US religious right at center of anti-LGBTQ+ message pushed around the world

Source: The Guardian

US religious right at center of anti-LGBTQ+ message pushed around the world

American groups have helped to establish global web who share ideas and funding in bid to restrict gay and trans rights

Tom Perkins
Sun 9 Jul 2023 09.00 BST

When the US evangelical preacher and anti-LGBTQ+ crusader Scott Lively landed in Uganda in 2009 to warn of the “gay agenda”, he was arriving after a series of culture-war defeats at home.

More and more US states were recognizing same-sex marriage, and opinion polls were showing fewer and fewer Americans objected. Lively was there to offer Uganda’s lawmakers some advice on how to drum up outrage. “Emphasize the issue of the homosexual recruitment of children,” he advised.

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”.

As wave of anti LGBTQ+ legislation sweeps the US, some may hear echoes of Lively’s messaging. 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”.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/09/us-religious-right-lgbtq-global-culture-fronts

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