On August 29, a CNN headline went viral: “Two men in Uganda are facing separate charges of ‘aggravated homosexuality,’ an offense punishable by death under the country’s controversial new anti-gay laws.” The clarifying community note attached to the tweet provided important context: “One man is accused of having a sexual relation with a disabled man, the other of a sexual act with a 12-year-old child. Both are charged with ‘aggravated homosexuality,’ defined as same-sex relations with someone who is HIV-positive, a child, an elderly person, or disabled.”
Consider the difference between the narrative provided by CNN and the reality behind the headline. Now consider the fact that the mainstream press has been doing this for years—and the impact that has had on the public perception of many issues. They’re doing this to us on purpose.
Another recent example of this comes from the Guardian. In July, they published an article on the “social imperialism” of the American religious Right titled, “U.S, religious Right at center of anti-LGBTQ+ message pushed around the world.” According to the Guardian, a handful of American evangelical leaders lobbying African leaders are largely responsible for legislation they refer to as ‘anti-LGBTQ+,’ patronizingly ignoring the fact that Africans are, by wide margins, far more socially conservative than Westerners on nearly every issue.
But the Guardian insists that this is a case of the Christians taking their culture wars abroad:
Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America often function as petri dishes for strategy as U.S. groups abroad help craft legislation and fight legal battles. 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 “religious Right’s play in Africa, where it has successfully lodged itself in many nations’ political and elite establishment, is about ‘power and money’” and has allegedly transformed laws around the world.
Additionally, the report claims, the religious Right is attempting to “redefine human rights”—which is precisely what the sexual Left has been doing at the international level for decades. Austin Ruse of the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM) sends out weekly missives detailing the machinations of activists at the UN to get abortion and LGBT-supporting language in treaties and formal documents of every kind; Marguerite Peeters described the phenomenon of how institutions were infiltrated and colonized in The Globalization of the Western Sexual Revolution (2012); sociologist Gabrielle Kuby did the same in The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom.
In short, the Guardian is claiming that an international cabal of Christian leaders is doing what cosmopolitan sexual revolutionaries have been doing with staggering success for over half a century. It isn’t just that this report isn’t true—it’s that it is precisely the opposite of the truth.
