Pride, Values, and Democracy
With Pride celebrations taking place across North America this month, I thought I’d shed some light on what Pride looks like in another part of the world. In particular I’ll focus on Uganda, a country where homosexuality is still illegal and considered highly taboo.
A new Bill put forth in Uganda’s parliament is calling for further criminalization of homosexuality, pushing for life sentences and even the death penalty for the offence of “aggravated homosexuality”, HIV positive offenders, or for repeat offenders. The law not only affects the LGBT community, but also the friends, family, teachers, and doctors of LGBT people under a very loose clause termed “abetting homosexuality”. Would a doctor providing care to a gay person be considered “abetting homosexuality”? What about a lawyer fighting to defend a gay client?
Though many governments around the world have criticized the proposed policy, a few countries have come forward threatening to cut foreign aid to the country. Uganda is ranked 154 out of nearly 200 countries on the Human Development Index, a commonly accepted aggregate of various quality of life metrics. For a country that relies on foreign aid for 2/3 of its national budget, this sort of action from the international community could leave Uganda’s poor, estimated at 35% of the population, significantly more at risk. Decreased food security, decreased access to education and health care, and a destabilized society in general would result.
We’ve seen countries like Zimbabwe who for decades have had trade and aid restrictions imposed by the West and the resulting negative impact on common citizens that this has had. In a country like Uganda, is the West prepared to see this same kind of suffering for the majority of people living in poverty in order to fight the battle against LGBT oppression, which could see marginal success if any? There’s talk that if the Bill does pass, it likely would never be applied in the courts. From another angle, is it the role of Western governments to impose Western values on countries like Uganda, where a vast majority of the population opposes homosexuality? Perhaps the battle is one of education and of development – of creating a thriving society where dialog and understanding can begin to take shape.
I think that a Uganda without extreme poverty, with access to education for all, would be a very different place for people of the LGBT community. While the West may have the best of intentions for extending human rights across Africa, would cutting aid to Uganda lead to a more successful democracy, a more educated society, and a Uganda of opportunity where dialog around gay rights issues can take place, or would it be the first step in a spiral downward for Uganda’s poor. What sort of impacts would the latter have on the LGBT community?
