Ugandan anti-gay agitation "Made in the USA" -- by US evangelicals and missionaries

[HiPointDem]

2. what i wanted to point out is that there is a DIRECT connection between US evangelicals, apparently

government-connected, and the first anti-gay bill. Linked to "The Family/Fellowship".

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality...One month after the conference, a previously unknown Ugandan politician, who boasts of having evangelical friends in the American government, introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which threatens to hang homosexuals, and, as a result, has put Uganda on a collision course with Western nations...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/world/africa/04uganda.html?_r=0


As for the moral authority of the North American Evangelicals, one of their leading organizations and the organizers of the annual presidential prayer breakfast, the Family (or the Fellowship)... The story of the Ugandan legislation to kill gays for being gay was intertwined with the Family and also with representatives of the wider "respectable" American Evangelical community...After the Family was reported to be hock deep in the Uganda scandal, Evangelical leaders still turned up in droves anyway!

They did this even though David Bahati, the man behind the kill-the-gays legislation, was deeply involved in the Family's work in Uganda at that time, and a minister in the government of Uganda and was also helping to organize the Family's National Prayer Breakfast...

Full story here: http://www.queerty.com/lawsuit-filed-against-u-s-missionary-who-cultivated-anti-gay-sentiment-in-uganda-20120316/#ixzz2F0xNloH1


The Fellowship, also known as the Family,[1][2][3] is a U.S.-based religious and political organization founded in 1935 by Abraham Vereide...The organization has been described as one of the most politically well-connected ministries in the United States. The Fellowship shuns publicity and its members share a vow of secrecy...Although the organization is secretive, it holds one regular public event each year, the National Prayer Breakfast held in Washington, D.C. Every sitting United States president since President Dwight D. Eisenhower, up to President Barack Obama, has participated in at least one National Prayer Breakfast during his term.[7][8][9][10]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fellowship_%28Christian_organization%29


Why are US Evangelicals So Into Uganda?

Anyone who hasn’t been under a social media rock for the past week is aware of the Kony 2012 video and viral marketing campaign started by Invisible Children. The goal is to convince US policymakers to intervene in the ongoing crisis in Central Africa by providing more US military advisers, more military aid to the Ugandan People’s Defense Force (UPDF), and more diplomatic pressure on Central African heads of state.

There’s been a wave of criticism since the whole thing began. Among the best critiques I’ve read are Bruce Wilson’s piece at AlterNet and Neil Anderson’s piece at Demand Nothing, both of which highlight Invisible Children’s financial connections with the National Christian Foundation, the Fellowship Foundation—aka, the Family, the International Foundation, the Wilberforce Foundation, C Street, etc—and several other Evangelical Christian groups. (Boing Boing has a nice roundup here, along with a much longer roundup of African voices responding to the Kony 2012 campaign...)

On the other hand, it could be that the president of Uganda—who’s held that office for almost as long as I’ve been alive—is a member of the Family and apparently quite a devout evangelical Christian. On the Family’s end it could also be his willingness to deport dissidents and burn down villages for Western corporate interests—something that’s surely attractive to deep-pocketed evangelical donors.

Those are pretty audacious accusations, and they could be completely wrong. But something just feels off about the thing, and I’ve learned to trust that instinct. Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire..

http://www.thereligiousleft.org/2012/03/why-are-evangelicals-so-into-uganda.html


Over at Alternet, Bruce Wilson digs in to the sources of funding for the group behind "Kony 2012," and discovers 990 IRS tax forms and yearly financial disclosure reports from the nonprofit and its major donors... The documents show that Invisible Children, Inc. received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the biggest financial backers of California’s anti-same-sex marriage Proposition 8, with links to James Dobson, The Family (see Jeff Sharlet's excellent book on the subject), and ideologically similar Christian Right entities.

(...) What does Invisible Children share in common with James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council... or the Fellowship Foundation — one of the nonprofit entities of the Washington-based evangelical organization also known as “The Family” whose leader Doug Coe has been captured on video celebrating the dedication inspired by Hitler, Lenin, and Mao ?

What does IC have in common with the ministry of California evangelist Ed Silvoso, who works directly with leading Ugandan author and promoter of the Anti Homosexuality Bill (also called the “kill the gays bill”) Julius Oyet — who claims that “even animals are wiser than homosexuals”?

The answer? — all of these ministries... received at least $100,000 in 2008 from what has emerged in the last decade as the biggest funder of the hard, antigay, creationist Christian right: the National Christian Foundation.

http://boingboing.net/2012/03/12/kony-2012-invisible-children.html