How should we respond to Uganda’s latest laws against homosexuality, as one of some 30 African countries that still have such laws? (https://www.news24.com/news24/africa/news/uganda-passes-bill-banning-identifying-as-lgbtiqa-20230321)
Some of our church members have been asking, so here are a few thoughts (with help also from my friend, Mark Christopher; and from Grudem’s textbooks on biblical politics & ethics):
(1) We have no defense for hypocritical dictators who hide their lust for power and money behind a guise of traditional morality (e.g., Museveni has been president since 1986, for the last 37 yrs). Such new laws may also be wrongly used in witch-hunt scenarios where someone is falsely accused of homosexuality for the sake of political expedience.
(2) Uganda allows for polygamy, which is certainly a violation of creation ethics of a one-man one-woman monogamous union. So, it would seem that the motivation for the anti-homosexual law is not rooted in concern for biblical marriage as God defines it.
(3) Old Covenant civil laws for Israel’s theocracy are not binding today on the Church or nations. Yet God’s Law is still part of His inspired Word and reveals His moral will for all humanity, for the sanctity of marriage and for sexual purity. Nations would be prudent to pattern their laws after God’s good, wise and holy Law.
(4) A good place to start would be to define what marriage is (as well as gender distinction) and make policy based on a Judeo-Christian understanding of marriage, gender, and family. Then for the state to say that any distortions of what constitutes the clearly defined one-man one-woman union are not recognized as legitimate forms of marriage.
(5) The mission of the Church is to proclaim clearly all the threats of God’s Law and all the invitations of His gospel – to declare a Saviour who died for us all, immoral sinners and lawbreakers of every kind. Yet any who repent and call on His name can be pardoned of all their sin, washed and cleansed by His blood, and live a transformed life by His grace!
(6) Christians must maintain biblical and historical perspective and not bow to the aggressive homosexual agenda of recent decades and their radical redefining of ‘human rights’. We should advocate for a very limited, non-intrusive role for government – ordained by God for “the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right” (1 Pet. 2:14).
(7) Before recent times, sodomy laws were almost universal, not out of hatred for anyone but because of biblical influence, fear of God, love for neighbour, protection of marriage & family, and preservation of society. Chief Justice Warren Burger (US Supreme Court, 1986) stated:
Decisions of individuals relating to homosexual conduct have been subject to state intervention throughout the history of Western civilization. Condemnation of those practices is firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards… To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millenia of moral teaching.