President Yoweri Museveni really detests western culture. To make his point, he made a reference to what happened before the advent of colonialists in Africa. “Nyendaalo was the nickname for a girl who got pregnant before marriage and the penalty was setting her ablaze while the boy would be speared to death. There was no immorality but colonialists came and defiled our culture calling it barbaric, and destroying the family marriage code,” he said to clergymen recently. [via The New Vision 5th July, 2005; may require registration]

Back in 1999, Uganda’s president ordered all homosexuals to be locked up shortly after reading that a gay marriage ceremony had occurred in Uganda. [The name of one partner in that rumor turned out to have been the name of the accused’s deceased wife.] Perhaps a large majority of Ugandans would agree with the president’s plan; that same year, 84% of those polled in the capital, Kampala, wanted homosexuality to remain illegal.

Despite the fact that President Museveni has led a stunningly successful campaign to reduce Uganda’s AIDS infection rate, he has alternatively claimed that no homosexuals exist in Uganda to spread the disease (2002) and warned the UN not to offer AIDS awareness programs for homosexuals in Uganda (2004) — because homosexuality is illegal.

Most recently, Uganda has outlawed same-sex marriage: “outlawed” as in “made criminal”:

Uganda’s parliament has passed tough new laws against gays in the African nation. The new law makes it a criminal offense for same-sex couples to marry.

“Parliament has adopted a proposal to amend the Constitution so as to criminalize same-sex marriages,” Bernard Eceru, a spokesperson for the government told the Ugandan Newspaper. Eceru said that 111 MPs voted in favor of the amendment, 17 against and three abstained.

Specific jail terms for offenders were not included in the legislation but are to be laid out in revisions to the Ugandan penal code at a later date, Eceru told the paper.

Uganda’s AIDS program stresses “abstinence before marriage,” marriage is only and always heterosexual in the eyes of Ugandan law, and Museveni thinks God’s on his side. Perhaps these factors explain why the Bush administration decided to send over $90 million to Uganda for AIDS prevention and treatment (even though Uganda has one of the lowest AIDS rates in Africa) — y’know, fundamentalist to fundamentalist.