Frank Mugisha and other individuals found campaigning for gay rights will face the choice of going to jail or leaving the country if Uganda's recently tabled Anti-Homosexuality Bill becomes law.
Mugisha heads Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), a leading sexual rights advocacy group that could soon be classed a criminal organization.
"I have never really considered moving out of Uganda. But if I cannot work within the country, then I will have to leave," said Mugisha.
The bill has baffled legal experts who read it as the product of an over-zealous Evangelical community that is clueless about both Uganda?s constitution and international law.
But for the bill?s proponents, chief among them Ethics and Integrity Minister James Nsaba Buturo, who has repeatedly alleged that there exists an organized, western-backed plot to recruit people into homosexuality, the law is necessary to confront a national emergency.
Homosexuality is spreading, Buturo argues, and if people like Mugisha aren?t stopped they will continue to lure impressionable youths into their sinful lifestyle and thereby threaten the perpetuation of the Ugandan people.
"Who is going to occupy Uganda in 20 years if we all become homosexuals? We know that homosexuals don?t reproduce," Buturo said last year when announcing plans to table the bill.
In one of its most curious provisions, the draft law calls on Uganda to nullify any international treaty or convention that is inconsistent with the spirit of anti-homosexuality.