Will California face a backlash for its homophobic legislation like Uganda Did?

Last updated on: March 27, 2015 at 8:29 am by Frank Schaeffer

Will California face a backlash for its homophobic legislation like Uganda Did? 2015-03-27T08:29:07-06:00 Frank Schaeffer

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“So will the State of California face the threat of similar federal sanctions for its own proposed “kill the gays” referendum? In attempting to put the Sodomite Suppression Act – which allows “any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification” to “be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method” – on the ballot in California, attorney Matt McLaughlin has made it clear that too many people in the United States are no better than those in Uganda who earned our country’s opprobrium.” So writes Steven W Thrasher column in his latest op-ed in The Guardian (reprinted here by permission)

Uganda faced a backlash for its homophobic legislation. Will California?

By Steven W Thrasher

California’s proposed ‘kill the gays’ referendum is a disgrace. Attorney General Kamala Harris should refuse legitimizing the bill, even if that requires civil disobedience

The ballot initiative wants to let this woman, and others like her, shoot gay people. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex

After years of efforts by American evangelical missionaries in collusion with pandering local politicians, Uganda passed a law in 2014 which made homosexual acts punishable by life in prison (an improvement on its 2013 “kill the gays” legislation). But though Uganda’s high court later overturned the law on a technicality, America quickly cut aid to the nation and calls for a trade boycott in Britain were swift, before the law was considered again.

So will the State of California face the threat of similar federal sanctions for its own proposed “kill the gays” referendum?

In attempting to put the Sodomite Suppression Act – which allows “any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification” to “be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method” – on the ballot in California, attorney Matt McLaughlin has made it clear that too many people in the United States are no better than those in Uganda who earned our country’s opprobrium.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve argued with Americans who in private or in print have asserted that Western countries are superior to backwards and unenlightened African nations like Uganda because of the alleged better treatment of our LGBT citizens. This racially troubling myth of black homophobia is an example of what Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole calls “the White-Savior Industrial Complex” and allows Americans to do things like downplay our role in exporting homophobic laws to Uganda in the first place. Such thinking led the Human Rights Campaign to call for a temporary recall of America’s ambassador to Uganda last year to “send one of the clearest signals possible that the United States will not tolerate such abuses to any person’s human rights.”

The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon and receives awards in the evening.

Yet McLaughlin’s proposed referendum combines the worst elements from Uganda’s and California’s previous anti-gay legislative efforts, and would make illegal “buggery” and “sodomistic propaganda” (I’d definitely be guilty of both of these many times over), as well as gay people holding public jobs or offices. He smartly refers to sodomy – which will whip up some disgust by conservatives. But even in the likely event his proposal doesn’t garner the 356,000 signatures needed to get on a statewide ballot, let’s not pretend like the harm facing such a violent possibility is incidental to queer Californians.

Heterosexual Californians have wielded voter referendums like clubs of moral superiority to terrorize queer people before: first with Prop 6 “Briggs Initiative” in 1978, an attempt to keep queer people from being public school teachers which Harvey Milk worked to defeat. It was followed by Prop 64 in 1986, the unsuccessful bid to track and quarantine people with Aids, and, most famously, by Prop 8 in 2008, the successful bid to stop LGBT Californians from getting married.

And California has used voter referendums to bypass representative democracy for nefarious purposes hundreds of times in the past century. Often, these propositions are lobbed by angry majorities looking to vent their rage on already marginalized minority scapegoats. White Californians have weaponized voter referendums to punish or threaten to punish people of color multiple times by heightening anti immigrant sentiment (Prop 187), making English the official school language (Prop 227), ending affirmative action in public institutions (Prop 209) and fueling the prison industrial complex with the “strictest ‘three strikes’ sentencing law in the United States” (Prop 184).

So as McLaughlin tries to gather signatures, LGBT groups will have to mount some kind of counter campaign, sucking resources from more worthy goals (like finding housing for homeless LGBT youth or ending trans profiling by police) and exacting a hellish emotional and psychic toll on those who fight this absurd battle. As a California lesbian told me in 2009 as she tried to counter Prop 8’s fallout, it’s “strange to stand outside of a Target in Sacramento and beg perfect strangers for your civil rights.” How terrifying will it be to have to ask strangers: “Please don’t vote to put a bullet through my brain to end my right to life?”

Those opposed to executing LGBT people could go take their case to McLaughlin and protest him directly, but, while he does not appear to have a California firearm permit, who wants to negotiate with someone who thinks it is better that LGBT “offenders should die rather than that all of us should be killed by God’s just wrath”?

As ridiculous as this is, it’s not funny – and it is unconscionable that such a lethal proposal should be allowed to be normalized in any way by California’s referendum bureaucracy. But while the San Francisco Chronicle reports that Attorney General Kamala Harris’s “options appear to be limited” and “she may not have any choice” but to move this odious effort ahead to the signature gathering phase without a judge’s intervention, I disagree.

Harris can and should choose to engage in an act of civil disobedience if necessary and refuse to facilitate the advance of such a clearly illegal effort. The oath of office she took in becoming attorney general (not to mention common decency) demand she not legitimize McLaughlin’s genocidal referendum in any way. Americans shouldn’t have to threaten California with boycott as they did to Uganda, nor should queer Californians have to beg their neighbors not to sign a petition that threatens them with execution. Harris, however, has an obligation to stop any of that from being necessary.

A decade ago, then San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom (now the state’s lieutenant governor) engaged in civil disobedience to perform same-sex marriages. The stakes are too high, and the likelihood of backlash too low, for Harris to refuse to engage in civil disobedience by refraining to facilitate even the discussion of the execution of queer citizens in the state she serves.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace

Available now on Amazon

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