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”.
The spread across the world illustrates how America’s evangelical and Catholic right has globalized over the past 15 years by helping establish a vast web of anti-LGBTQ+ zealots who share ideas, messaging and funding.
Africa, eastern Europe and Latin America often function as petri dishes for strategy as US 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.
In late June an argument frequently made by the European religious right – that religion-based objections to same-sex marriage trumped the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals – was used to win a case before the US supreme court that critics say will allow businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.
“The policy ideas and solutions that are traveling the globe look rather similar,” said David Paternotte, a sociologist at Université libre de Bruxelles. “The US is a key player in that game, but the circulations can go in different directions.”
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”, said Kapya Kaoma, a Uganda-born pastor who now lives in Boston. How that global success has fueled the religious right “is something people in the west fail to understand”, he added.
Lively is not acting alone: the US Christian right spent at least $280m abroad between 2008 and 2019, an investigation by the British news site openDemocracy found. Lively, however, is among the most infamous, having made his name from his 1995 book The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, which claimed Hitler and Nazi leadership were gay, and gay men were behind the Holocaust.
His 2009 speech to Uganda’s parliament planted the seeds for the 2014 Anti-Homosexuality Act, which was ultimately struck down by the nation’s supreme court. But Uganda recently passed a new version with the help of fundamentalist US groups like Family Watch International, whose leader, Sharon Slater, has said LGBTQ+ rights are “fictitious”, and The Family, a secretive group that reportedly helped author the bill. OpenDemocracy found it spent $20m in Africa between 2008 and 2019.
Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania and other nations have introduced anti-LGBTQ+ bills that impose harsher punishments with the assistance of US groups.
Meanwhile, the US Christian right in the European Union largely focuses on legal infrastructure, said Neil Datta, who leads the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights.
“The added value the Americans bring is the expertise of the legal culture wars in the US,” he said. “There’s 60 more years of litigation on social issues than what we have in Europe.”
Hungary banned the sharing of LGBTQ+ content to people under 18, and passed a law allowing anonymous reporting of same-sex couples raising children. Its far-right leader Viktor Orbán recently echoed Lively when he defended the legislation, saying in a speech: “Gender propaganda is not just … rainbow chatter, but the greatest threat stalking our children.”
In Poland, authorities have used new laws to harass LGBTQ+ activists, and around 100 municipalities – nearly a third of the country – in 2019 passed resolutions declaring themselves free of “LGBT ideology”.
Among key US groups backing these other efforts are the American Center for Law and Justice and European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), both run by Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, Jay Sekulow. In a legal brief, the ECLJ defended the Polish municipalities, arguing there is nothing discriminatory “in considering that pro-LGBT+ social pressure is the vector of an ideology, and in refusing to promote it among children”. The ECLJ has also provided legal assistance defending Italy’s ban on gay marriage, and for other human rights cases at the EU level.
OpenDemocracy identified over $14m that Sekulow’s US operation has spent in Europe since 2007, which is part of at least $88m in total spending by the US Christian right during the same period.
The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which boasts having won 14 supreme court cases since 2011, has spent $21m in Europe and regularly intervenes or argues in front of the European Court of Human Rights. In 2015, it defended national laws requiring sterilization for transgender people, telling the court “equal dignity does not mean that every sexual orientation warrants equal respect”.
‘They’re trying to redefine human rights’
Leaders from the world’s religious right regularly meet at forums hosted by groups across the globe, like the Conservative Political Action Coalition (CPAC), World Congress of Families and Political Network for Values.
“Once they’re all there together they exchange ideas and they’re able to see ‘Well, this worked well in this country, so I can take and adopt it, and it should work in my country’s context,’” Datta said.
In Europe, the religious right’s latest messaging has its roots in the 1990s, when social advances that expanded rights for LGBTQ+ people and access to abortion drew the ire of the Vatican and other European conservative groups.
“They had lost these important moments and went through a process of thinking: why did we lose? Was it our narrative, leaders, strategy?” Datta said.
Out of that process, the Vatican in the 2000s developed the term “gender ideology”, Datta said, which is similar to potent transgender messaging the US religious right imported several years later.
“There can be different versions in different countries, but it means the same thing, and it works very well in other languages,” Datta said. The term has functioned as a rallying cry in Europe around which the political and legal infrastructure sprouted with the assistance of US expertise and funding.
At the same time, the European religious right “modernized” its messaging, Paternotte said. It is no longer “trying to be against things, but in favor of things”, he added: instead of being against LGBTQ+ rights, it is “pro-family”.
The religious right also now positions itself as a defender of human rights, but that’s “partly a trick”, Paterrnotte said. Though it claims to be for freedom of speech, it is against gay marriage, so the religious right feels it should not have to accept gay marriage, and attempts to limit speech around it.
“Then that human right [religious freedom] is more important than other human rights,” Paternotte said. “They’re trying to redefine human rights in a more restrictive sense ... and that’s happening nationally and globally.”
The ADF effectively made that argument in a recent case before the US supreme court, which ruled on 30 June that a conservative website designer could refuse service to a gay couple despite a Colorado state law that forbids discrimination against LGBTQ+ people.
Following the ruling, the ADF general counsel Kristen Waggoner wrote in a statement: “Disagreement isn’t discrimination, and the government can’t mislabel speech as discrimination to censor it.”
Just as it has in the US in recent years, the European religious right has claimed expanded LGBTQ+ rights are a form of “totalitarianism”. Other variations of that message hold that the European Union is engaged in a form of imperialism.
In its legal brief to the EU human rights court defending some nations’ forced sterilization programs for transgender people, the ADF wrote that protecting those laws “is a powerful way of ensuring that human rights are properly protected whilst at the same time mitigating the risk of human rights imperialism”.
‘Social imperialism’
A similar tactic has been used in Uganda by the religious right and Museveni.
“There’s now an attempt at social imperialism, to impose social values,” Museveni said after signing the 2014 bill. “We’re sorry to see that you [the west] live the way you live, but we keep quiet about it.”
In reality, many western religious leaders have profited from business in Africa and are embedded with countries’ leaders, which is a form of colonialism, said Victor Mukasa, a transgender person with Sexual Minorities Uganda who now lives in the US.
Lively’s 2009 visit in which he addressed Uganda’s parliament represented a pivotal moment on several levels. It marked the beginning of the US religious right’s close relations with the government, and while Ugandans prior to Lively’s campaign generally did not approve of homosexuality, the US pastor’s message that LGBTQ+ people were “preying on” children generated a dangerous climate.
“Here was propaganda saying we were sodomizing children while parents were at work, and we were recruiting teenagers in big numbers into homosexuality,” Mukasa said.
Since then, the religious right and Ugandan government have run an effective propaganda machine that capitalizes on a dearth of information available to many Ugandans, Kaoma said.
When a transgender person recently went on a shooting spree in Tennessee, the story was pushed in Uganda as an example of LGBTQ+ violence, just as it was in the US, Kaoma said. But most Africans do not know that the majority of mass shootings in the US are carried out by rightwing straight men, and there is little counter to the messaging.
“Africans who don’t know the context look at this and say, ‘This is what transgender people do,’” Kaoma said.
Though some find Lively’s assertion that the Nazi leadership was gay to be absurd, Kaoma said it is common for LGBTQ+ people to be compared by African and US religious right leadership to Nazis or others who carry out genocide, and use that as a call to arms.
“They say, ‘If you don’t fight this movement, lose your rights, lose your children,’ and that has led to the destruction of human life,” Kaoma said. “Unless the world becomes aware of this, Africa will never be the same again.”
The solutions are few. Kaoma called on Pope Francis to intervene but the Vatican has long avoided the issue until earlier this year when Francis said being gay is a sin, but not a crime.
For Mukasa, there is no easy solution, but he and others are working on engaging Ugandans, and “sensitizing our communities and being present in our communities in safe ways so that they see the humanity in us”.
“So they see that we too are parents, we too protect our children, we too are professionals, that we love our country, and we will stand to protect our country,” Mukasa said.
