Topic: Accuracy in Media
Cliff Kincaid returns to the subject of the proposed anti-gay law in Uganda in his Jan. 8 Accuracy in Media column, portraying it, as he has previously, as intended "to protect children from homosexual predators and the dangerous public health impact of the homosexual lifestyle." He also asserts that the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart "falsely claimed it would make homosexuality 'a crime punishable by death.'"
But Kincaid is the liar here -- Capehart's statement is essentially true. As we've previously detailed, CNN reported that the law would apply the death penalty to those who "engage in homosexual sex more than once," as well as "people who test positive for HIV"; it would also imprison "Anyone who knows of homosexual activity." The law would also apply even to Ugandans participating in same-sex acts in countries where such behavior is legal.
Kincaid's problem is that he's getting his misinformation about the law (and, apparently, about homosexuality itself) from virulently anti-gay pastor Scott Lively, whose Abiding Truth Ministries is on the Southern Poverty Law Center's list of hate groups. The New York Times reported that the Uganda law was incited in part by people like Lively, who participated in a recent conference on the "gay agenda" in the country in which, according to the Times, they "discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how ‘the gay movement is an evil institution' whose goal is ‘to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.' "
Kincaid has never offered meaningful evidence to contradict any of the details we or anyone else have reported about the law, which makes him the liar when he insists that the death penality doesn't apply to homosexuals.
