An anti-gay Ugandan Cabinet minister vowed on Friday to continue to fight homosexuality in his country despite his claim that he receives daily hate mail from gay people around the world.
”The mail is from outside not from Uganda and I receive these mails every day,” Ethics and Integrity Minister James Nsaba Buturo said. ”I would not tell what is in those mails because the language used is rotten. The gays claim that they are oppressed, denied rights, undermined and fought.”
As Cabinet minister, Buturo has hotly opposed homosexuality and lesbianism in the country where the practice is illegal and punishable by a maximum sentence of life in prison.
”The practice [of homosexuality] is nonsensical. With men and men having relationships and women and women doing the same, we are destroying a generation. We should take care of our future,” he said.
Gay people in Uganda rarely speak openly or go to press, but an independent newspaper, the Daily Monitor, in its Friday edition quoted one of their leaders as saying that Buturo is a stumbling block in their quest for gay rights.
”Despite fighting us, we shall not be intimidated. We will fight for our rights and we will win,” the paper quoted Juliet Victor Mukasa, the head of Sexual Minorities in Uganda, as saying.
There are no official or independent statistics of the number of gay people in Uganda. — Sapa-dpa