Call To Action
Wednesday, February 3 and
Thursday, February 4, 2010
- Protest Uganda’s Pending Anti-Homosexuality Bill
(and the American religious right encouraging it)
- Demand the Entire Ugandan Delegation be Dropped from
The Family’s National Prayer Breakfast
- Quell Uganda’s “Kill The Gays” Movement By
Limiting U.S. Government Financial Aid
- Require U.S. Asylum for LGBTQ Ugandans
- Challenge The Family and National Prayer Breakfast Participants To Live Up To The Christian Ideals
They Espouse
A Call To Action
Join Full Equality Now DC on February 3-4, 2010, to protest the American-encouraged Anti-Homosexuality Bill currently being crafted in the Ugandan Parliament that calls for death sentences for AIDS victims as well as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender citizens.
This repressive bill is the culmination of the work of a secretive “christianist” cult known as “The Family” that oversees questionable and unsanctioned political and business dealings with the highest echelons of foreign governments.
Uganda’s proposed legislation would intensify and legalize the existing brutality and persecution of its LGBTQ citizens, including life sentences for the “aggravated homosexuality” of being HIV-positive. All Ugandan citizens would be required to report homosexuals to the police or face three years imprisonment. Any “promotion of homosexuality” would carry a seven-year prison sentence. Only recent international outcries have tamped down, at least for now, provisions for the death penalty for three-time “offenders” and people suffering from AIDS.
The Family’s February 4 National Prayer Breakfast is this organizations only public U.S. event each year. It brings together American elected officials and businessmen, many of whom support the sentiments of legislation’s authors, and their international counterparts. “Homosexuals must forget about human rights!” recently exclaimed Uganda’s Minister of Ethics and Integrity, James Nsaba Buturo, a co-author of the bill and member of The Family.
The night before the National Prayer Breakfast, February 3, participate in Full Equality Now DC’s Protest and Rally starting at 5:30 p.m., at one of The Family’s tax-exempt centers at 133 C Street SE in Washington. Stand against the pending anti-LGBTQ legislation in Uganda and in particular The Family’s actions supporting it. While expressing its religious hypocrisy and promulgating repression of homosexuals worldwide, The Family enjoys U.S. tax protections for its numerous properties, including C Street’s low-cost dormitory for Family members such as sex-scandal plagued Nevada Senator John Ensign and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.
What: Protest and Rally at The Family’s DC location
When: Wednesday, February 3, 2010, 5:30 p.m.
Where: The “C Street House,” 133 C Street SE, Washington, D.C.
Organized and Sponsored by: Full Equality Now DC
The next morning, February 4, concurrent with The Family’s National Prayer Breakfast and as an alternative to it, engage in the District’s American Prayer Hour, part of a decentralized series of powerful and inspirational events across the country that morning, including Dallas, Chicago, Boston, and Berkley, California.
What: American Prayer Hour/DC
With: D.C. Faith leaders and renowned gospel singer Ray Boltz
When: Thursday, February 4, 10 a.m.
Where: Calvary Baptist Church, 755 8th Street NW
Organized by: Truth Wins Out
Co-Sponsored by: Full Equality Now DC
Most important, stay alert and continue to work to scuttle this legislation in the weeks to come, and stand in solidarity with LGBTQ communities throughout the world, especially Uganda.
Members of The Family include current and past conservative members of the U.S. Congress, and anti-gay lightening rods such as Pastor Rick Warren. Family members and anti-gay extremists in Uganda are working together to craft this life-threatening legislation. The new bill’s chief authors are Family members Minister Buturo and Member of Parliament David Bahati, both of whom have proceeded with the encouragement of Ugandan President and Family member Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.
Only in response to mounting international pressure, The Family recently “disinvited” David Bahati to the February 4 breakfast, and this pressure must not cease.
Ugandan Martin Ssempa, Family member and vocal fundamentalist pastor, is championing the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, and has forced LGBTQ citizens and activists into hiding by publishing their names and addresses. Most recently, Ssemba has been organizing a “Kill The Gays” million man march demanding life imprisonment or death for every gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Ugandan.
The Family is based in the U.S. but operates more than 10,000 cells worldwide to promulgate its anti-homosexual agenda, especially in African countries where a fertile bed of homophobia has existed for decades. Although The Family has recently made rather specious statements saying that they are the secret allies of the LGBTQ community, its adherents were instrumental in setting the stage last year for so-called anti-gay experts to travel Uganda to help officials justify the extreme vileness expressed in the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.
If The Family wants anyone to actually believe that they are advocates for human rights, we must challenge them to now publicly affirm their organization’s support for worldwide LGBTQ equality, less their recent statements again prove that they are the hypocrites and anti-Christian bigots they so obviously appear to be.
President Barack Obama has already condemned the bill but he must do more. President Obama must certainly boycott the Breakfast because of The Family’s support for the Ugandan bill. He should not be seen anywhere near the Ugandan delegation, much less share the dais with any one of them. In the days leading up to February 4, we call on President Obama and each elected U.S. official to come forward publicly to disassociate themselves from The Family and the National Prayer Breakfast and the scheduled Ugandan state delegation.
The Ugandan government has long misspent and wasted millions of dollars of U.S. funding intended for HIV/AIDS prevention and wellness services, and American elected officials have done nothing to make sure our tax dollars aren’t wasted or used to persecute LGBTQ citizens in Uganda or anywhere else.
Should this draconian measure pass, we will join together to call on the U.S. government to explicitly condemn it and to offer asylum to LGBTQ Ugandans, all of who personify the definition of refugees with a “well-founded fear of persecution.”
In the latest issue of The Public Eye, Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican Priest from Zambia nails it, saying, “Ironically enough, although American conservatives repeatedly accuse progressives of being imperialist, it is their dealings with Africa that are extremely imperialistic. Their flow of funds creates a form of clientism, with the expectation that the recipients toe an ideological line.” This sums up the explicit modus operandi characterizing all of The Family’s work.
Washington has one of the highest rate of HIV infection and has seen a meteoric rise in local hate crimes against our LGBTQ citizens, so we, especially, must redouble our efforts, protesting The Family’s actions, squashing Uganda’s pending hateful legislation, and fighting against the repression of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people everywhere. It is surely a matter of life and death.
Full Equality Now DC is a grassroots organization dedicated to local and national actions in support of full federal equality for all Americans regardless of sexual orientation or gender identification. It was founded by the original DC Host Committee that helped bring a quarter of million people to the October 2009 National Equality March in Washington, DC.
F U L L E Q U A L I T Y N O W D C
More equality activists have expanded membership through weekly meetings where actions are decided through democratic means. Recently these have included a public protest of WMATA bus advertisements that singled out LGBTQ citizens for discrimination, and a series of actions to interfere with the Ugandan politicians forwarding repressive laws that would jail its homosexual citizens.
For more information, go to www.fullequalitynowdc.org.
Better Call Tyrone.... 