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Speaker 1

00:00

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ It was the Gay Pride Parade today in New York, which capped a month. Yeah, which, which capped a great month of significant advances for marriage equality in America.

Speaker 2

00:15

The White House is granting new benefits to same-sex couples, including those who live in states where gay marriage is against the law.

Speaker 3

00:21

To date, 19 states in the District of Columbia have legalized marriage equality, and the momentum continues.

Speaker 1

00:27

That's right, we are nearly halfway to full nationwide marriage equality, which means, which means... Which means it's about to become a question of which state is going to be last. Who could it possibly be, Mississippi?

Speaker 1

00:41

We don't know. We don't know, Mississippi. It could be anyone, Mississippi. Now, I know it's a little premature, but I do think this might be 1 of those moments where we're allowed to feel great about this country.

Speaker 1

00:53

Marriage equality is sweeping the nation, and America did it! Strike up the band, bring out the rock and roll George Washington,

Speaker 4

01:01

and the American... Yes! I see no reason why this feeling is ever going to end.

Speaker 4

01:08

It's fantastic. Yes! Okay, okay, okay. Hold on, hold on, hold on,

Speaker 1

01:12

hold on. Because unfortunately, this month has also brought less good news from other countries.

Speaker 5

01:20

There's great controversy over the new U.N. General Assembly president. Uganda's Sam Kutesa has been elected to the largely ceremonial role, but thousands have signed a petition against the appointment because of Uganda's harsh laws on homosexuality.

Speaker 1

01:34

Yeah, calling Uganda's laws harsh doesn't really do them justice. That's like calling Stalin a bit of a grump. Or the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire a whoopsie-do.

Speaker 1

01:46

Or the Titanic a disappointing vacation. Because... Let's take a moment to remind ourselves about what Uganda's laws actually contain.

Speaker 3

01:56

On Monday, the president of Uganda signed a sweeping anti-gay bill into law. It makes it illegal simply to be gay in the country and imposes harsh prison sentences for offenders.

Speaker 1

02:06

So the moral arc of the universe is long and it bends away from Uganda. And the law isn't just putting gays at risk of imprisonment. Since it passed the Ugandan legislature, the number of recorded acts of persecution has increased between 750 and 1,900 percent from previous years.

Speaker 1

02:25

It's gotten to the point where people from the Dark Ages could build a time machine, travel to 2014 Uganda, step outside and go, -"Ah, shit, it didn't work." Okay. Nice try. Get back in. -$1,000.

Speaker 1

02:37

Now, you might wonder, how can the UN allow a representative of the Ugandan government, which has also been accused of corruption and the brutal suppression of dissent, to be in charge of their General Assembly.

Speaker 6

02:50

Sam Cortez is chosen without a vote. The selection is done on geographical rotation, and African countries had already agreed he'd be their candidate.

Speaker 1

03:00

Oh, that's fine, then. So it's just their turn. Essentially, the U.N.

Speaker 1

03:03

Apparently works according to the same principle as family movie night, where even if your little sister picks My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic, Princess Twilight Sparkle for the third time, You have to watch it, because it's her fucking turn. -$5,000. The fact that in the 21st century, 81 countries have laws outlawing homosexuality is incredibly depressing. Although, in a way, it shows how lucky we are to live here.

Speaker 1

03:32

Because remember, when it comes to advances in marriage equality, America did it! Am I right, cheerleaders? Yes! Yes!

Speaker 4

03:39

Yes, break dancing Lincoln out here! These 6 humans is never gonna blow up in our face! USA!

Speaker 4

03:47

USA! USA! Okay. Okay.

Speaker 4

03:51

Oh, this feels so good.

Speaker 1

03:54

I mean, just out of interest, where did Uganda get the idea to come up with such hateful laws?

Speaker 7

04:01

Uganda has had laws against homosexuality for virtually all the past century. They were introduced in the old British colonial days.

Speaker 1

04:13

Whoopsie daisy. I've got to be honest, being British is sometimes a little like being an alcoholic. When someone says you did something awful, you find yourself going, honestly, I don't even remember doing that.

Speaker 1

04:25

But yeah, probably, probably. I'm a dick, I'm a dick. What do you want me to say? Okay, so fundamentally, it's the British people's fault, but, you know, I live in America now, so I've still got a pretty warm feeling inside me, unless someone is about to take that away from me.

Speaker 2

04:41

The irony, gay rights activists say, is that it was a small group of American evangelicals who came to Uganda speaking out against homosexuality, which was already illegal, that really took the persecution of the LGBT community to a new level.

Speaker 1

04:58

Wait. So, what you're essentially saying is, America did this. -♪ ♪

Speaker 4

05:04

-♪No! No! No! Get back in that cake!

Speaker 4

05:08

Get back in that cake and think... Get out of here! All of you, get out of here and think about what you've done! Shame on you!

Speaker 4

05:14

Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you!

Speaker 1

05:21

Okay, okay, so... It turns out, American anti-gay activists were in Uganda in the run-up to the passage of the law. And let's meet just 1 of them, Scott Lively.

Speaker 1

05:33

Now, if that name rings a bell, you may know him as 1 of those far-right Christians who go on TV and say things like this.

Speaker 8

05:40

I think Mr. Obama may well be a homosexual himself.

Speaker 1

05:43

Hey, hey, hey, Hey, that's clearly wrong. It's not Mr. Obama, it's President Obama.

Speaker 1

05:49

President Obama is a homosexual, get it right. Have some respect. Now, if you live in Massachusetts, you may also know Scott Lively as that crazy guy currently running for governor, and who's attempting to take back the symbol of the rainbow from the gays by promoting this song. ♪

Speaker 2

06:07

The rainbow belongs to God

Speaker 1

06:10

♪

Speaker 2

06:12

Untouched by evil desire

Speaker 1

06:17

-♪ Yeah Whoa! Whoa! I feel like if Kermit ever heard that song, he would immediately insist on 1 fewer songs about rainbows.

Speaker 1

06:28

-♪ I... -♪ Look, Scott Lively is clearly an idiot, and luckily, over here, we just get to laugh at him.

Speaker 8

06:37

You are never going to stop AIDS until you stop treating homosexual sodomy as a civil right and start treating it as a form of conduct to avoid. -$9.50. -$9.50.

Speaker 8

06:48

-$9.50. $9.50. $9.50. -$9.50.

Speaker 8

06:50

-$9.50. $9.50. $9.50.

Speaker 4

06:51

$9.50. -$9.50.

Speaker 1

06:52

The guy's material is killing out there. Hey, what's up with how HIV's only transmittable between homosexuals, huh? Is this on?

Speaker 1

06:59

Huh? Huh? This guy knows what I'm talking about. Unfortunately, though, in Uganda, it is a very different story.

Speaker 9

07:08

In America, there's a nobody. But in Africa, this extremist guy... Becomes the spokesperson and is able to address the entire parliament for 5 hours.

Speaker 1

07:22

I don't know what's more shocking there, that he addressed the parliament at all, or that he did it for 5 hours. Because listen, if your hard-on for homophobia lasts 5 hours, You need to seek medical attention. -...and he didn't just stop there.

Speaker 1

07:37

-... Scott Lively spoke on Ugandan TV and gave seminars attended by Ugandan government officials. And here is where Scott Lively is about to get considerably less funny.

Speaker 8

07:48

Increasingly, lesbians are being molested by other women. It's actually becoming more and more common in the United States. How dare you say that homosexuality and pedophilia are equated?

Speaker 8

07:59

Well, they are equated. They have a very little sense of mercy. The Rwandan stuff probably involved these guys. These were the Nazis.

Speaker 8

08:07

The Nazis...

Speaker 4

08:09

It's like he

Speaker 1

08:10

just ate the most offensive package of magnetic poetry and then vomited it all over his audience. And then later that year, Uganda's anti-homosexuality bill was introduced. And for the record, Lively says he doesn't approve of it, and disclaims any influence over it.

Speaker 8

08:28

I do not support, and never did support, the harsh penalties, in terms of long prison sentences. I don't believe in that. I never have.

Speaker 1

08:36

No, no, no, of course not. You were simply saying, look, guys, gay people are dangerous, insidious Nazis, do with that information what you will, lively out. Lively out.

Speaker 1

08:45

-... LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE, CHEERING, APPLAUSE... Why back off now, Scott? Own it.

Speaker 1

08:50

If God hates gays as much as you think he does, he's gonna be pretty pissed at you for not seeing this thing through. And it's not just Scott Lively. 1 of Uganda's most prominent anti-gay preachers is a pastor named Martin Semper. Let's listen in on 1 of his lovely sermons.

Speaker 10

09:06

Do you know what they are doing in the bedroom? I did research and I gathered their information. Now, They start off by touching each other's genitals and smelling each other.

Speaker 1

09:19

I've got to say, for an anti-gay pastor, that man clearly had very quick access to a lot of fetish porn. --POPPING,

Speaker 4

09:27

LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE- Very, very swift. Just, look, There we go.

Speaker 1

09:31

Now, Martin Semper is not American. He has, in the past, however, received funding from the Canyon Ridge Christian Church in Las Vegas and the U.S. Government, which allocated his organization $40,000 for abstinence education, which he presumably, responsibly spent on gay porn to show during sermons.

Speaker 1

09:51

But if you want a single soundbite that sums up the depressing scale of the American cultural influence on Ugandan homophobia, it is this.

Speaker 11

10:00

In the beginning, it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.

Speaker 1

10:04

Yeah, that's not a Ugandan saying. Let me give you 3 names that are not especially common in Africa. Adam, Eve and Steve.

Speaker 1

10:16

So clearly, US groups recognized the market for homophobia stateside was dwindling, and so tried to sell it somewhere else. Meaning that Africa isn't just where we send our losing team Super Bowl shirts, it's also where we now send our losing political philosophies. And although the U.S. Is now issuing sanctions in reaction to these laws, this is clearly a problem that Uganda is going to have to solve itself.

Speaker 1

10:41

And here, we may have 1 small glimmer of hope, because in researching this story, we found a clip of an interview on a Ugandan morning show with a transgender human rights activist named Pepe Julian Onzima.

Speaker 12

10:54

Pepe Julian Onzima, thank you for coming in.

Speaker 11

10:57

Thank you for

Speaker 12

10:58

having me.

Speaker 13

10:58

Good morning.

Speaker 12

10:59

Why are you gay? Whoa!

Speaker 1

11:02

Okay, so we're just jumping straight into it, then. No warm-up question there, straight into it. And that set the tone for that activist's hour-long marathon of restraint.

Speaker 12

11:13

Don't you think gays, homosexuals, lesbians, transgenders should instead be reoriented other than, receiving all this kind of recognition, because society seems to deem them as unnatural, as people who are maybe lost.

Speaker 11

11:32

Simon, you're seated with me right now. How unnatural is that?

Speaker 12

11:37

Well, it's natural, but I'm just baffled.

Speaker 1

11:40

Baffled? Yeah, but that's the point. If you're baffled by something, you don't automatically throw it in jail. Otherwise, American prisons would be full of Keurig coffee machines.

Speaker 1

11:50

Wait!

Speaker 4

11:51

Is it water first, then the cup? Do you take the lid off? Somebody put this witchcraft behind bars!

Speaker 4

11:57

It's wrong! It's morally wrong! I'm frightened! -♪ ♪ -♪ APPLAUSE AND CHEERING ♪ But

Speaker 1

12:06

to his true credit, Pepe Onzema somehow kept his cool the whole time.

Speaker 12

12:12

Why do you recruit young boys and girls into this gay activism?

Speaker 11

12:20

There is no such thing as recruitment of young people or adults or anything like that. What is recruitment, first of all? When you ask me about recruitment, what do you mean by recruitment?

Speaker 12

12:36

I mean, trying to put them into your system. Teaching them what to do, how to go about it. -...-We

Speaker 11

12:44

do not do that.

Speaker 1

12:46

How does a human being maintain that level of composure and say, we do not do that, rather than, what the fuck is wrong with you?

Speaker 4

12:54

--AUDIENCE LAUGHS, CHEERS, APPLAUDS- And it

Speaker 1

12:56

got even worse. It got even worse when we were joined by none other than Martin Semper, who turned up with a bag full of vegetables and a lot of questions.

Speaker 10

13:06

They begin to use gadgets like bananas. They use carrots. They use bananas.

Speaker 10

13:12

They use cucumbers and other metallized ones, And they put them inside themselves.

Speaker 12

13:16

These are the instruments you use

Speaker 1

13:27

Zima is the Gandhi of Uganda. He is Uganda and I am truly honored to say that he is actually joining us here this evening. Please welcome Pepe Julian

Speaker 4

13:51

APPLAUSE Please, please. Tepe... Yes.

Speaker 1

13:58

Thank you so, so much for being here. I guess my first question has to be, why are you gay? LAUGHTER No, no, I just thought that's how all interviews for Uganda started.

Speaker 1

14:11

The key question is, do you think this law would have happened if it were not for US interference?

Speaker 13

14:21

The answer is no. It wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for US influence. Why I say that is for very many years, we've had a penal code.

Speaker 13

14:34

And we've done research to find out how many people have been actually convicted under the penal code that we have. And there's probably just 1 case. And the person did not serve the sentence. So

Speaker 1

14:52

no. But it's not about whether the laws are enacted, is it? It's about the incitement of the hatred around it. In many ways, that can do more physical damage than the threat of jail terms.

Speaker 13

15:06

Absolutely. Of course with the penal code many of us have suffered under the penal code. You know, just the way it is presented to the public. Many of us have suffered from evictions, beatings on the street, arbitrary arrests and so on.

Speaker 13

15:26

However, that increased, it changed, with your influence or you're from

Speaker 8

15:34

somewhere else?

Speaker 1

15:34

Both. I'm the double down. You know, I sowed that seed as a British person. And now, as someone who lives in America, I fertilized the fuck out of that seed.

Speaker 1

15:43

Yes, you did. So you're welcome and sorry on both counts.

Speaker 13

15:47

Sorry doesn't cut it. LAUGHTER

Speaker 4

15:52

APPLAUSE

Speaker 1

15:55

I love the fact that we've just seen incredible restraints during that interview and it's with me that you're going, yeah, you need to say fucking sorry. So are you safe in Uganda? I'm guessing the answer to that is not really.

Speaker 1

16:13

Is that true?

Speaker 13

16:15

Not really. I'm not exactly safe. But to a certain extent, I'm safe because I stand my ground.

Speaker 13

16:25

I'm not going to change under fear. I'm not going to run away from the country. And the fact that you guys know about me is a form of protection for me. I look over my shoulder every day, but there's no other place I would rather be than be there and make sure that the safety I need Actually happens in the country.

Speaker 1

16:55

Yeah, that's just I cannot tell you how much I can't tell you how much I thank you for being here and how much I admire you for going back to Uganda.

Speaker 13

17:06

Can I drink some water?

Speaker 1

17:08

Go for it. Are you sure? Do you mind sticking around and we'll talk more on the web?

Speaker 1

17:12

Is that OK?

Speaker 13

17:12

Sure.

Speaker 1

17:13

That would be great. If you want to watch an extended interview of this online, Please go down here. My huge thanks to Pepe, Julian, and Zima.

Speaker 1

17:22

Have a great week. We're off next week. We'll be back in 2 weeks. Have a great week.

Speaker 1

17:27

Good night.

Speaker 4

17:30

Thank you.