Joe Biden was quick to condemn Uganda’s sweeping new anti-LGBTQ law, which includes ten-year prison sentences for the “promotion” of homosexuality, life sentences for homosexual acts, and even the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality”.

The US president called the law “a tragic violation of human rights”, threatening sanctions, and stating: “This shameful act is the latest development in an alarming trend of human rights abuses and corruption in Uganda.”

Of course, I have no objections to my country’s president denouncing such a horrific law. But at the same time I can only agree with the views expressed in a report by openDemocracy’s Khatondi Soita Wepukhulu last month.

They helped highlight the United States and the European Union’s self-serving and unethical silence on their own citizens’ roles in the passing of this bill, which has been well over a decade in the making. The US and EU have focused solely on Uganda’s own president and political establishment as this anti-LGBTQ state terror unfolds.

This erases the many years of anti-LGBTQ agitation and lobbying by American (and some European) anti-rights activists and right-wing Christian politicians, under the cover of both “training” and religious “ministry” – to say nothing of the fact that Uganda’s original sodomy law was imposed by the British Empire.

Wepukhulu’s commentary focuses largely on Sharon Slater, a Mormon, and her group Family Watch International – as well as another American citizen, Tim Kreutter, and his “active” role in the international politics of the ultra-conservative Fellowship Foundation (or ‘the Family’). Though neither figure was directly involved with Uganda’s new law, both have been linked to the political work that preceded it.

Before Slater and Kreutter, there was Lou Engle, a leader in the extreme charismatic Protestant movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation; and Scott Lively, head of Abiding Truth Minstries – and, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a man whose presentation of “his virulent views about homosexuality at a 2009 anti-gay conference in Uganda… is widely believed to have played a role in the drafting of Uganda’s notorious ‘kill the gays’ bill” (the new law is a reheated version of legislation that passed briefly in 2013 but was quickly struck down for procedural reasons). As Wepukhulu points out, Ugandan rights activists drew attention to their influence at the time.

US links with Uganda

In addition to those two, many other American politicians, pastors, and missionaries pushed both virulent homophobia and abstinence-only sex “education” in Uganda in that period. They included celebrity pastor Rick Warren and a number of politicians involved in the Family and the National Prayer Breakfast, among whom were then-senators Sam Brownback and James Inhofe, both Republicans.

As for Warren, he became a household name, at least among US Protestants, after publishing ‘The Purpose Driven Life’ in 2002, a sort of Christian self-help book that immediately became wildly popular in evangelical circles. He was also virulently homophobic, and known for casual comparisons of homosexuality to incest and bestiality.

Much to the chagrin of myself and other liberals and progressives, Barack Obama invited Warren to give the invocation at his 2009 presidential inauguration ceremony. This happened shortly after Warren, whose megachurch is located in southern California, passionately advocated for the passage of Prop 8, a ballot initiative that banned same-sex marriage in the state until a court overturned it in 2010.

All the while, Warren was developing a relationship with Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa, declaring Uganda a “purpose-driven nation,” and platforming Ssempa at his Saddleback Church even as Ssempa, back in Uganda, pressed for the passage of what many in the US media were then calling the “kill the gays” bill. In 2005, Ssempa admitted to a reporter that he believed in quietly passing around condoms to certain groups of people, even though he admitted to having publicly burned condoms in a college campus demonstration. By 2007, however, Ssempa was strictly in favour of the abstinence-only approach.

As with Slater, public scrutiny eventually caused Warren and other right-wingers who pursued active influence in Uganda to downplay their influence and state their opposition to the death penalty for homosexuality. But Warren and the National Prayer Breakfast figures who contributed to the increasingly violent anti-gay climate in Uganda have never really owned up to their own complicity.

Nor did Obama – who, like Biden, was far too optimistically given to making grand gestures of reconciliation to authoritarian right-wing Americans – ever admit that he made a mistake in platforming a toxic figure like Warren. It’s an unfortunate pattern that, as Wepukhulu points out, persists, and I think it’s worth recalling this history of US Christian Right interference in Uganda in some detail as we reflect on present realities.

Biden and the National Prayer Breakfast

One consistent throughline in this whole sordid trajectory is the influence of politicians involved with the National Prayer Breakfast, and I find it utterly exasperating that the event’s Democratic defenders continue to give its organisers cover.

The Fellowship Foundation’s activities, including its prayer breakfasts, frequently undermine official US policy in their involvement in unofficial foreign diplomacy, exercising considerable influence on some authoritarian foreign leaders. And while the National Prayer Breakfast itself is now technically organised by a distinct entity, the Fellowship Foundation remains closely associated with the event and continues to use prayer as a path to influence in foreign countries.

With this in mind, if Biden truly wants to push back against Uganda’s anti-LGBTQ legal hellscape, he should draw explicit attention to the American actors who undermine his own policy agenda and dissociate himself from their networks by cutting all ties with the National Prayer Breakfast and denouncing the Fellowship Foundation.

Unfortunately, among Democrats, Biden is one of the National Prayer Breakfast’s biggest fans. With that in mind, I won’t be holding my breath. But I will be taking every opportunity I can to speak out against the president’s complicity in fostering the very policies he publicly denounces in his refusal to see the National Prayer Breakfast for what it really is: a right-wing Christian influence-peddling extravaganza whose organisers foster hate on a global scale.