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Amid a flurry of rightful criticism for Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, one U.S. politician accurately described this awful law passed recently in the African nation.
“This Uganda law is horrific & wrong,” a U.S. senator tweeted on May 29. “Any law criminalizing homosexuality or imposing the death penalty for ‘aggravated homosexuality’ is grotesque & an abomination. ALL civilized nations should join together in condemning this human rights abuse.”
The words are spot on, though the source of the words may have surprised people: Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
We appreciate Cruz’s perspective on this specific law but we’d also strongly suggest that he, his fellow Texas Republicans and Republican lawmakers across the country apply this same line of thinking to anti-LGBTQ legislation in America as well. Efforts to criminalize the LGBTQ community for being themselves do need to be condemned, both at home and abroad.
The Uganda law and the legislative action to limit transgender inclusion and access to care happening in Republican-led state houses across the country are not the same thing, to be clear. However, the shared echoes of treating differences as some sort of social danger should also be clear. This isn’t just an abomination when it happens so overtly on a different continent; it is also grotesque when it happens in more nuanced ways here in the U.S.
Just days before he weighed in on the Uganda law and its plainly horrific death sentence for so-called “aggravated homosexuality,” Cruz was applauding the move in Texas to ban gender affirming care for minors. As one of those minors pointed out earlier this year, that ban can be its own kind of death sentence.
“That would make life insufferable,” a 16-year-old trans boy told the Texas Tribune earlier this spring about the prospect of losing access to hormone therapy and potentially having physical traits from his sex assigned at birth return. “That is a death sentence.”
Recent events from the state house in Montana demonstrate how defensive officials can get when it is pointed out that their actions could have a dire impact on people trying to access important care. But when a group of our fellow Americans experience high rates of depression and suicidality, and a form of care has been demonstrated to decrease risks and improve health outcomes for them, pointing out and criticizing the negative impact of banning that care is both logical and necessary.
To borrow some words from Cruz, restricting access to this potentially life saving care for trans Americans might be less plainly abominable than the new law in Uganda, but it is horrific and wrong nevertheless.