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Many top U.S. politicians are also invested in Uganda. The Bush administration liked to present the country as a model of pro-abstinence, anti-condom AIDS prevention policies (a claim that some dispute), and author Jeff Sharlet recently revealed close ties between The Family -- the secretive network of conservative American Christians that includes leading Sens. James Inhofe, Sam Brownback, Tom Coburn and Mike Enzi -- and the Ugandan legislator, David Bahati, who introduced the tough new anti-gay bill.
These American and African Christians have many things in common, but a frequent tie is a shared dislike -- bordering on detestation -- of homosexuality and homosexuals. Ugandan Christianity, like the faith in much of Africa and the Southern Hemisphere, is booming and orthodox on matters of sex, and is seen by Americans evangelicals in particular as fertile territory for mission work. It is also seen as a bulwark against an even more traditionalist Islam, as well as a breeding ground for Christian allies in the culture wars being fought in the West.
"Just as the United States and other northern societies routinely dump our outlawed or expired chemicals, pharmaceuticals, machinery, and cultural detritus on African and other Third World countries, we now export a political discourse and public policies our own society has discarded as outdated and dangerous," Tarso Luís Ramos, head of the PRA, says in the foreword to the report. "Africa's anti-gay campaigns are to a substantial degree made in the U.S.A."