Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni is warning citizens (above) not to engage in “outsider” practices like oral sex because “the mouth is for eating.”
“Let me take this opportunity to warn our people publicly,” he said in a recent television appearance, “about the wrong practices indulged in and promoted by some of the outsiders.”
“One of them is what they call oral sex,” he continued. “The mouth is for eating. Not for sex.”
Homosexuality has been illegal in Uganda since the Colonial era.
In recent years, legislators fought to pass what was familiarly known as the “kill the gays” bill that would have made homosexual acts punishable by death. In 2013, a watered-down version of the law that threw out the death sentence and replaced it with life in prison was passed, but was later annulled by Uganda’s Constitutional Court.
Museveni, a supporter of the bill, denied that the decision to scrap the law had anything to do with the U.S.-Africa Summit taking place soon after it was scrapped, and called receiving foreign aid in exchange for the fair treatment of his country’s LGBT community “sinful” after several countries said they would withhold aid in response to Uganda’s persecution of LGBT people.
In 2014, Uganda criminalized the transmission of HIV.
