Uganda has lost one of its greatest human rights activists, David Kato, who was famous for saying that all he wanted to be was a “good human rights defender.”
David Kato, a man in his mid-forties living near the capital of Uganda, was murdered with a hammer in his home on January 26th, 2011.
He was called “the father of the Uganda gay rights movement”, and he was a founding officer of Sexual Minorities Uganda, which is an organization for gay rights.
Homophobia is a pressing issue in Uganda, for even suspected homosexuality can lead to imprisonment. There is currently a bill circulating in the Ugandan Parliament that could potentially give the government the right to kill anyone suspected of homosexuality.
In a written statement made by President Obama, he said, “LGBT rights are not special rights; they are human rights.”
Who is to blame for this heinous crime? Some say it’s the American evangelicals who tour Uganda in an attempt to warn them of the dangers of homosexuality. Evangelicals believe that if one has enough faith and prays enough, he or she can transform into a heterosexual person. One evangelical in particular, Scott Lively, says that “it’s too early to call Kato’s murder a hate crime.” He said this knowing that, months before Kato’s death, there was a publication of Uganda’s’ top 100 homosexuals, with their pictures, addresses, and names, and a banner on top saying “Hang Them!”
Unfortunately, the local police force seems to agree with Mr. Lively. They have come to a very quick conclusion that Kato’s murder was the consequence of a basic, run-of-the-mill robbery, simply because, upon investigating the crime scene, they saw that a few things were missing.
Human rights advocate Archbishop Tutu, the contributor of our word of the year “Ubuntu,” recently spoke out against such intolerance. He has already appealed to the church, asking them to admit to taking part in actions against the African homosexual community, saying, “Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity—or because of their sexual orientation. …It is a great wrong. An even larger offense is that it is being done in the name of God. Show me where Christ said, ‘love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones.’ I would never worship a homophobic God.”
There have been two arrest warrants issued to the suspects of Kato’s murder—a taxi driver found near Kato’s house and an ex-convict who was in Kato’s house before the killing. However, these arrest warrants were not issued before Kato’s funeral, which drew a 300 people. Unfortunately, the remembrance of his life was marred by a homophobic outburst, including a very passionate anti-gay priest who stated that “Gays and Lesbians are sinners” and that they deserve to be targeted.