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The Minister of  Ethics and Integrity Minister, Simon Lokodo, who has consistently persecuted LGBTQI community through harassment at events and continued threats, has announced plans to introduce to new Parliamentary Bill imposing the death penalty for same-sex relations. This Bill would now also seek, apparently, to stringently punish for “promotion and recruitment” of homosexuality in order to curb a rise in “unnatural sex” though the death penalty.

“Homosexuality is not natural to Ugandans, but there has been a massive recruitment by gay people in schools, and especially among the youth, where they are promoting the falsehood that people are born like that,” Simon Lokodo, the country’s Ethics and Integrity Minister, told Reuters. “Our current penal law is limited. It only criminalises the act. We want it made clear that anyone who is even involved in promotion and recruitment has to be criminalized. Those that do grave acts will be given the death sentence.”

Of course anyone who understands human sexuality knows that it is impossible to recruit an individual into a sexuality. It is impossible to promote a form of human sexuality. One’s sexuality is impossible to influence via promotion or recruitment. And there is also no such thing as Ugandans being any different to other human beings when it comes to human sexuality and the spectrum of LGBTQI. This fallacious notion is contained in the very rhetoric that seems to grant popularity to individuals like Simon Lokodo. Let us hope that this time round the Ugandan LGBTI community is able to thwart these myths.

Notably the old Bill was never adjudicated on its merits and was invalidated by the Constitutional Court of Uganda on procedural grounds. According to Thomson Reuters, the government now plans to resurrect the act in the coming weeks with a death penalty not only for same-sex relations, but also for “promotion and recruitment” of homosexuality. This seems even worse than what passed in 2014.

Currently LGBTQI people are criminalized under the old British Penal Codes and many have fled the resulting severe persecution to include banishment, evictions, firings, expulsions, assaults, sexual violence, mob attacks and threats of death.

Sources have confirmed that the Bill will be tabled by the end of this month. However this has not been verified through Parliament.

Recently a young gay man was murdered in the same week that another member of the Ugandan government, Minister of Security, Elly Tumwine, declared Gays to be terrorists:

Can Gay Man’s Murder in Uganda be Linked to Security Minister’s TV Scapegoating of LGBTI People, Posted on October 5, 2019 by Melanie Nathan: When government officials in a place like Uganda, or anywhere for that matter, accuse Gay people of having an agenda as terrorists, they must be held responsible for the violence that will follow. Sadly a member of Uganda’s gay community was hacked in a brutal assault by a homophobic straight person, using a hoe to his head, and the young gay man did not survive his injuries.READ MORE HERE.