It was the gay pride parade today in New York,
which capped a great month of significant advances for marriage equality in America.
[The white house is granting new benefits to same sex couples,
including those who live in states where gay marriage is against the law]
[To date, nineteen states in the district of Columbia have legalised marriage equality and the momentum continues]
That's right, we are nearly half way to full nationwide marriage equality,
which means it's about to become a question of which state is going to be last.
Who could it possibly be, Mississippi?
We don't know. We don't know, Mississippi.
It could be anyone, Mississippi.
Now, I know it's a little premature,
but I do think this might be one of those moments where we're allowed to feel great about this country.
Marriage equality is sweeping the nation and America did it!
Strike up the band! Bring out the rock and roll George Washington!
and the Americake(?)
Yes! I see no reason why this feeling is ever going to end! It's fantastic! Yes!
OK, OK, OK! hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on...
because unfortunately this month has also brought less good news from other countries.
[There's great controversy over the new UN General Assembly president,
Uganda's Sam Kutesa's been elected to the largely ceremonial role.
But thousands have signed a petition against the appointment because of Uganda's harsh laws on homosexuality]
Yeah, calling Uganda’s laws ‘harsh’ doesn’t really do them justice. That’s like calling Stalin ‘a bit of a grump'.
Or the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire a ‘whoopsie-doo’.
Or the Titanic a ‘disappointing vacation.’
Because.. let's take a moment to remind ourselves about what Uganda's laws actually contain.
[On Monday, the president of Uganda signed a sweeping anti-gay bill into law.
It makes it illegal simply to be gay in the country and imposes harsh prison sentences for offenders.]
So the moral arc of the universe is long and it bends away from Uganda.
And the law isn't just putting gays at risk at imprisonment.
Since it passed the Ugandan legislature,
the number of recorded acts of persecution has increased between 750% and 1900% from previous years.
It’s gotten to the point where people from the dark ages could build a time machine,
travel to 2014 Uganda, step outside and go "Ah shit, it didn’t work. OK, nice try, get back in."
Now, you might wonder: how can the UN allow a representative of the Ugandan government,
which has also been accused of corruption and the brutal suppression of dissent, to be in charge of their General Assembly.
[Sam Kutesa is chosen without a vote.
The selection is done on geographical rotation and African countries had already agreed he'd be their candidate.]
Oh that's fine then! So it's just their turn!
Essentially, the UN apparently works according to the same principle as family movie night,
where even if your little sister picks 'My little pony friendship is magic princess twighlight sparkle' for the third time,
ya have to watch it cos it's her f***ing turn.
The fact that, in the twenty first century, 81 countries have laws outlawing homosexuality is incredibly depressing.
Although, in a way, it shows how lucky we are to live here.
Because remember, when it comes to advances in marriage equality, America did it!
Am I right, cheerleaders?! Yes?
It's never gonna blow up in our face. USA! USA! USA!
OK, OK, ah.. This feels so good.
I mean, just out of interest, where did Uganda get the idea to come up with such hateful laws?
[Uganda has had laws against homosexuality for virtually all the past century.
They were introduced in the old British colonial days.]
Whoopsie-daisy.
I've gotta be honest, being British is sometimes a little like being an alcoholic.
When someone says you did something awful, you find yourself going
"Honestly, I don't even remember doing that, but yeah, probably, probably. I'm a dick, I'm a dick.
What'd you want me to say?"
OK, so fundamentally, it's the British people's fault.
But, you know, I live in America now, so I've still got a pretty warm feeling inside me,
unless.. someone is about to take that away from me.
[The irony, gay rights activists say, is that it was a small group of American Evangelicals,
who came to Uganda speaking out against homosexuality, which was already illegal,
that really took the persecution of the LGBT community to a new level.]
Wait.. so.. what you're essentially saying is, America did this..
No! No! No! Get back in that cake!
Get back in that cake! Get outta here!
All of you, get out of here and think about what you've done!
Shame on you! Shame on you!
OK, OK, so. Turns out, American anti-gay activists were in Uganda in the run up to the passage of the law.
And let's meet just one of them: Scott Lively.
Now, if that name rings a bell,
you may know him as one of those far right Christians who go on TV and say things like this..
[I think Mr. Obama may well be homosexual himself.]
Hey, hey, hey, hey. That's clearly wrong.
It's not Mr. Obama, it's President Obama.
President Obama is a homosexual, get it right!
Have some respect.
Now, if you live in Massachusetts,
you may also know Scott Lively as that crazy guy currently running for governor,
who's attempting to take back the rainbow as a symbol from the gays by promoting this song.
[The rainbow belongs to God, untouched by evil desires]
Wow, wow! I feel like if Kermit ever hear that song, he would immediately insist on one fewer songs about rainbows.
Look, Scott Lively is clearly an idiot, and luckily, over here we just get to laugh at him.
[You're never gonna stop AIDS until you stop treating homosexual sodomy as a civil right
and start treating it as a form of conduct to avoid]
[Laughter]
The guy's material is killing out there.
Hey, what's up with how HIV's only transmittable between homosexuals, huh?
Is this on, huh? This guy knows what I'm talking about.
Unfortunately though, in Uganda, it is a very different story.
[In America, he's a nobody. But in Africa, this extremist guy becomes the spokesperson
and he's able to address the entire parliament for five hours.]
I don’t know what is more shocking here:
that he addressed the parliament at all or that he did it for five hours.
Because, listen, if your hard-on for homophobia lasts five hours, you need to seek medical attention.
And he didn't just stop there.
Scott Lively spoke on Ugandan TV and gave seminars attended by Ugandan government officials.
And here is where Scott Lively is about to get considerably less funny.
[Increasingly, lesbians are being molested by other women.
It's actually becoming more and more common in the United States.]
[How dare you say that homosexuality and pedophilia are equated? Well, they are equated.]
[They have very little sense of mercy.. The Rwandan stuff probably involved these guys.]
[These were the Nazis. The Nazis.]
It’s like he ate the most offensive package of magnetic poetry and then vomited it all over his audience.
And then later that year, Uganda's homosexuality bill was introduced
and, for the record, Lively says he doesn't approve of it and disclaims any influence over it.
[I do not support, and never did support, the harsh penalties in terms of long prison sentences.
I don't believe in that, I never have.]
Oh no, no, of course not.
You were simply saying "Look guys, gay people are dangerous insidious Nazis..
do with that information what you will. Lively out. Lively out."
Why back off now Scott? Own it!
If God hates gays as much as you think he does,
He's gonna be pretty pissed at you for not seeing this thing through!
And it's not just Scott Lively,
one of Ugandan's most prominent anti-gay preachers is a pastor named Martin Ssempa.
Let's listen in on one of his lovely sermons.
[Do you know what they're doing in their bedroom?
I did research and I gathered their information.
Now they start off by touching each other's genitals and smelling each other..]
I've gotta say, for an anti-gay pastor, that man clearly has very quick access to a lot of fetish porn.
Very very swift, just "Oh, there we go!"
Now, Martin Ssempa is not American. He has in the past, however,
received funding from teh Canyon Ridge Christian church in Las Vegas and the US government
which allocated his organization $40,000 for abstinence education,
which he presumably responsibly spent on gay porn to show during sermons.
But if you want a single sound-bite
that sums up the depressing scale of the American cultural influence on Ugandan homophobia, it is this..
[In the beginning, it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.]
Yeah, that's not a Ugandan saying.
Let me give you three names that are not especially common in Africa: Adam, Eve and Steve.
So clearly U.S. groups recognized the market for homophobia stateside was dwindling and so tried to sell it somewhere else, meaning that 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.