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In Africa, Moscow battles against LGBTQ rights, side by side with U.S. religious conservatives
(www.wsj.com)
The summary and the entire WSJ article can be read here.
The government of Russian President Vladimir Putin, African politicians and activists from the American religious right have been working side by side to push for anti-homosexuality laws in Africa, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Highlights of the Wall Street Journal article of Sept. 22 include:
- On Jan. 25, 2023, Vladlen Semivolos, the Russian ambassador to Uganda, met Speaker of Parliament Anita Among in her office and urged her to push for quick approval of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which provides the death penalty for repeated consensual same-sex intimacy.
- In March 2023, Russia supplied $300,000 to Uganda to host lawmakers from across Africa for a conference on how to resist Western pressure on issues like gay and reproductive rights.
- On March 20, when Uganda’s parliament voted on the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, around a dozen Ugandan lawmakers joined the vote remotely from Moscow, where they were attending a conference of Russian and other African parliamentarians dubbed “Russia-Africa in a Multipolar World.”
- The Russian ambassador denies making that $300,000 transfer or pushing for passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.
- An email announcing the $300,000 payment went to Sharon Slater, president of the anti-LGBTQ American advocacy group Family Watch International, one of the organizers of the Ugandan conference.
- Slater says she and Family Watch weren’t aware of any Russian funding for the conference and never had any involvement with the Russian government on any African issues.
- She spokes at a 2014 conference in Moscow that was organized by the anti-gay World Congress of Families.
- In her speech at the Uganda conference, Slater claimed that the U.N. and international aid groups are “after the children” and that they promote sex education that will “capture their hearts and minds to recruit them to their cause.”
- Slater says Family Watch has never supported anti-LGBTQ legislation in African countries and wasn’t “responsible for the treatment of homosexuals under African laws.”
- Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni says that Slater convinced him to remove a section of the bill that would have made it a crime simply to identify as LGBTQ.
- Attendees at the Ugandan conference included anti-gay legislators from Ghana who proposed the harsh anti-LGBTQ bill that Ghana’s parliament passed in February 2024 and that is currently awaiting action from the President and Supreme Court.