At Women in the World, the Reality of Uganda’s Brutal Gay Ban

[DonViejo]

BY ANDREW ROMANO

Clare Byarugaba endures the fear and violence that have followed her nation’s cruel crackdown. In Los Angeles, she and other female activists reported on their struggles for equality.

Ugandan gay-rights activist Clare Byarugaba spoke out against her nation’s oppressive new ban on homosexuality Friday afternoon at Los Angeles’s first Women in the World luncheon, delivering an harrowing first-person account of how her life and the lives of other gay Ugandans have changed since President Yoweri Museveni signed the legislation into law last month.

“As a lesbian living in Uganda, it has been very difficult,” Byarugaba told hundreds of attendees who gathered at the Montage hotel in Beverly Hills. “My mom said, ‘I’m going to hand you into police.’ What that means is corrective rape. That I can’t see my family anymore.(emphasis added - DV) I have received so many death threats. And now I’m facing seven years to life imprisonment simply because of the work I’m doing—and because of my sexual orientation.”

Byarugaba was one of five women from around the globe who joined Women in the World founder Tina Brown and her co-hosts Melanie Cook, Rashida Jones, Nancy Josephson, Misimbi Kanyoro, Marta Kauffman, Kelly Meyer, and Katherine Ross to tell their stories and, in so doing, help fulfill the organization’s mission to “see the world through women’s eyes” and bring attention to “a hidden army of women with the talent and will to reinvent their futures,” according to Brown.

After Byarugaba was involuntarily outed by a Ugandan tabloid “witch hunt” earlier this year, she had to take a week off from work to cope with the personal fallout. “Coming out was supposed to be my journey,” she said. “Unfortunately the media did it for me when I was not ready.” She has seen friends lose their jobs and get assaulted by the police. “A transgender friend, a mob attacked her and undressed her in public,” Byarugaba said. “I know people who have tried to commit suicide. People call me on a daily basis and say, ‘Give me five reasons why I shouldn’t kill myself.’”

The ban is politics, plain and simple—the result of “U.S. anti-gay extremists” such as Evangelical pastor Scott Lively “coming to Uganda and saying ‘the gays are after your children,’” which inspired the president to seize on the issue, Byarugaba said.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/15/at-women-in-the-world-the-reality-of-uganda-s-brutal-gay-ban.html

[shenmue]

1. Horrible

Good grief, can't people just accept one another?

[Nika]

2. The people like Scott Lively who are working to spread these immoral and discriminatory laws want

them to grow worldwide and then to spread here. I am always aware as a transgender woman that there are people here who would love to be empowered to partake in similar mob 'justice' if they could get away with it. These need to be addressed and the situation rectified in these Africa countries, and Russia. This is an unacceptable situation. People like Lively should receive attention here at home and be pressured to stop inspiring lynchings, mob justice and bad laws using fear and hate as their guide.