Bill targets anyone identifying as gay, lesbian, transgender or nonbinary
KAMPALA, Uganda—Ugandan lawmakers introduced new legislation that proposes prison terms of up to 10 years for anyone identifying as gay, lesbian, transgender or nonbinary, reviving an earlier effort to tighten colonial-era laws that criminalize homosexuality in the East African country.
The bill was introduced by opposition lawmaker Asuman Basalirwa, but has the support of Uganda’s ruling National Resistance Movement, giving it a near-certain majority in parliament. It comes nearly a decade after Uganda’s highest court annulled an earlier law that allowed life sentences for what it called homosexual acts.
The new bill goes further than the 2014 law by proposing prison sentences of up to 10 years for 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.” It also criminalizes actions such as touching another person “with the intention of committing the act of homosexuality” and includes jail terms of two to five years for the promotion, recruitment and funding of LGBTQ activities.....
Addressing a packed chamber on Thursday, Anita Among, the speaker of Uganda’s parliament, said she wanted every lawmaker to vote for the new bill. “This is the time you are going to show us if you are a homosexual or not,” she said.
Mr. Basalirwa, the opposition lawmaker who introduced the bill, said it was needed to fight threats to traditional heterosexual families.
“We need to protect our society from the cancer posed by homosexuality,” said Mr. Basalirwa. “We cannot sit and watch as our values are eroded by Western groups who are actively recruiting our children into homosexuality.”
Homosexuality is illegal in around half of Africa’s 54 countries, [bold]with gay sex punishable by death in Mauritania, Sudan and parts of Nigeria and Somalia.