PRA tracks the influence of the U.S. Right globally and the exchange of ideologies that threaten human rights. Most notable has been our research on how U.S.-based religious conservatives are building organizational strength to promote homophobia and attacks on reproductive rights in sub-Saharan Africa.

Where are we and what happened yesterday?

The African LGBTQ advocacy group Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) has sued Lively for crimes against humanity, specifically for inciting the persecution of Ugandan LGBTQ people.

Though based in Illinois, the World Congress of Families (WCF) has a global mission. It seeks to spread anti-choice, anti-LGBTI policies and ideas worldwide, as well as a conservative definition of the family.

In 2007, Allan Carlson, president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society and founder of the World Congress of Families (WCF), published The Natural Family: A Manifesto alongside Paul Mero, head of the conservative, Mormon-backed…

Earlier this week, representatives of anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ groups from Russia, Italy, Spain, Venezuela, Australia, New Zealand, France, Serbia, and the United States (including the infamous Scott Lively) convened in Moscow to make plans for…

An interesting aspect of journalism and blogging is the filter through which the information is processed. Journalists have the ability to impact opinions about and perceptions of certain issues. Coming from a solid journalist, this can provide us…

Join PRA For The Special Boston Screening! Inspired by PRA’s research and starring our religion and sexuality researcher, Rev. Dr. Kapya Kaoma, God Loves Uganda exposes how the U.S. Christian Right exports hateful ideology and militant homophobia to…

A Web Exclusive Interview with Roger Ross Williams

Roger Ross Williams is a television and film writer, director, and producer whose most recent project, the documentary God Loves Uganda, focuses on the work of American evangelical Christian missionaries in Africa. Williams decided to focus on…

Dubbed by Time Magazine as “God’s Lobbyist,” Dr. Richard Land is the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of Southern Baptist Convention, and serves as the Commissioner on…

The influence of U.S.-based Christian Right groups on the criminalization of homophobia has recently expanded to Belize, which has become a hotbed for anti-LGBTQ activity, according to new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center: Dangerous…

On Wednesday, Zimbabweans will head to the polls to elect a new president. In May, current President Robert Mugabe, a dictator infamous for his human rights abuses, signed a new constitution that will usher in much-needed reforms, including a more…

Andrea Sheldon Lafferty is a former Reagan and Bush administration official and current Executive Director of the Anaheim, CA-…

The following article is adapted from PRA’s 2012 report, Colonizing African Values. Sharon Slater co-founded Family Watch International (FWI) with the goal of defending “fundamental institutions and values that are so critical to any society.”

Though opponents of the discredited “ex gay” movement achieved a partial victory last week in the United States when Alan Chambers announced the closing of his organization, Exodus International, the battle over the legitimacy of a gay cure is only…

All eyes were on Uganda in 2009, when the Parliament tried to pass a bill making homosexuality punishable by death in certain cases. Since then, however, it has become increasingly evident that discrimination against LGBTQ people in Africa is far…

In January, I wrote in PRA’s Public Eye quarterly that Rev. Everaldo Dias Pereira, vice president of the conservative evangelical Christian Social Party (PSC), was being tapped by group of Brazilian pastors to run for president in 2014. Last month,…

The documentary God Loves Uganda, which depicts the role of American conservative evangelicals in generating vicious antigay campaigns in Uganda, has received acclaim at film festivals across the…

Following the arrest of a gay rights advocate in Zambia, Political Research Associates’ religious and sexuality researcher Rev. Canon Dr. Kapya Kaoma writes about the attacks on gay people in his home country for the Lukasa Times. Zambian LGBTQ…

On Easter Sunday, Ugandan Pastors Solomon Male and Thomas Musoke launched their “Say No to Homosexuality” campaign outside the gravesite of slain gay rights activist David Kato–purposely selecting the spot to prevent it from becoming “a pilgrimage…

When the Executive Director of Exodus International, Alan Chambers, dramatically announced in January 2012 that he no longer believed there was a “cure” to homosexuality, he allegedly ended his organization’s 35-year-long effort to “convert … LGBTQ…

Boston, MA, April 2, 2013: Exodus International, the U.S. network of Christian ministries prominent in the “ex-gay” movement, dramatically changed its position in January 2012 when Executive Director Alan Chambers announced that he no longer…

Did you know that the same Christian-right legal organization responsible for drafting the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which bans federal recognition of same-sex marriage in the U.S., also supports the constitutional criminalization of…

From a modest building in a central neighborhood in Goiânia, the capital of the Brazilian state of Goiás, Filipe Coelho is launching the American Center for Law and Justice’s (ACLJ) Brazilian branch, following the example of the Christian Right…

U.S. Evangelicals Fund Homophobia in Uganda

Yesterday, the New York Times’ released an eight-minute “Op-Doc” titled “Gospel of Intolerance,” from Oscar-winning filmmaker Roger Ross Williams, exposing “how money donated by American evangelicals helps to finance a violent antigay movement in…

Tomorrow in Park City, Utah, will be the world debut of God Loves Uganda, a documentary on the U.S. Christian Right spreading homophobia abroad that builds on Political Research Associates’ research.

Yesterday, I and about 40 others crammed into the Springfield, MA, office of Arise for Social Justice, fresh from the first oral hearing of the lawsuit brought by Ugandan gay rights activists against Scott Lively–the notorious holocaust revisionist…

Political Research Associates condemns the criminalization of sexual minorities and calls on American and international religious and political leaders to denounce the reintroduction of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda, which reportedly passed…

On Friday, Andy Kroll at Mother Jones reported that Jay Sekulow and Jordan Sekulow, the father-son team leading the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) — high-profile social conservatives and advisers and supporters of Republican Presidential…

Intercepting the International Human Rights Agenda

On a visit to Zambia in February 2012, the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called on African countries to stop treating LGBT people as less than human or as second class citizens. He explicitly asked Zambian lawmakers to stop…

How the U.S. Christian Right Is Transforming Sexual Politics in Africa

While U.S. Christian Right leaders made headlines when international pressure forced them to retract support for Uganda’s notorious Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, a new report by Political Research Associates shows that U.S. Christian Right groups…

Today, Political Research Associates (PRA) released its new report, Colonizing African Values: How the U.S. Christian Right is Transforming Sexual Politics in Africa (pdf), which exposes the U.S. Christian Right’s growing infrastructure for…

On Friday, July 22, at least 76 people were killed in the Oslo bombing and the shooting rampage at a Labor Party summer training camp for young liberal political activists. Immediately following news of the Norway terrorism, the internet buzzed with…

Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill will be debated in Parliament today and voted on tomorrow, Wednesday May 11. The bill, thought by many to have been shelved, had in fact remained before a committee of Uganda’s parliament. There were hearings on…

A Profile of Scott Lively

In March 2009, Scott Lively traveled more than 8,000 miles from his home in Springfield, Massachusetts, to talk to a small audience at the Triangle Hotel in Kampala, Uganda, about homosexuality. “My name is Scott Lively,” he began. “I’m married. I…

David Kato, an openly gay human rights activist and advocacy officer at Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), was attacked in his home in Mukono, Uganda, on January 26, and died on his way to the hospital. Kato had received death threats since October,…

African Anti-Gay Politics In The Global Discourse

In August 2010, more than 400 African Anglican Bishops gathered in Entebbe, Uganda, for their second All-Africa Bishops Conference, which attracted global media attention because of the debates on LGBT rights.

Frank Musgisha, the spokesperson for Uganda’s leading LGBT rights organization, Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), will tour the United States this month to speak about the human rights crisis currently facing queer Ugandans, and the role conservative…

(New York, December 11, 2009) – A United Nations General Assembly panel that met this week broke new ground and helped build new momentum for ending human rights violations based on sexual orientation and gender identity, a coalition of sponsoring…

In August, at the fifth World Congress of Families (WCF) in Amsterdam, Austin Ruse, president of the New York-based Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-Fam) warned “that UN radicals in alliance with radical lawyers and judges and other…

U.S. Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia

A groundbreaking investigation by Political Research Associates discovered that sexual minorities in Africa have become collateral damage to our domestic conflicts and culture wars. U.S. conservative evangelicals are promoting an agenda in Africa…

For two days in early March 2009, Ugandans flocked to the Kampala Triangle Hotel for the Family Life Network’s “Seminar on Exposing the Homosexuals’ Agenda.” The seminar’s very title revealed its claim: LGBT people and activists are engaged in a…

Sexual minorities in Africa have become collateral damage to our domestic conflicts and culture wars as U.S. conservative evangelicals and those opposing gay pastors and bishops within mainline Protestant denominations woo Africans in their American…

Political Research Associates is calling on Pastor Rick Warren to oppose an antigay bill promoted by his allies that is currently being debated in the Ugandan legislature. In March 2008, Warren told Ugandans that homosexuality is not a natural way…

In March 2008, U.S. evangelical leader Rick Warren told Ugandans that homosexuality is not a natural way of life and thus not a human right. One year later, U.S. conservative evangelical and Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively (a resident of…

U.S. Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia

A groundbreaking investigation by Political Research Associates discovered that sexual minorities in Africa have become collateral damage to our domestic conflicts and culture wars. U.S. conservative evangelicals are promoting an agenda in Africa…

Selections from Scott Lively’s presentations at a conference in Kampala, Uganda in March 2009

While gender-based discrimination and oppression are nothing new abroad, for the past decade the U.S. Christian Right has been aggressively exporting its campaigns against reproductive rights and gay rights to countries around the world. Recently,…

RE: Launch of hate campaign against sexual minorities

Efforts to mobilize Ugandans to hunt down and imprison Ugandan gays and lesbians received worldwide attention during a three-day Family Life Network conference held March 3-5 in Kampala. But the media haven’t caught up with the rest of the story:…

The Religious Right in the States and Beyond

In the wake of pre-election punditry that the Religious Right is dead and that the so called Culture Wars are over, I wrote a piece for The Public Eye: “The Culture Wars Are Not Over: The Institutionalization of the Christian Right.”1 The year was…

A new report by the progressive think tank Political Research Associates documents the growing threat Christian Right NGOs based at the United Nations pose to international policies supporting women’s reproductive health.

The Right Targets the UN with its Anti-Choice Politics

This article is derived from the PRA report UNdoing Reproductive Freedom: Christian Right NGOs Target the United Nations. In June 2004…

Parties of the extreme Right now have a role in the governments and/or the parliaments of several European countries, including Flanders (northern Belgium…

A Google(tm) search on January 12, 2005 turned up some 5,000 hits on the following quote: “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” — Benito Mussolini It is generally…

Since the United Nations held the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China in September 1995, women’s rights and human rights groups in the US and throughout the world have worked to “bring the Beijing platform home.” Adopted by consensus…