Meanwhile, the US Christian right in the European Union largely focuses on legal infrastructure, said Neil Datta, who leads the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights. Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania and other nations have introduced anti-LGBTQ+ bills that impose harsher punishments with the assistance of US groups.
OpenDemocracy found it spent $20m in Africa between 20. But Uganda recently passed a new version with the help of fundamentalist US groups like Family Watch International, whose leader, Sharon Slater, has said LGBTQ+ rights are “fictitious”, and The Family, a secretive group that reportedly helped author the bill. His 2009 speech to Uganda’s parliament planted the seeds for the 2014 Anti-Homosexuality Act, which was ultimately struck down by the nation’s supreme court. Lively, however, is among the most infamous, having made his name from his 1995 book The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, which claimed Hitler and Nazi leadership were gay, and gay men were behind the Holocaust. Lively is not acting alone: the US Christian right spent at least $280m abroad between 20, an investigation by the British news site openDemocracy found.
How that global success has fueled the religious right “is something people in the west fail to understand”, he added. The religious right’s play in Africa, where it has successfully lodged itself in many nations’ political and elite establishment, is about “power and money”, said Kapya Kaoma, a Uganda-born pastor who now lives in Boston. “The US is a key player in that game, but the circulations can go in different directions.” “The policy ideas and solutions that are traveling the globe look rather similar,” said David Paternotte, a sociologist at Université libre de Bruxelles. In late June an argument frequently made by the European religious right – that religion-based objections to same-sex marriage trumped the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals – was used to win a case before the US supreme court that critics say will allow businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people. The new global front in culture wars is in turn empowering a resurgent domestic religious right that is pushing book bans, Pride flag bans and record 491 state level bills targeting LGBTQ+ rights.
The spread across the world illustrates how America’s evangelical and Catholic right has globalized over the past 15 years by helping establish a vast web of anti-LGBTQ+ zealots who share ideas, messaging and funding.Īfrica, eastern Europe and Latin America often function as petri dishes for strategy as US groups abroad help craft legislation and fight legal battles. Fine-tuned in Africa and elsewhere, arguments used to attack rights overseas have been re-imported to the US as the religious right warns again that the left and gay people are “grooming seven-year-olds” and “ promoting pedophilia”. Five years later, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni signed a law that made same-sex relationships punishable by death, asserting that western groups and gay people were “coming into our schools and recruiting young children into homosexuality”.Īs wave of anti LGBTQ+ legislation sweeps the US, some may hear echoes of Lively’s messaging.
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