Today, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni signed the Anti-Homosexuality Act, a wide-ranging bill that imposes seven years in jail for "the offense of homosexuality" (gay sex) and lifetime in jail for "aggravated homosexuality," which describes an array of offenses like incest, sex with a minor, and sex with a person with a disability. Uganda's The Observer reports, "The bill will formally become law when it gets published in the Uganda Gazette. That, however, remains a formality. For Uganda's largely anti-gay population, the most important part was the president's signature."

The bill's author, David Bhati, has maintained that this law is about protecting children (this has been his stance for years, since he was hawking a similar bill with a provision for the death penalty, then-dubbed the "Kill the Gays" bill). But of course that's not what it's about. It's never just about that. It's also about a president who's been in office for 28 years using an already powerless group of people as a sign of resistance to the deviance of western culture (even though anti-gay sentiment in Uganda was stoked in part by American evangelist Scott Lively).