commission of any offence under this Act…”

Discussions about the Anti-Homosexuality Bill often talk about this clause as requiring anyone who knows someone who is gay being required to report that person to the police. But that’s not what this clause says. Well, it does say that, but it also says so much more.

What it says is that if anyone learns that a doctor is treating gay people, they are required to report that doctor to police within twenty-four hours for “aiding and abetting” homosexuality in violation of Clause 7, because Clause 7 is an “offence under this Act.” If someone learns of a landlord renting to gay people or a hotel owner renting a room to gay people, then that person is required to report the landlord or hotel owner to police within twenty-four hours for violating Clause 11, another “offence under this Act.” If someone learns of someone providing a safe house to gay people on the run, then that person is required to report the sanctuary-provider to police within twenty-four hours for also violating Clause 11. If someone learns of a person making donation to a gay-rights group, then that person is required to report the donor to police within twenty-four hours for violating Clause 13. If someone learns of anyone who says that gay rights should be respected, then that person is required to report the rights advocate to police within twenty-four hours for also violating Clause 13.

And that’s in addition to the case where someone learns that somebody else touched someone else’s “any part of the body” “with anything else” “through anything” in an act which “does not necessarily culminate in intercourse,” that that person is required to report that “toucher” to police for violating Clauses 1 and 2.

And if anyone should fail to report any of these things — and much more — within twenty-four hours of learning about it, that person could be thrown in prison for three years or fined five million shillings, which is about US$2,100 in a country where the per capita annual income is about US$500.

The extend of this reporting requirement is nearly endless.

When the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee issued its recommendations in the closing days of the Eighth Parliament, they recommended deleting Clause 14, saying “The offence will create absurdities and the provision will be too hard to implement.” Absurdities indeed. The Eighth Parliament ended before the committee’s recommendation could be adopted, and when the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was re-introduced into the Ninth Parliament, it was the original bill that was reintroduced with Clause 14 intact. The bill is again in the hands of the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee for further consideration.

Clause By Clause With Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill:
Clauses 1 and 2: Anybody Can Be Gay
Clause 3: Anyone Can Be “Liable To Suffer Death”
Clause 4: Anyone Can “Attempt to Commit Homosexuality”
Clauses 5 and 6: Anyone Can Be A Victim (And Get Out Of Jail Free If You Act Fast)
Clauses 7 and 14: Anyone Can “Aid And Abet”
Clauses 8 to 10: A Handy Menu For “Victims” To Choose From
Clauses 11, 14, 16 and 17: Nowhere To Run, Nowhere To Hide
Clause 12: Till Life Imprisonment Do You Part
Clause 13: The Silencing of the Lambs
Clause 14: The Requirement Isn’t Only To Report Gay People To Police. It’s To Report Everyone.
Clauses 15 and 19: The Establishment Clauses For The Ugandan Inquisition

The Daily Agenda for Thursday, February 23

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Maryland Senate May Vote on Same-Sex Marriage: Annapolis, MD. Debate on the marriage equality bill was supposed to begin yesterday, but marriage opponents exercised their right to delay the debate by a day. So the debate should begin this morning, with a final vote either tonight or Friday morning. Twenty-four votes are needed for passage, and a similar measure passed last year by twenty-five votes. Marriage supporters are confident that they have at least that many again this year, while opponents acknowledge that Democratic leaders probably have the 29 votes needed to prevent a filibuster. The bill, which was narrowly passed in the House last Friday, won’t go into effect until January, 2013. Marriage opponents promise to place a referendum on the ballot overturning the law before that happens. Polling shows that such a referendum would be very close.

Jury Selection Continues in Tyler Cleminti Suicide Trial: New Brunswick, NJ. Jury selection began this week for the trial of Dahrum Ravi, the Rutgers University student who invited fellow students via Twitter to watch his gay roommate make out with another man via webcam and iChat. Many believe that it set up a chain of events which led to Tyler Clementi’s suicide when he jumped off of the George Washington Bridge three days later.  A very well-written and nuanced profile appeared a few weeks ago in the New Yorker which provides a lot of details leading up to Clementi’s death, suggesting that the prosecution’s case is not a slam dunk. There is also new evidence that Clementi may have been suffering from depression before the harassment took place. Jury selection continues today. Once the trial itself begins, it is expected to last a month or more.

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?