It was first reported last month that Uganda’s parliament would be weighing a brand new anti-homosexuality bill, which, among other things, was poised to create a new crime of “aggravated homosexuality,” as well as targeting gay people who have sex while HIV-positive.

Now, the bill has reached parliament, and aside from the persecution of gay Ugandans in every day life as it is, the law would impose a minimum sentence of life imprisonment to anyone “convicted” of having gay sex. If the accused person is HIV-positive or a serial offender, or a “person of authority” over the other partner, or if the “victim” is under 18, a conviction will result in the death penalty, says the Guardian.

Also of profound importance is the clause that members of the public are obliged to report homosexual activity to police within 24 hours or risk up to three years in jail. This part of the bill is drawing considerable ire from Ugandan human rights workers, including Sexual Minorities Uganda, a coalition of local lesbian, gay, bi, intersex and trans groups that would all be banned under the law. They say this scenario of obligated reporting of homosexual activities will lead to a witch hunt.

“The bill is haunting us,” said Mugisha, 25, chairman of Sexual Minorities Uganda. “If this passes we will have to leave the country.”

Human rights groups within and outside Uganda have condemned the proposed legislation, which is designed to strengthen colonial-era laws that already criminalise gay sex. The issue threatened to overshadow the Commonwealth heads of government meeting that ended in Trinidad and Tobago today, with the UK and Canada both expressing strong concerns. Ahead of the meeting Stephen Lewis, a former UN envoy on Aids in Africa, said the law “makes a mockery of Commonwealth principles” and has “a taste of fascism” about it.

More after the jump.

The Ugandan government is committed to passing the legislation before the end of 2009, according to James Nsaba Buturo, the minister of state for ethics and integrity.

“We are talking about anal sex. Not even animals do that,” Butoro said, adding that he was personally caring for six “former homosexuals” who had been traumatised by the experience. “We believe there are limits to human rights.”

Homosexuality has always been a taboo subject in Uganda, and is considered by many to be an affront both to local culture and religion, which plays a strong role in family life. This negative stigma and the real threat of job loss means that no public personality has ever “come out”.

And perhaps worse still – lest we somehow inflate a sense of superiority over the plight Uganda’s gay, lesbian, bi and trans community are facing – the bill is almost exclusively being promoted by the activist efforts of United States evangelists.

Both opponents and supporters agree that the impetus for the bill came in March during a seminar in Kampala to “expose the truth behind homosexuality and the homosexual agenda”.

The main speakers were three US evangelists: Scott Lively, Don Schmierer and Caleb Lee Brundidge. Lively is a noted anti-gay activist and president of Defend the Family International, a conservative Christian association, while Schmierer is an author who works with “homosexual recovery groups”. Brundidge is a “sexual reorientation coach” at the International Healing Foundation.

The seminar was organised by Stephen Langa, a Ugandan electrician turned pastor who runs the Family Life Network in Kampala and has been spreading the message that gays are targeting schoolchildren for “conversion”. “They give money to children to recruit schoolmates – once you have two children, the whole school is gone,” he said in an interview. Asked if there had been any court case to prove this was happening, he replied: “No, that’s why this law is needed.”

Is this a symptom of the crumbling hierarchy of hate here in the U.S.? Have the winds of change, slow but steady, at home prompted American evangelists to outsource their vitriol to other nations? And at such hyperbolic levels?

It’s no coincidence that the bill doesn’t even include a “rehabilitation” clause. That would seem to have been one of the very first features perpetrated by Schmierer and Brundidge. As awful a sentiment as “sexual reorientation” is, there isn’t one in this bill. What does that tell you about the compassion or understanding or logic or anything else surrounding the infancy of this genocide? Or further, the systematic impact of influence from crackpot evangelicals on a nation that is, by all accounts, so impressionable as is (84 percent of the population is Christian…)?