Simon Lokodo is the minister of “ethics and integrity” in Uganda and a promoter of Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill, which seemed set to become law until President Yoweri Museveni halted it because of the pending scientific advice. However, the delay was a small victory, for activists dismayed a week earlier when Museveni insisted that he would approve the legislation. The LGBTQ activists are risking their lives protesting against it. In 2009, Uganda had made headlines with the introduction of the anti-homosexuality bill that included a death sentence for gay sex. In 2014, the country’s lawmakers passed a bill, but they replaced the death penalty clause with life in prison. President Yoweri Museveni had signed the bill but it was later annulled by the country’s constitutional court due to a technicality.
Meanwhile, in the US there was anxiety about what the Supreme Court would decide about the discrimination against people from the LGBTQ community in the workplace. All these struggles just kept on shinning the light on the ignorance and bias that still goes on in society. Being legally banned from living as you are, being threatened to be killed or arrested for having a sexual orientation, that doesn’t please ignorant people in power, is one of the heinous crimes against mankind. This just goes on to show us that some people are incapable of rational thinking, logic or even tolerance in the very least. The whole idea of being able to make laws on the basis of religion is wrong in its very foundation.
In 2016, when a baker in Colorado refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple and won the case in the Supreme Court because apparently, his religious views were more important than the gay couple’s right to live a life where they have rights and are not discriminated. Northeastern University’s law professor, Dan Urman pointed out that the court ruling focused on the government’s treatment of the baker rather than the baker’s treatment of the gay couple.
Mayuri Talgaonkar