Jef­frey Get­tle­man, in this New York Times arti­cle, writes about how three Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians from the United States–Scott Lively (click here to read quotes from his talk in Uganda), Caleb Lee Brun­didge and Exo­dus Inter­na­tional board mem­ber Don Schmierer – are now try­ing to dis­tance them­selves from an event in Uganda at which they spoke about “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.’ The rea­son for their backpedal­ing is that the event con­tributed to the cli­mate that led to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which would make homo­sex­u­al­ity a cap­i­tal crime. In a rhetor­i­cal move that is remark­ably sim­i­lar to the ways in which the reli­gious right tries to dis­tance itself from peo­ple who mur­der doc­tors that per­form abor­tions, each of these men or their orga­ni­za­tions has issued state­ments about how their mes­sage is one of love and com­pas­sion, not hatred and vio­lence. Read the arti­cle and fol­low some of the links. Their hypocrisy speaks for itself.

I do have to share, though, my favorite quote from Gettleman’s arti­cle. Refer­ring to the Ugan­dan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, Schmierer says, “That’s hor­ri­ble, absolutely hor­ri­ble. Some of the nicest peo­ple I have ever met are gay peo­ple.” (Makes me won­der if any of them are Black.)