Wielding Whip and a Hard New Law, Nigeria Tries to ‘Sanitize’ Itself of Gays; New York Times, 2/8/14

Adam Nossiter, New York Times; Wielding Whip and a Hard New Law, Nigeria Tries to ‘Sanitize’ Itself of Gays:

"“This draconian new law makes an already-bad situation much worse,” the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, said in a statement. “It purports to ban same-sex marriage ceremonies but in reality does much more,” she added. “Rarely have I seen a piece of legislation that in so few paragraphs directly violates so many basic, universal human rights.”

Homosexuality is illegal in 38 of 54 African countries, according to Amnesty International, and carries the death penalty in Mauritania, Sudan and Somalia, as well as Shariah-governed northern Nigeria. Recently Uganda’s president declined to sign a bill that carried a life sentence for gays, though he called them sick. In Senegal, where the press regularly “outs” gays, same-sex relations carry a penalty of five years...

The Nigerian news media have been largely supportive of the law — “Are Gay People Similar to Animals?” was the headline on a recent op-ed article in a leading newspaper, The Guardian — and government officials have reacted angrily to criticism from the United States and Britain.

The acting foreign affairs minister, Viola Onwuliri, recently praised the law as “democracy in action,” and suggested that Western critics were hypocrites to promote democracy and then complain about a law that the populace supports. In a Pew Research Center survey conducted last March, 98 percent of Nigerians said they do not believe society should accept homosexuality."