Uganda Police Raid HIV Program Looking for Gay and Bi Men to Arrest

[William769]

Giving out safer-sex educational materials to prevent HIV can send you to prison in Uganda now.

People living with HIV, especially those who are gay, bisexual, or transgender, in Uganda have been reeling from last week's police raid on an HIV and AIDS service provider in Kampala (which was funded by the United State's military's Walter Reed Project).

Box Turtle Bulletin posted video from NTV Uganda (in which safer-sex educational materials, condoms, and lube that the group offered are cited by Uganda Police Force spokesman Fred Enanga as reasons for arrests). Enanga released a statement about last week's raid, which is as follows:

"Police received a report that an NGO based in Nakasero area of Kampala was carrying out recruitment and training of young males in unnatural sexual acts.

"Police deployed crime intelligence officers to verify the claims, by infiltrating the project. Two officers undertook the assignment.

http://www.hivplusmag.com/treatment/law-crime/2014/04/09/uganda-police-raid-hiv-program-looking-gay-and-bi-men-arrest

[countryjake]

1. K&R!

[Behind the Aegis]

2. Disgusting!

Start rounding them up!

We have the four gay men sentenced in Egypt, the cries from the gays of Ukraine, and the on-going bullshit in the other African countries, just this week alone.

Didn't someone here predict something like this was going to happen awhile back? I can't remember if it was an article or a DU'er who said something about the government going after AIDS and HIV places in order to root out gay and bi men.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

3. We need to respect other people's cultures less.

I have very little sympathy for people who complain about "cultural imperialism" - things like gay rights (and women's rights, and freedom of speech and religion, and banning corporal and capital punishment, etc, etc) are not "Western values", they're objectively correct universal values that happen to have caught on primarily in the West; we should be exerting what pressure we can on other societies to adopt them too (or not "too", in the case of e.g. the USA and capital punishment).

When someone says "it's part of my culture", the correct response is "yes, I know that your culture is flawed in this way, that's what I'm saying; now you need to change your culture".

When someone says "But your country does $badthing, you have no moral authority to complain about mine", the correct response is either "no, that's a good thing", "no my country doesn't do that" or "yes, please keep pointing this out and complaining about my country, and maybe you'll help improve it; at the same time, here is a list of things that your country needs to change. Oh, and by the way, moral authority is an ad hominem attack; what matters is if what I say is right, not who is saying it"