Rebecca Kadaga, the speaker of the Ugandan parliament, has painted a psychotic picture of what Christmas means in that country.

Merry Christmas? Ugandan Speaker of Parliament promises the draconian anti-gay (Kill the gays) bill will pass before the end of 2012, and will be a Christmas gift for Uganda’s Christian community. On Monday, November 12, Ugandan Speaker Rebecca Kadaga told The Associated Press that Uganda’s anti-gay bill will be passed before the end of 2012 despite vigorous and vocal international criticism of the odious legislation.

Because fuck asking for world peace.

How could such a murderous piece of legislation, so offensive to human compassion, so flagrantly at odds with reason, ever even be considered by a nation of humans, let alone be likely to pass? Believers know the answer just as surely as atheists.

Kadaga insists it is what most Ugandans want: Ugandans “are demanding it,” she said. Last Friday Kadaga met with Ugandan anti-gay activists who spoke of “the serious threat” posed by homosexuals to Uganda’s children. Some Christian clerics at the meeting in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, asked the speaker to pass the law as “a Christmas gift.”

Don’t give me any of this “they are only extremists and there aren’t many like them” line. Remember all those people who left church to cram fried chicken sandwiches down their faces at Chick-Fil-A, right here in the US of A, to “support free speech”? Yeah, Chick-Fil-A donated money to groups that are working to get this bill passed. Tastes like trans fats and being an asshole, doesn’t it? In their minds, they’re just sitting on the moral high ground munching on their waffle fries without a care in the world. Meanwhile, immoral atheists like me actually give a shit about the suffering they helped to create. Jesus might forgive the droves of believers for failing to see the difference between supporting free speech and supporting the oppression/death of gay people, but I sure don’t.

The response from the moderate Christians will be that these people have somehow mistranslated the will of the same god who ordered Abraham and Jephthah to murder their children, who slaughtered whole cities of homosexuals and children, and whose book contains passages calling for the death of homosexuals. The rub for them is that the Ugandans abiding by their own personal relationship with Jesus should, instead, comport to the moderate’s personal relationship with Jesus. They will rush to assure the critics of faith on Uganda’s account that faith is really beautiful when done right. The implication will be that the Ugandans’ belief that the Canaanite Jew who rose from the dead 2,000 years ago wanted gays to die is irrational, and that the more sane, more reasonable position is that the Canaanite Jew who rose from the dead 2,000 years ago doesn’t want us to kill gay people. This is what passes for serious moral discourse in this world.

Those moderates, some of which will likely email me or comment, will consider that message so important that many of them will exert more energy in defense of faith than they will in criticism of a nation of Christians set to murder normal people. This type of behavior, intended to separate moderate faith from fundamentalist, only makes me loath religious moderation even more.

It will occur to very few that we shouldn’t genocide gay people because simple compassion dictates we shouldn’t, regardless of what god said (which makes the quibbling over his will superfluous, even if the evidence for his existence didn’t suck to the extreme). This is the problem with religion: it jams concern for god’s will into where empathy will should be, and it does so in moderates and fanatics alike