As you may know, Jose Ortiz and I were in Uganda in 2007 and 2008. We met many gay Christians while there. Many of these Ugandans, if not most, hold still -- or did at one time -- a personal faith which they deeply confessed.
This open journalistic hatred of people whose sexual orientation makes up the minority is irresponsible reporting and culpable maligning whereby the very lives, relationships and livelihood of innocent individuals are put at risk.
These journalists are mislead, uninformed in the area of the social sciences, and on a "religious" mission of some kind in which they believe the elimination of a group of people must be invoked in order for their societal objectives to be achieved. They are calling for the creation of a society in which an innocent minority must be expelled. These journalists are flirting with the dangers of what their neighboring county - Rwanda - once endured: to pit friend against friend to the degree that violence could erupt.
Every religious person in Africa and in the West must call for a halt to this kind of reporting, especially a call from evangelicals in whatever country they reside because, for the most part, Uganda is an evangelical country. Therefore, evangelicals everywhere must lift their voices and say, "this is not how evangelicals - or any people of faith - treat another people." Uganda's evangelical faith is fast becoming the Puritans' dark hour at Salem in which one Bible text overrode every other text - 'to not permit a witch to live.' Death-to-the-homosexual rides on the crest of the abusive use of a Leviticus passage and the misunderstood story of Sodom and Gomorrah. The "holy" war against homosexuals is unbecoming of Jesus, whose mission often centered on correcting religious leaders over their zealous applications of the Hebrew Scriptures against oppressed minorities.
Never in my whole life as an evangelical would I have endorsed a "witch-hunt" list of names. Yes, I would have attacked
ideas that I felt were undermining society, but never would I have attacked
individuals, as these journalists do, so that lives are put at risk. What is happening in Uganda is unchristian -- in whatever narrow sense or very broad sense one may say it means to be Christian. There is nothing Christian about what these journalists have done in creating their published list of homosexuals.
It is time for evangelicals to raise their voice against their fellow evangelicals in Uganda: "Stop the witch-hunt! Never in the name of Jesus! Never in the name of religion!"
Steve Parelli, MDiv
Executive Director
Other Sheep
Other Sheep eNews April 23, 2009
See Tabaire's April 10 opinion article (