Uganda – Death To Homosexuals

There is a bill in the Uganda legislature that would make being homosexual a capital offense. The bill as written,

…if passed in its proposed version, would punish homosexual acts between adults—including touching "with the intent of committing the act of homosexuality"—with life imprisonment. The punishment for "serial offenders," homosexual sex with minors or the disabled, or homosexual sex while being HIV-positive, is death.

However, Uganda is not the first nation that has draconian laws against homosexual act, seven other nations also have the death sentence for homosexual acts they are Iran, Mauritania, Saudi-Arabia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, Yemen and Nigeria (death penalty applies to 12 Northern provinces with Sharia law). In addition, 73 countries around the world consider homosexuality illegal, not including the seven that impose the death sentence. What is ironic is that many of those countries do not consider a transsexual a homosexual. A BBC article said that,

Sex changes have been legal in Iran since Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of the 1979 Islamic revolution, passed a fatwa - a religious edict - authorising them for "diagnosed transsexuals" 25 years ago.

Today, Iran carries out more sex change operations than any other nation in the world except for Thailand.

What is disastrous is that many Iranian homosexuals are given a choice between death and gender reassignment surgery, they are condemned to live their life being stuck in the wrong gender by force.

Sixty-five nations voted in favor of the United Nation’s statement on human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity, however, the United States was not one of the signers of the resolution. The resolution called for,

...called upon member states to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as protected non-discrimination categories and “to ensure that sexual orientation or gender identity may under no circumstances be the basis for criminal penalties.”

President Bush refused to sign it and sided instead with sixty nations that offered a counter proposal,

Nearly sixty nations, principally from the Islamic world, sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania, presented an alternate statement which warned against the attempt to create “new rights” or “new standards” by “misinterpreting” the non-discrimination clauses of long-established human rights instruments. The alternate declaration condemned “all forms of stereotyping, exclusion, stigmatization, prejudice, intolerance and discrimination and violence directed against peoples, communities and individuals on any ground whatsoever, wherever they occur,” while defending the ability sovereign nations to enact laws that meet the “just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare.”

However, President Obama did sign the resolution upon his inauguration.