The department’s immigration authorities also discriminate against the LGBTQ community
The Ugandan parliament passed a new anti-LGBTQ bill on March 21 that includes life imprisonment and the death penalty for “acts contrary to nature”. To justify the vote for executions the parliamentarians used the old bugbear of family values, selective biblical readings, self-declared African traditions and the haunting spectre of roving bands of homosexuals predating on all and sundry.
The bill states that anyone who “holds out as a lesbian, gay, transgender, a queer, or any other sexual or gender identity that is contrary to the binary categories of male and female” should be sent to prison for 10 years. There is the temptation to chuckle. Like many of the other 32 African countries with anti-LGBTQ legislation Uganda’s law is merely an update of colonial era legislation.
The Ugandan 1950 penal code states that “Any person who has carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature; or has carnal knowledge of an animal; or permits a male person to have carnal knowledge of him or her against the order of nature, commits an offence and is liable to imprisonment for life.”But while the irony might appeal to a dark sense of humour, something very important is being obscured.