US talks sanctions against Uganda after a harsh anti-gay law – but criminalizing same-sex activities has become a political tactic globally
The Biden administration has called for immediate repeal – and threatened to cut aid and investment to Uganda.
- The Biden administration has called for immediate repeal – and threatened to cut aid and investment to Uganda.
- As a scholar of politics and religion in the region, I have been working with Ugandan community activists and NGO leaders since 2017.
- I argue that it is an example of what sociologists call a moral panic, and part of a worrying global trend.
Globalizing anti-LGBTQ+ politics
- In Russia in 2022, Vladimir Putin ratified a law against LGBTQ+ propaganda, using language that is strikingly like Uganda’s new bill.
- In 2014, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan likewise signed a law against the public display and promotion of same-sex relationships.
- In each case these leaders stoked anxieties about LGBTQ+ groups and then took forceful action against the perceived moral danger.
Moral panic as distraction tactic
- In sociology a moral panic is described as a surge in social anxieties about certain deviant groups.
- Moral panics start as social norms that are inflamed into something larger: a sense of diffuse and imminent threat from categories of people like delinquents, foreigners or minority groups, seen as agents of broader moral decay.
- There is a difference between cultural norms against divergent forms of sexuality and gender expression, and a moral panic over LGBTQ+ groups.
History in Africa
- Sexuality in Africa is a complex terrain and ripe for the eruption of moral panics.
- In the colonial period, European powers often interpreted examples of same-sex relations in Africa as evidence of those cultures’ so-called primitivism.
- Colonial laws enforced the heterosexual, monogamous and conjugal family model by criminalizing homosexuality and other common practices like polygamy.
The Uganda case
- President Museveni has led Uganda for nearly 40 years, and many citizens are frustrated at his tightfisted hold on power.
- Community activists and NGO leaders, LGBTQ+ and otherwise, are directly in the line of fire.
- They spread the idea that LGBTQ+ groups are trying to force the vulnerable into homosexual relationships, stoking protective anxieties among parents.