 So I personally did not think that this was possible, but Ted Cruz the senator from Texas who we all know and hate He actually said something that was perfectly reasonable shocking I know and of course since he said something that was agreeable to most reasonable human beings it caused outrage among his Republican followers and honestly, let's be clear to even call his statement his tweets Reasonable or even compassionate. It really just feels like we're giving him too much credit Because this is the bare minimum like it is the bare minimum expectation for basic human decency But having said that though the bar is very low, so I do feel inclined to give him credit So what exactly am I talking about? Well without further ado He reacted to this story shared by the New York Times on Monday where they say the president of Uganda signed a punitive Anti-gay bill on Monday that includes the death penalty and shrining into law an Intensifying crackdown against LGBTQ people in the East African nation It is one of the world's most restrictive anti-gay measures now in response Ted Cruz tweeted this Uganda law is horrific and wrong Any law criminalizing homosexuality or imposing the death penalty for aggravated homosexuality is grotesque and an abomination all Civilized nations should join together in condemning this human rights abuse Hashtag LGBTQ now I get it the bar is very very low here, right? He just simply said we shouldn't kill gay people or imprison them for life if they happen to be gay It feels like he shouldn't get credit for this But I'm gonna give him credit for this given the climate in US politics currently Because him saying that believe it or not is not something that his own supporters agree with in fact There were Hundreds if not thousands of responses to him were they unequivocally condemned him for denouncing this vehemently homophobic law Here's a couple of examples here LMAO. What are you conserving? Uganda is based. I want sodomy laws back Homosexuality is a sign of civilizational decline grow desk abomination Now the Uganda lies based and should be worldwide make homosexuality shameful again You just lost my support Ted Cruz is pro-but sex. That's disgusting and anti-life Why do you hate life Ted gay is not okay? Uganda follows Christian values more closely than Texas. You should be ashamed Uganda is based It's actually pretty epic and will protect his country from the plague in which we suffer in America Imagine how beautiful our country would be Ted. I'm very disappointed in your take here Homosexuality is sinful and unnatural Maybe they saw how it unfolded here in the US first the gays wanted to get married and now they want to touch your kids Seems pretty logical to me if you're Uganda right now We made a societal mistake when we normalized the deviancy you would have hated God's law Ted Glad you're here now to fix all that God got wrong. Oh Ted I'm not even surprised you went gay This person actually had to Google a photograph of two men kissing to dunk on Ted Cruz here Really your hashtagging LGBTQ Christianity must take a back seat in your life Hashtag ww JD which for those of you who don't know stands for what would Jesus do and yeah Jesus would probably also want to kill gay people if you read the Bible another person said delete this and last but not least Woke Ted Cruz. So that is where we're at in 2023 America folks if you simply say that Jailing gays for life is wrong or killing them is wrong Well, congratulations. You've been infected with the woke mind virus And I understand that reading all of that is probably very depressing. I apologize for putting you through that But I need people to understand that This is a very widespread sentiment It's not like there were a couple of tweets with no engagement that denounced Ted Cruz That was widespread and a lot of those tweets Had tons of likes hundreds of likes in some instances But to his credit despite the backlash he doubled down on this I guess highly controversial stance that you shouldn't kill gay people and he doubled down in a response to former Trump Attorney Jenna Ellis writing Jenna not sure why you're defending this barbaric Ugandan law It imposes life imprisonment for consenting adults who engage in gay sex. That's ridiculous You or I may or may not agree with their choices But consenting adults should not go to jail for what they do in their own bedrooms and as you can see here She also called his tweet pro gay Because again, this is where we're at in 2023 despite Ted Cruz's past as a passionate homophobe he's now woke or pro-LGBTQ for simply denouncing life imprisonments or the death penalty for homosexuality It's just astonishing that we've come this far or we've fallen so much just within the span of a year Particularly a couple of months. It's it's really depressing But I do have some good news at the end of this video So stick around for that if this is kind of getting you down, but I need people to understand that This extremist almost Nazi-esque views that we're seeing from the right. It doesn't just Start and end with LGBTQ plus people for example far-right influencer Ian Miles Chong got Ratioed into oblivion for simply responding to an anti-semitic tweet by saying Jews aren't the problem and his followers roasted him And some of them even shared pro-Hitler images because I mean of course But it doesn't even stop there because in response to a video of Biden saying that he's taking unprecedented action to fight hate and Anti-semitism Lauren Bobbert responded by saying when they say stuff like this, they mean they want to go after conservatives I mean way to tell on yourself Bobo Fucking moron, but I want to stress that We're no longer just seeing typical right-wing bigotry. None of this is standard bigotry bigotry involves somebody Not wanting a marginalized group to have Civil rights this rhetoric that we're seeing is extremist and genocidal and you don't have to speculate Where it would take us if we follow this ideology to its logical conclusion because they've already told us They want what Uganda has in America and Uganda's bill is so bad that again It is viewed as one of the most homophobic laws in the world, but ironically Uganda didn't necessarily come up with this by themselves This homophobic wave that we're seeing in Uganda and other countries is the result of US meddling But first let's get to the law itself So as lgbtq nation explains while homosexual sex was already punishable by life imprisonment in Uganda under the country's colonial era Penal code the new law imposes a life sentence for recruitment Promotion and funding of same-sex activities and even bans Identifying as lgbtq plus it makes what the law describes as acts of aggravated homosexuality Punishable by the death penalty as Politico notes the law defines aggravated homosexuality as same-sex relations involving HIV positive people Children or other vulnerable people now many of the fascists and Ted Cruz's replies used the law's definition of aggravated homosexuality to Basically defend the law saying that this doesn't apply to all gays It only applies to HIV positive people and pedophiles specifically the problem However, is that this law is framed so as to conflate homosexuality with pedophilia And it also suggests that gays are plague-ridden deviants who are knowingly spreading diseases But I mean what if two HIV positive gay people engaged in intercourse? Will they get life imprisonment or because of this law the death penalty I mean what if somebody simply accuses a gay person of being a pedophile? What's the standard for evidence furthermore is this going to be a Trojan horse for an expansion because their first law which criminalized homosexuality was expanded here, so What's gonna stop them from conflating a man acting too effeminate around a child as pedophilia? I mean it is a very Slippery slope here and we're already seeing a surge of homophobic or harassment as a result of these laws But it's not just queer people who are being harassed. It's anyone who is perceived to be LGBTQ So this will affect straight and cis people as well. That's what they don't realize But I mean when you have this culture that is deeply homophobic You can't just create these exceptions and not expect Innocent people to get caught up because they will get swept up in this But even though politicians like Ted Cruz are against these laws It should still worry us that there are so many right-wingers who publicly support laws that are this homophobic But we shouldn't really be shocked by this because homophobia is something that American evangelicals exported to Uganda and other countries as well to be clear and they basically used these countries as testing grounds for their highly conservative social policies and the goal ultimately is to export those policies Back to the United States after seeing that they're successful in these countries where they're testing them out in MSNBC columnists Naira Hawk explains American evangelical missionaries arrived in Uganda in the 1980s They built medical clinics and schools as part of a strategic effort to prompt a religious revival in the developing world The 1980s also marked the start of the AIDS epidemic that at its peak ended up infecting 30% of pregnant women in Uganda and 20% of adults across the continent that epidemic also offered 34 million children across the continent Missionaries in Uganda quickly adopted America's virulent homophobia to preach against what they argued was deviant sexual behavior It did not matter that AIDS in Africa was mostly spread by straight people Lou Eagle and evangelical leader from Kansas City, Missouri Known for his opposition to abortion and gay people brought Ugandan preachers to America for training and education American church leaders have also had a direct hand in Uganda's criminalization of LGBTQ people the PBS documentary God loves Uganda features Scott lively a religious personality who blames homosexuals for the Holocaust and Follows his celebrity rise in East Africa in that documentary We see lively appearing on talk shows and addressing the Ugandan Parliament in favor of the 2009 version of the anti-homosexual bill now the original version of the 2009 law referenced in that article was originally dubbed the kill the gays bill Because it originally wanted to kill all gay people simply for being gay But the compromise was life imprisonment and as you can see that law is being expanded here It just was expanded now Scott lively is one of many American evangelicals to spread bigotry across Africa and especially in Uganda and They're successful at doing this because of their methods so they'll do actual charity work for these impoverished communities and They'll build schools. They'll offer them food housing, but in turn They indoctrinate them and you know It sounds reasonable because if your village is struggling and hungry and you have this American come along and offer you food and In exchange all you have to do is listen to them preach to you that sounds pretty reasonable on its face, right? But that's how they indoctrinate these villages Into their hateful ideology and they kind of saw Uganda as a sort of testing ground and for those unaware Americans have been using other countries as laboratories for their shitty policies since forever Another example is how American neoliberals used chili to test out privatizing social security, which has been Disastrous doesn't even begin to explain it, but it's been a colossal mistake But this is what they do right with regard to Africa, for example a large portion of non-governmental organizations are religious So you begin to see why these countries slowly, but surely adopt social conservatism because they are influenced by these Western creatures who come in and They're nice to them and Again, they offer you all of these resources They offer you charity. All you have to do is listen to them preach hate to you It's honestly despicable. It's it's exploitative But this is what they've been doing and Pastor Rick Warren who spread homophobia in Africa apparently had a guilty enough conscious to come out and publicly denounce Uganda's kill the gays bill back in 2009 because he knew how nefarious and predatory their actions in Africa were but now you hear conservatives ironically saying that us being against Homophobic laws like this is us basically exporting woke when none of the social conservatism the bigotry is what we exported originally But in short gay people have always existed in Uganda and regardless of what laws they pass gay people will continue to exist as Is the case in any country? But the difference is that a bunch of bloodthirsty evangelicals convinced Ugandans That the existence of gay people is wrong and that's why we're seeing so many laws Their influence is far and wide in some of these countries, but as depressing as the story may be I want to make it very clear that not every country is moving backwards when it comes to LGBTQ plus rights Because as pink news explains on Tuesday May 30th Nagoya district court became the second to rule against Japan's banning of same-sex marriage Despite the country's prime minister Fumio Kishida claiming the ban wasn't discriminatory to the LGBTQ plus community The ruling welcomed by activists and supporters outside the court follows Japan's main opposition the constitutional Democratic Party CDP Submitting a bill calling for same-sex marriage to be legalized Now what I also love to hear is that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's lack of support for gay marriage is one of if not the main reason Why his support is just imploding so his approval rating dropped by 30 points last year And as his approval rating goes down support for marriage equality goes up In fact 69% of Japanese citizens nice support marriage equality and 68% support gay adoption So to see their homophobic prime minister hemorrhage support in part due to his refusal to support a policy that the overwhelming majority of the population wants I mean it demonstrates that not every single country Is following the u.s. Backwards when it comes to LGBTQ plus rights now The reason why this is happening is because progress isn't always linear like we kind of visualize Progress as always moving forward, but sometimes you take a couple of steps forward and a lot of steps backwards There's periods of progress that are Rapid right that was the 2010s for LGBTQ plus rights, especially gay marriage rights There's always going to be swift periods of progress followed by rapid regression But what matters the most at the end of the day is that the trend overall? I think ultimately heads in a positive direction and despite the GOP's genocidal rhetoric I do believe that we are also headed in a positive direction Even if it doesn't necessarily seem that way now But just remember that the biggest bigots are also the loudest So what we're hearing now basically is a last-ditch effort by bigots to turn the country against LGBTQ plus people But it's probably too late for them and while the damage that they're causing is palpable. It's real We're feeling it now. I do believe that this is only temporary So keep that in mind if you start to feel depressed from these stories because I feel it too But understand that things will get better because we didn't think that they could possibly improve before and they did So all of this is temporary and we just have to keep fighting Because the second that we give up and we see the ground to these bigots, that's when they win That's when they pounce so just hang in there as difficult as as it may be Trans rights are human rights. It is necessary to push trans on the kids pride