New York and San Francisco both celebrated Gay Pride this past weekend, capping off what’s been an extraordinary year for LGBT rights in the U.S, as same-sex marriage bans are being knocked down left and right. There’s been a lot to celebrate.
Watch John Oliver explain how Americans brought anti-gay hate to Uganda
Alex Abad-Santos is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at The Atlantic.
But there’s an anti-gay maelstrom an ocean away. In Uganda, you can still be imprisoned for being gay or supporting gay rights. And one of the reasons the anti-gay vitriol burns so hot there, as John Oliver explains, is because of U.S. evangelicals like Scott Lively.
Lively is an American evangelical who has given anti-gay talks to Ugandan government officials about gay people, comparing LGBT people to Nazis, rapists, and child molesters. And while his view has largely fallen out of favor in the US (Oliver shows a clip of a crowd laughing at Lively), he’s unfortunately a big deal in Uganda.
“US groups recognized the market for homophobia stateside was dwindling and so tried to sell it somewhere else,” Oliver said on Sunday’s show. “Africa isn’t just where we send our losing team’s Super Bowl shirts, it’s also where we now send our losing political philosophies.”
For more information on Uganda’s treatment of LGBT people, see Brandon Ambrosino’s interview with documentarian Roger Ross Williams and his explainer on the country’s anti-gay laws.
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