“How can Parliament be the one to break the Constitution and the Law repeatedly?” Museveni wrote, according to The Daily Monitor .
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni at an anniversary parade in Kasese town, west of Uganda's capital Kampala last year.
James Akena / Reuters /
A report in the Ugandan newspaper The Daily Monitor suggests President Yoweri Musveni will attempt to block enactment of the "anti-homosexuality law," accusing the country's parliamentary speaker of pushing through the anti-homosexuality bill without a quorum in a December 20 vote. The premier, who is Museveni's representative in parliament, attempted to thwart the vote by a quorum call that was ignored by the speaker.
The law would impose up to a life sentence for engaging in same-sex relationships, and requires people to report people believed to be gay to the police.
"How can you pass law without the quorum of Parliament after it has been pointed out?" Museveni wrote, according to the Monitor. "What sort of Parliament is this? How can Parliament be the one to break the Constitution and the Law repeatedly?"
Museveni reportedly went on to say that although homosexuality is "abnormal," the lifetime prison sentence is not the appropriate response. (He endorsed a life-time sentence only for those who lure young peopole into "these disgusting behaviors.") Instead, he said some people turn to homosexuality for "mercenary reasons" — as a way of earning money — and could be brought out of homosexuality through economic empowerment.
"The question at the core of the debate of homosexuality is; what do we do with an abnormal person? Do we kill him/her? Do we imprison him/her? Or we do contain him/her?" he reportedly wrote.
But he also condemned Western countries where LGBT rights are recognized.
"You cannot call an abnormality an alternative orientation," he wrote. "It could be that the Western societies, on account of random breeding, have generated many abnormal people."
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