Channel four is about to expose a global coalition of organisations that support anti-gay laws around the world.
The groundbreaking team behind last year’s documentary Hunted, Liz MacKean and the Dispatches team return with an investigation into the global networks that are supporting a wave of anti-gay laws around the world.
In a special one-hour documentary on the 23rd July, Dispatches will unveil the well funded and organised back-lash against the LGBT community across four continents, led by bodies which promote and believe in family values.
One group, the World Congress of Families – an umbrella organisation of religious conservative groups which has established links in over 80 countries – is based in America, where same-sex marriages have just been made legal in all 50 states. The WCF and their associates (who boast combined budgets of almost $200 million a year) claim they are merely supporting pro-family laws in other countries. But Dispatches reveals how, in doing so, they have supported anti-gay laws in Russia and lobbied the Slovakian government to help pass laws curtailing the rights of the gay community.
Dispatches has discovered that, days after the anti-gay propaganda law came into effect, Brian Brown, President of the National Organization for Marriage (part of the WCF), was present at a Russian parliamentary meeting preceding Russian legislature banning the adoption of children to countries which support gay marriage and also to some same sex couples.
Also interviewed is Pastor Scott Lively, who has previously linked homosexuality with paedophilia. In this programme, Dispatches reveals the extent of his links with the WCF. Lively advised Uganda’s government on how they might take forward their anti-homosexuality legislation. The Ugandan Anti-Homosexual Act was passed into law in December 2013 (though it has recently been annulled on a technicality, but is soon to be reintroduced to parliament). The passing of this legislation resulted in a sharp increase in homophobic attacks in the country (from sources including SMUG and the United Nations). However, like Jacobs, Lively rejects this claim and any responsibility for the increase in violence against gays.
Hunted: Gay and Afraid, Channel 4 Dispatches, Thursday 23rd July at 11.05pm.
