Recent news of Uganda’s bold and controversial move to sign into law various new anti-gay legislation, which will make life even harder for homosexuals living in that country, has been welcomed with open arms across Africa, including my own country, Malawi. That was expected. But this is not ‘good news’ at all. Instead, it is really bad news.

As this intriguing drama is quickly taking shape under the watchful eyes of a spellbound global community, the next episode in this tragicomedy of sorts has to be the recent publishing of Uganda’s Top 200 Homosexuals in the Red Pepper tabloid newspaper. The feature was aptly given the appropriate and inconspicuous front-page headline – “EXPOSED”.

It doesn’t take a genius to know where this will inevitably end up – we have been here before.

The exposed ones will try to leave the country and seek asylum in western nations! Crowds of Ugandans will mobilize and exact mob justice on the exposed ones leading to homicidal murders which will remain unsolved! In the event that authorities do catch the perpetrators of these gay murders, they might probably get a lenient sentence of months, instead of years, much to the delight of an approving public!

Rich nations will cut off aid as more families will give up their gay children for “treatment” by an angry heterosexual mob on a holy mission to “cleanse” the world of this vermin!

This is all reminiscent of Nazi Germany, isn’t it? But yes – we know where this is going because we have been here many times before – and, no doubt, will again.

But what strikes me as odd, baffling even, is how Christian folk (of which I am proudly a part) in my neck of the woods, are so particular about this particular sexual sin and don’t respond with the same level of fervency towards cases of fornication, teenage pregnancy or adultery.

Even more baffling is how we can all fundamentally disagree on a great many things and still get along, but age-old alliances can be severed because of this one issue of who one chooses to love or marry.

Even more interesting, in a time when the Church is inundated with Prosperity Gospels, is the fact that the Bible has many more references to economic injustice and laws governing the accumulation of wealth than actual mentions of homosexuality.

Of course, this is not a justification on my part for the homosexual lifestyle – far from it!

Actually, I believe, without debate or compromise, that homosexuality is a sin and an abomination before God. And God, and God alone, will judge us all. But one can’t argue with the fact that these disparities aforementioned are glaring, yet unquestioned.

But the one question that has constantly troubled me, as I read headlines of representatives of God, in their various shapes and sizes, calling for the humiliation and, in one case, the killing of homosexuals, is: is this what Jesus had in mind?

Would Jesus have endorsed the exposing of supposed homosexuals in the humiliating manner we are seeing in Uganda if He knew it would incite potential murders justified as mob justice?

Would Jesus have sanctioned the recent calls by the Muslim fraternity to “kill gays” and then join the Christian majority in their deafening silence of approval?

Would Jesus have approved of the hateful remarks being made by many supposed Christians to the point of calling God’s own creation “sub-human”?

I may not be God’s spokesman but I am sure I am in a safe position when I say the answer is an emphatic NO!