President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast. (Photo by Mandel Ngan via AFP/Getty Images.)
New at Metro Weekly, “Obama Slams Ugandan Bill,” my article on today’s National Prayer Breakfast and other developments related to the proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill:
President Barack Obama took the setting of the National Prayer Breakfast – an annual Washington event that has drawn criticism from several quarters this year due to its sponsorship by The Fellowship, aka The Family – to strongly denounce the proposed “Anti-Homosexuality Bill” currently being considered in Uganda as ”odious.”
Obama told the assembled national and international figures today, Feb. 4, ”We may disagree about gay marriage, but surely we can agree that it is unconscionable to target gays and lesbians for who they are — whether it’s here in the United States or, as Hillary [Clinton] mentioned, more extremely in odious laws that are being proposed most recently in Uganda.”
Also in the article, I mention that “Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced a resolution condemning the proposed Ugandan bill, which calls for the execution of gays in some circumstances. Sexual relations between members of the same gender are already illegal in that country.” I have made a copy of the resolution available here (pdf) at Law Dork.
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Chris Geidner is a lawyer in Washington, D.C., who writes at Law Dork, is the senior political writer at Metro Weekly and has written for The Atlantic Online, Advocate.com, Salon and other publications. An extended biography can be found