https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/russia-and-u-s-religious-conservatives-see-common-foe-in-africa-gay-rights-53edee87KAMPALA, Uganda—The message landed in the inboxes of Ugandan parliamentary staffers on the final Tuesday in March last year: Russia’s embassy had just transferred $300,000 for them to host lawmakers from across Africa for a conference on how to resist Western pressure on issues like gay and reproductive rights.
CC-ed in the email, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal, was another name: Sharon Slater, president of Family Watch International, an Arizona-based conservative lobby group and one of the organizers of the event.
Slater, a prominent Mormon activist and the wife of a senior Intel executive, has spent the past quarter-century working with officials from Africa, Europe and the Middle East to oppose abortion, gay marriage and sex education not centered on abstinence. Now, the mother of seven’s efforts have merged with a broader, ultraconservative movement that encompasses the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin, African politicians and activists from the American Religious Right.
Russian diplomats and American conservative activists present themselves as protectors of what they call “traditional African values” from the pressures of a neocolonial, decadent West. Emboldened governments have begun passing sweeping antigay legislation, putting some of America’s closest allies on the continent increasingly at odds with Washington, where the Biden administration has made the protection of LGBTQ rights a central plank of its Africa policy.
LGBTQ activists say the campaign has endangered the lives of gay and transgender Africans, especially in Uganda, now home to one of the world’s strictest antigay laws, where repeat convictions for gay sex carry the death penalty and merely teaching about same-sex attraction or gender nonconformity risks a prison sentence of up to 20 years.
