Did American Taxpayers Help Push Through Uganda’s Anti-Gay Law?

Mother Jones

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This week, when Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni approved a harsh new bill making “aggravated homosexuality” a crime punishable by life in prison, he cited a recent report from the Ugandan Ministry of Health’s Committee on Homosexuality, which concluded that same-sex attraction is mostly a learned impulse. “Since nurture is the main cause of homosexuality, then society can do something about it to discourage the trends,” Museveni said. “That is why I have agreed to sign the bill.”

This pronouncement creates a quandary for the United States. American officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry, have vehemently condemned Museveni’s decision. Yet millions of US taxpayer dollars are flowing to the agency that the Ugandan leader used to justify the legislation, according to records from the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Gay rights activist argue that the Committee on Homosexuality report was engineered to ensure the bill’s passage, and at least one committee member—a physician named Eugene Kinyanda—refused to sign his name to it because the process had “taken a very political” direction. “I will not be used to justify the passing of a bill which as a doctor I do not fully understand,” he wrote in an email to a fellow committee member, which was reprinted on the blog Patheos.