was shocked to read “Straight man’s burden: The American roots of Uganda’s anti-gay persecutions” in harper’s magazine – we don’t just interfere militarily in third world countries, we also export some of our most fundamentalist social “values”.
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An anti-gay bill that calls for the death penalty or life imprisonment for some homosexual acts was introduced in Uganda’s Parliament about a year ago. The proposed legislation was stalled after an international outcry, including from President Obama, who called the bill “odious.”
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Less talked about are the ties between the anti-gay measure and the far-right evangelical movement here in the United States. The author of the bill is David Bahati, a Ugandan lawmaker who has close ties to US organized evangelical groups that operate across several African countries. The groups are members of parliamentary prayer fellowships organized by the Family, one of the most powerful Christian conservative groups in Washington, DC.
The Family, also known as the Fellowship, is so highly secretive it didn’t even admit it existed until last year, when three political sex scandals, those of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, Nevada Senator John Ensign, and former Mississippi Congress member Chip Pickering, forced it into the open. All three men lived at one time in the Family’s clubhouse on Capitol Hill, known as the “C Street House.”
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?…so, OK, this is what’s going on in Uganda, this is sort of the nightmare scenario—I followed it back to the United States and in the US armed forces, where groups linked to the Family—not the same as the Family—but that’s where you see the real flowering of a kind of a militarized, politicized fundamentalism, that leads you into situations where you have something like the 15,000-strong Officers’ Christian Fellowship. This is not fringe.
These are officers defining their mission as reclaiming territory for Christ in the military, not allowing the opposition—this is how they put it—not allowing the opposition, all of which is spearheaded by Satan, to stand in their way. They describe military personnel who don’t share their religious beliefs as “spiritual terrorists.” They describe the war in Iraq and Afghanistan as a “spiritual war of the greatest magnitude.” And you even have situations where you have senior officers—I spoke to one three-star general, who used language to describe the situation we can’t even—you know, we can’t say on TV, said this is an “F-ing clown show,” where you have senior officers promoted on the basis of religion, not merit. You have strategy, you have military decisions being based on the Book of Revelation, in some cases. You have troops who are being forced to pray, to traditions not their own. And you have the military, in every way, sort of fulfilling, you know, the kind of al-Qaeda charge against the United States. There’s folks in the military—the vast majority of military personnel are honorable folks, but there’s a very strong core within it that sees their mission not as defending democracy, but as expanding Christ’s kingdom. (JEFF SHARLET)
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More here.