Republicans are rolling back child labor laws. But they’ve always been weak on farms.
While many middle schoolers spend their summers at the pool, biking around the neighborhood, or playing video games, Jacqueline Aguilar spent most of hers toiling in the lettuce fields of south central Colorado.
“My parents didn’t have enough money to buy new school clothes, and so that’s when I knew I had to go and work in the fields,” she said. Starting at age 11, from 5 am to 2 pm — six, and sometimes seven days a week, at $10 an hour — Aguilar would walk up and down rows of lettuce, weeding and adjusting lettuce heads to make sure they’d grow correctly.
“Physically, it was super draining,” Aguilar said. “My feet were constantly hurting … I remember just having so many blisters on my hands from the hoe.” She wrapped bandanas around her neck and wore long sleeves to prevent sunburn. “I would get dehydrated super fast and for lunchtime, we wouldn’t really get a meal. So it was like we weren’t eating, we weren’t drinking — they didn’t have clean water for us.”
Aguilar’s first summer of employment was technically illegal — though hardly unusual in agriculture — but once she turned 12, it was perfectly legal for her to work long, grueling hours under a scorching sun, even though her peers would have to wait until they were 14 to work in nearly any non-agricultural job.
In many states, including Colorado, children as young as 12 can harvest tobacco, milk 1,500-pound cows, or work in fruit and vegetable production like Aguilar, but they can’t tear movie tickets or bag groceries. It’s because the agriculture sector plays by a different set of employment rules than most of the rest of the economy.
“A 12-year-old can’t work in this air-conditioned office I have here, making copies, but we’ll let that same kid go into the field in 100 degree heat and do back-breaking work,” said Reid Maki, director of child labor advocacy at the National Consumers League and the Child Labor Coalition. (Aguilar, who is now 20, is interning with Maki at the Child Labor Coalition this summer.)
On top of an age gap, there’s also a time gap. Under federal law, 12-year-olds can work on farms for an unlimited number of hours so long as they don’t miss school and have the permission of their parents, while there are federal limits on the number of hours 14- and 15-year-olds in every other industry can work.
There’s a risk gap, too. Kids can perform agricultural tasks designated as “hazardous” by the US Department of Labor (DOL), like operating heavy machinery, at age 16, while similarly hazardous work in other fields is restricted until age 18.
Even kids under 12 can work on farms if the farm’s staff size is small enough, or if the DOL grants the farm a special waiver. Kids at any age can work on their parent’s farm.
Maki said the carveouts are especially troubling when you consider that agriculture is one of the more dangerous sectors in America, and the deadliest occupation class for minors.
On Monday, Rep. Raul Ruiz, a Democrat from California, where about half of America’s produce is grown, introduced the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety, or the CARE Act. The bill aims to close the age, time, and risk gaps for children working on farms, and increases penalties for child labor violations.
“We’re just bringing parity to child labor protections [in agriculture] that other industries have,” Ruiz said.
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Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
Setting limits on child labor is a particularly salient — and charged — issue, as Republicans in statehouses across the country have recently pushed to weaken broader child labor laws amid continued worker shortages. Some bills increase the number of hours children under 16 can work, others lower the age limit for children to serve alcohol at bars and restaurants, while an Iowa bill would allow kids as young as 14 to work in meat coolers.
The bill also comes months after news reports of migrant children illegally employed to clean slaughterhouses and pack Cheerios in factories. According to the DOL, there’s been a 69 percent increase since 2018 in children who are discovered to be illegally employed, totaling more than 3,800 children across 835 companies.
The CARE Act would do a lot to protect kids working on farms, but it’s arguable it doesn’t quite go far enough. Given the increased risk of death and injury that farm work entails — the CDC calls it one of the most hazardous industries — it follows that there should be more protections for youth employed in agriculture than, say, those working pretzel stands. But farm lobbyists wield a lot of influence in Washington — enough to kill past attempts to change agricultural rules for minors, and most likely this one too.
Why kids can work on farms (and why they probably shouldn’t)
In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), a major piece of legislation enacting the federal minimum wage (just 25 cents an hour at the time), overtime pay requirements, maximum workweeks, as well as restrictions on child labor (including minimum age requirements and restrictions on hazardous work). But agricultural work was exempt from some key parts of the law: In addition to the looser rules around employing children, agricultural workers were exempt from federal overtime and minimum wage provisions. (Most are now covered by federal minimum wage law, but not overtime).
It adds up to what Alexis Guild of Farmworker Justice calls “agricultural exceptionalism.”
“To obtain sufficient support for these reforms, President Roosevelt and his allies had to compromise with Southern congressmen,” Guild wrote in a 2019 paper with her former colleague Iris Figueroa. “These compromises included exclusions of farmworkers and domestic workers from the law’s protections, preserving the plantation system in the South — a system that rested on the subjugation of racial minorities.”
“A lot of the child laborers at the time were children of color — they were Black kids,” Maki, of the National Consumers League, said. “Today they’re brown kids.”
There isn’t solid data on the number of minors employed on farms, but a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey from 2014 estimated the number at around 148,000 kids, with a little more than half working in crop production and the rest working with livestock. (Advocacy groups have estimated the number as much as two or three times larger.) Maki said he thinks that official estimates of vulnerable and exploited groups are usually too low. (The CARE Act creates reporting requirements on work-related injuries for children employed in agriculture; currently the government doesn’t consistently keep track of the number of children employed in agriculture under 16, nor of injury rates for this age group.)
Ruiz, who grew up in the farm worker community of Coachella, California — both of his parents were farm workers — said he saw a lot of his peers drop out of school to work on farms to earn income for their families. Growing up he heard stories of workers hiding from inspectors and women and young girls sexually harassed.
“That’s why it’s so important that we bring parity in the protections for children in order to stop the cycle of poverty, to increase their probability of finishing school, and also to provide protections to prohibit exposure to pesticides, harassment, and abuse in the fields as children,” Ruiz said.
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Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
Aguilar’s experience is similar. She said a lot of kids migrate from Mexico to her small town in Colorado (both of her parents migrated from Mexico), and they can’t speak English so it’s hard for them to stay focused in school. Many turn to agriculture and drop out because their parents, many of whom also work in agriculture, don’t make enough income to support their families.
“They’re losing their opportunities as a minority to go to college and be a change,” she said. “They keep with the generations of working in agriculture, not breaking [the cycle]. Having farmers be so okay with them working so young is an issue. They should be promoting children to go to school and not to a field with their parents.”
Hand-harvesting fruits and vegetables in the field for hours — including picking fruits and nuts from trees on ladders as high as 20 feet — exposes kids to pesticides and risks musculoskeletal injuries. Exposure to pesticides and prolonged outdoor work in the sun increases farm workers’ cancer risk, and chronic pain is prevalent among farm workers due to extended periods stooping to harvest crops.
Aguilar’s father — a longtime farm worker — died of cancer, and she suspects his work in agriculture played a role. Her mom is disabled: “Her tendons from her shoulders are torn, and I think it’s from the movement of sorting the potatoes, of bending down with the hoe, and boxing and carrying heavy stuff.”
In 2014, it was estimated that nearly 12,000 workers under 20 were injured in agriculture-related incidents, but the true number could be much higher. Aguilar said a lot of kids don’t report injuries, either out of pride, fear of deportation if they or their family is undocumented, or lack of health insurance or money for medical care.
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AP/Nati Harnik
Children are most likely to get injured — or die — in accidents with tractors and other vehicles, or while working with machinery or animals.
In 2016, young workers were 7.8 times more likely to die on the job in agriculture when compared to all other industries combined. According to the US Government Accountability Office, more than half of the 452 children aged 17 and under who died on the job from 2003 to 2016 were employed in agriculture, even though they make up a tiny fraction of that working age group.
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Danger on the family farm
The CARE Act, as with similar legislative attempts in the past, doesn’t apply to kids who work on their parent’s farms as a way for farming families to pass down traditions to the next generation. That exemption appears common sense — and current federal law allows kids at any age to work on their parent’s farm — but the data tells a more complicated story.
Of the nearly 12,000 agriculture-related injuries suffered by workers under 20, more than half worked on their parent’s farm, and 60 percent of them occurred when they weren’t even working. This doesn’t mean a kid working on their parent’s farm is necessarily more dangerous than kids working on a stranger’s farm, there are just way more of them: Around 375,000 kids worked on their parent’s farm in 2014 compared to the 148,000 hired to work on other people’s farms.
But the fact that so many agriculture-related injuries among children happen when kids aren’t working suggests farms — with large tractors, ATVs, machinery, tools, and large animals around — aren’t the safest environment for kids, whether they’re working or not. There’s also little government safety oversight on small farms.
In 1976, Congress barred the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from conducting regulatory activities — including checking for hazards and investigating deaths — on farms with 10 or fewer nonfamily workers. As of 2012, such farms accounted for over 90 percent of farms, employing 1.2 million workers. From 2011 to 2016, over 300 workers on small farms died in accidents that OSHA couldn’t investigate (in some states, the Atlantic noted in 2018, state inspectors could have filled the gap).
In 2018, Jordan Barab, former deputy assistant secretary of labor for OSHA during the Obama administration, told the Atlantic that the exemption is Congress saying it “doesn’t really care whether workers get killed on small farms or not.”
“There’s no other way to interpret it,” Barab added.
The future of farm work protections
The CARE Act will likely face stiff opposition from farm groups. When reached for comment on the bill, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the International Fresh Produce Association, the American Fruit and Vegetable Processors and Growers Coalition, the Washington Growers League, and two of the largest produce companies in California — Grimmway and D’Arrigo, as well as international produce company Dole — did not respond.
In 2011, the American Farm Bureau Federation and other farm groups came out against proposed DOL rules that would’ve prevented children under 16 employed in agriculture from working with animals, handling pesticides, working in tobacco fields, and other risky tasks.
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AP/Ed Reinke
Given the CARE Act’s slim chance of passage, states could step up to close the minimum age requirements for farm work and hazardous farm tasks, especially leading agricultural states, many of which still allow 12-year-olds to work.
Rightly, there’s no shortage of outrage over Republican efforts to roll child labor laws back to the 20th century. But federal rules for children in agriculture have always been stuck in a less enlightened past, with few top agricultural states raising standards to catch up with the rest of the economy. Aguilar said she wants to see that change.
“I think if they’re children, they should be children, and not an adult working an adult job that is super hard even on adults — can you imagine a child?” she said. “It’s something that needs to change. These children shouldn’t be going through that at this age. We shouldn’t be going through that at this age.”
What it misses on story it makes up for in visual splendor.
Not to sound like an old person, but I do miss the Pixar of my youth — the can’t-miss studio that turned out artful, funny movies for kids and adults and had cultural staying power. (Toy Story was released in 1995, shortly after my 12th birthday, but I wasn’t too grown up to love it when my grandma took me to see it.) A new Pixar movie used to be enough of an event in my life that my husband and I, full-grown adults, felt perfectly comfortable showing up to see Ratatouille unaccompanied by children. Wall-E narrowly missed my Sight & Sound ballot last year.
In 2006, Disney acquired Pixar, and alongside other unfortunate factors, the “can’t-miss” reputation has slowly declined, with relative duds like The Good Dinosaur, the less-than-loved Cars series (at least among the parents of their target audience), and Lightyear (want to feel old? Lightyear came out less than a year ago) tarnishing the shine. Honestly, that’s fine — everyone gets some swings and misses — but Disney for some reason decided to push Pixar’s best recent offering, Turning Red, straight to Disney+ with no theatrical option, probably in a now-cooling enthusiasm about streaming. (Soul and Luca also went straight to streaming, but at the height of the pandemic, with other concerns at heart.)
Anyhow, this all brings us to Elemental. For a giant nerd (me), a movie starring the ancient four elements — earth, air, fire, and water — sounded weird and gutsy and great, so hopes ran high. You may be expecting (and I half-expected to be writing) some soliloquy on Plato and Hippocrates and whatever here, but Elemental doesn’t give us that. To the ancients, the elements were a way to explain all of existence by way of four fundamentals, simple substances that would make the complexity of the natural world more legible. For director Peter Sohn, the four elements are really just a way to construct a little imaginative universe in which to play, and I mean, I can’t fault him. No need to drag the Presocratics in to please me.
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Disney / Pixar
I am a little disappointed, though, by the feeling that Elemental is underdeveloped, both by Pixar story standards and the standards of much less exacting movies. In part, it’s the story of an immigrant family — a fire family, to be specific, the Lumens, who move to the big city in search of a better life for their fire child Ember (Leah Lewis). In this city, water and earth and air live in the shiny fancy central metropolis, while fire people are relegated to an outer borough, away from where they might cause harm. Out there, the Lumens open a shop where they sell snacks and other fire-specific goods. Ember is raised working in the shop, and her parents tell her it will be hers one day.
As she approaches the crest of young adulthood, she meets Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie), a water person who accidentally ends up in the shop through some mishaps, and they fall in love. From there it’s sort of a Romeo and Juliet thing, but there’s also an adventure about saving the shop from getting shut down, and also finding a leak in the town, and also learning to risk love by combining elements and — well, honestly, it gets a little muddled, and I started to lose track of what was going on.
Pixar’s story strength has always been in helping audiences process deeply poignant and melancholy feelings about the world — sadness, loss, the fear of abandonment, even the nature of the soul. These are weighty matters that many contemporary purveyors of entertainment for children skip over (it feels like most other kids’ films are either about “friendship” or “being yourself”). With a story based on the four elements, you could imagine, for instance, an exploration of trying to take the scariest phenomena of the world and injecting them with wonder and awe. In its muddledness, Elemental feints in a few directions — ambivalence about your parents’ goals for you, the experience of second-generation immigrants, prejudice against people who don’t look like you — but nothing quite lands securely because it isn’t thoroughly developed.
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Disney / Pixar
Yet Elemental isn’t a full failure. It’s an original story, for one, and coming from Disney, that’s no small thing. The best thing about Elemental — and, since movies are a primarily visual medium, it’s a very good thing indeed — is that it looks incredible. The team at Pixar somehow manages to render a realistic-looking flame that’s also clearly a cartoon, somehow a being with emotions ranging from rage to love to fear, while also in the same frame depicting rushing water so realistic-looking that I started to wonder if they’d actually shot real water instead.
The human artists at Pixar are a peak example of what it means for art and technology to combine, and they’ve been generating genuine amazement from their audiences for three decades. What they’re doing, though, isn’t mere spectacle; it’s creating a space for the imagination to play in, finely rendered and detailed. I’ll never forget attending the “Pixar: 20 Years of Animation” show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2006 and being transfixed by the artistry on display. Pixar rarely gets gimmicky; instead, they strive to create stories and characters and experiences (emotions, elements, souls, memories) that are best crafted through careful animation.
Which is why I left Elemental with a smile on my face. A film without images (or with bad images you can avoid while staring at your phone) might as well be a long podcast. There’s clearly a tug-of-war going on inside Pixar; I don’t know how it will end. But the expectations they’ve set for several generations of audience members about what a great movie can look like — even a movie, yes, for kids — is priceless, and we’ve been lucky to have them.
Elemental opens in theaters on June 16.
When identity gets criminalized, everyone gets hurt.
On May 26, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed the nation’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, also known as the AHA.
Uganda is far from the only nation to criminalize homosexuality — at least 62 other countries, most of them in Africa and the Middle East, also have anti-gay laws on the books. But Uganda’s regulation cracking down on LGBTQ existence is especially draconian. It outlaws same-sex sexual activity but also punishes others who merely tolerate the existence of queer people. According to the law, a person can be punished for even leasing property to a gay person.
This isn’t Uganda’s first attempt to pass such legislation: The nation has had laws forbidding “buggery” (anal sex between men) on the books since British colonial times. In 2009, prodded by support from extremist groups of American evangelical Christians, Uganda’s parliamentary body attempted to pass a law broadening punishable activities to include other forms of gay sex, as well as the “promotion of homosexuality.” Although that law failed, a similar one was passed in 2014. That law was later overturned by the nation’s constitutional court on a technicality; the current law is also being challenged before the court.
Regardless of whether the new law stands, damage has already been done. As Uganda’s government has deliberated over the law, there’s been an uptick in police and civilian harassment and violence against LGBTQ Ugandans, and terrified citizens are trying to flee the country.
When LGBTQ Ugandans suffered a wave of violence after the 2014 law passed, law enforcement set the tone — but ordinary civilians perpetrated much of the abuse, said Jennifer Leaning, a public health and human rights expert at Harvard’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, during a public event on Monday. The same dynamic appears to be unfolding now.
But the law also poses threats to those outside the LGBTQ community, including the many Ugandans who support it. Stigmatizing identities has a domino effect on other people: “Everyone is affected when vulnerable people are pushed out of care,” said Asia Russell, executive director of Health GAP, an international HIV equity advocacy organization.
On the face of it, criminalizing homosexuality is immensely dehumanizing and damaging. But the destruction this law can cause runs much deeper, and could set Uganda back on a range of health metrics.
Here’s how that could look.
Uganda’s HIV progress is at risk
One big fear experts have about the AHA is that it will lead to rising rates of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among all Ugandans. HIV is already mired in stigma and misconceptions in the region, and the law will likely drive sexual activity, STI prevention efforts, and care-seeking for HIV and STIs underground.
“If you are worried about being accused of being gay, then you certainly are not going to come in for HIV testing,” said Matthew Kavanagh, a professor of global health at Georgetown University, “even if you’re a heterosexual man.”
In recent years, Uganda had been making steady progress on HIV. The nation was an early adopter of many of the preventive strategies that emerged in the days before HIV medications were available on the continent. Its government hospitals implemented services aimed at preventing transmission from mothers to children in 2000, and the country was a pioneer among African countries in offering HIV testing and education services to the general public. And in the years after HIV treatment rolled out in Uganda in 2004, the country implemented some relatively progressive HIV testing policies.
Between 2010 and 2021, the country’s new HIV infection rate decreased by 39 percent.
In Uganda, as in most of sub-Saharan Africa, most new HIV infections are in women — not in men who have sex with men, as in the US. In 2021, 65 percent of new HIV infections in Uganda were in women and girls, who are most likely to be infected through heterosexual sex, compared with only 19 percent in the US in 2019.
Still, many Ugandans associate HIV risk with gay sex, said Kavanagh. Therefore, merely engaging in HIV prevention, testing, and treatment efforts can implicate someone as being gay and lead to punishment.
Richard Lusimbo, a Ugandan LGBTQ rights activist who leads the Uganda Key Populations Consortium, said during Monday’s event that already, peer sex educators have been jailed for providing HIV preventive services. “All they did was carrying out promotion of health services and providing more information to their peers around condom use, around lubricants,” he said. “Having even lubricant becomes a risk.”
With the consequences so severe, it wouldn’t be a surprise if all people at risk avoided any kind of sexual health care, but especially HIV testing and care services. That poses an enormous threat to Uganda’s progress on HIV.
Already, the AHA has led to so much fear among many people living with HIV that some HIV/AIDS treatment centers in Uganda’s capital are nearly empty, and the HIV treatment medications they normally hand out to patients are piling up, according to reporting from Reuters.
Since the law’s passage, drop-in centers that offer HIV services to members of Uganda’s LGBTQ community have seen a 60 percent drop in service utilization, said Kenneth Mwehonge, who directs Uganda’s Coalition for Health Promotion and Social Development, during Monday’s event.
It’s very worrisome if people living with HIV aren’t getting the medications they need. Modern medical treatment for HIV is extraordinarily effective — it generally makes the virus undetectable, which allows people with HIV to live normal life spans and prevents them from transmitting the infection through sex. But untreated people are at high risk for progressive and life-threatening immune system problems, and are much more likely to transmit the disease through sexual activity.
If the trend of avoiding care persists, it means more HIV will go undiagnosed and untreated, and transmission will likely rise across all populations — not just among gay people.
The law threatens the trust at the heart of provider-patient relationships
By deputizing all of Ugandan society as reporters of homosexual activity, the AHA is likely to raise patient concerns about the safety of seeking medical care, especially if there’s a concern they could be suspected to be gay. That could lead people — LGBTQ and not — to avoid seeing medical providers for a whole range of diseases, both infectious and not.
Under a section of the AHA concerning “promotion of homosexuality,” people can be punished for contributing to the normalization of gay sex acts. Punishments in this case include fines and license revocation. Another section indicates all Ugandans have a “duty to report” those suspected of even intending to have gay sex. This section contains language that protects health care providers from violating confidentiality provisions by reporting a patient.
For these reasons, the law has been widely interpreted to mean that health care providers must call the police on any patient they believe to be gay.
“When you look at the act, it’s very broad and very vague when it talks about promotion,” said Lusimbo, during Monday’s event. “So does providing a service to an LGBTI person qualify as promotion?”
The implication that it does is creating a lot of hesitation among providers who “do not want to be associated or be seen as people who are promoting or engaging in amplifying the voices of the LGBT community,” he said.
When trust in health providers breaks down, it can be lethal to a community’s health, said Kavanagh. “What we know — whether it’s HIV, or Covid, or [mpox], or Ebola — is that trust between the health sector and the population is perhaps the most critical tool in ensuring that the people who are experiencing the highest rates of transmission get diagnosed, get treatments, get a vaccine,” he said. “And what this law is requiring is that health workers actively break that trust. And that is very, very dangerous for public health.”
Indeed, Uganda’s recent success at containing an Ebola outbreak with relative speed relied on community members’ trust in traditional healers, community health workers, and conventional medicine practitioners. Under the AHA, a person with Ebola symptoms might hypothetically avoid seeking care out of fear they’d be suspected of homosexuality because their symptoms resembled acute HIV infection. It’s not only LGBTQ people who would suffer under those circumstances.
Critical foreign aid supporting Uganda’s health and other infrastructure may be withdrawn or redirected
Foreign aid is critical for supporting Uganda’s health system, and important for other parts of its infrastructure — and donors might be pulling back some of that aid now that the AHA has passed. That could result in weaknesses in health care and other systems that harm the whole of Ugandan society.
Uganda is one of the top recipients of foreign aid globally. Aid from foreign governments generally comprises between 6 and 8 percent of the nation’s gross national income, and thousands of nonprofit organizations also operate within the country.
Over the last few months, as Uganda’s political bodies considered the latest version of the AHA in earnest, countries and organizations have begun reconsidering their relationship and their assistance to the country. The World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development are reevaluating their work in Uganda, and a joint statement from several major funders of the nation’s health infrastructure called for the act to be reconsidered.
Programs funded by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which provides about $400 million in HIV funding to Uganda each year, could become illegal under the new law, said Russell. “There’s a huge concern that PEPFAR strategy becomes promotion of homosexuality under this law,” she said.
Academic institutions that work within the country are also reconsidering how their funds are being used. Louise Ivers, director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Global Health, wrote in an email to Vox that the organization planned to redirect the millions it spends on its Uganda program away from governmental to nongovernmental institutions.
That means shifting from supporting a public university in southwest Uganda — which helps sustain nurse training and community health work programs — to instead supporting nongovernmental organizations working on humanitarian efforts and education aimed at reducing LGBTQ discrimination in Uganda.
“In many ways just ‘pulling out’ is easy, but instead we are trying to take a careful approach that will both serve the poorest patients (a priority to us as clinicians), while also following through on our values,” Ivers wrote.
Ivers’s concern — and that of many other funders — is to avoid compounding harm to LGBTQ communities by withdrawing critical support not only for HIV care, but for the entire health care system.
It’s not just funding for health services that donors are reconsidering: Kavanagh said there is a “big push” to also review World Bank loans for infrastructure support to the nation. In fact, during the 2014 effort to pass an earlier version of the AHA, the World Bank paused its loans to Uganda.
Reducing support for any public goods in Uganda would likely cause pain for all Ugandans: A weaker health system and bad roads hurt everyone. “The health sector is of interest to the Ugandan government, but other sectors are even more important,” said Kavanagh.
Experts fear a spillover effect to other populations and other countries
Lusimbo fears the AHA will lead to increased persecution not only of LGBTQ people but also of other marginalized groups. In particular, he’s concerned the next step for the law’s proponents is to push for legislation targeting harm reduction programs that provide care to people who inject drugs.
There’s also concern that the AHA will lead Uganda’s neighboring countries to adopt similar attitudes toward LGBTQ people, if not similar legislation. Ingrid Katz, a research scientist at the Center for Global Health at Massachusetts General Hospital, noted that a “family protection bill” in Kenya uses the same language as the AHA. Lusimbo said Ghana and Tanzania are also seeing rising rates of anti-LGBTQ sentiment — “they seem to having kind of a template that is being followed,” he said.
International pressure is mounting against Uganda, but it could also backfire. Uganda’s president has been defending the law as anti-imperialist: As he explains it, the West is trying to impose its values of LGBTQ tolerance on Uganda.
It’s hard not to note the irony here; after all, American evangelicals helped transform Uganda’s long-simmering homophobia into law. Still, some human rights advocates within the country have asked foreign partners to tread lightly in their opposition to the law — in part to avoid the appearance that resistance is funded by outside interests.
The difficult consequences of any actions make this a challenging time for people who care about public health. Continuing aid appears to condone an egregiously harmful law — but withdrawing aid will also hurt innocent people.
“Governments that espouse hate shouldn’t get funding,” said Kavanagh, and donors who invest in Uganda’s essential social services “have to creatively address this horrific set of policy choices. The economic ramifications, hopefully, will wake Museveni up,” he said.
Although the law is popular among Uganda’s general public, some LGBTQ advocates are clear that they do not want the US government and other funders to take measures that would cause harm to Ugandans more broadly. “We do not believe in sanctions or cutting off aid because at the end of the day, this again has a very negative impact on other Ugandans,” said Lusimbo.
Instead, aid that directly impacts LGBTQ communities or supports the legal work of challenging the AHA before Uganda’s constitutional court is key, he said.
“This is a really delicate time for the outside world to put immense pressure on Uganda,” said Leaning, the human rights expert. Right now, she said, the best help for the nation’s most vulnerable is likely “funding or expertise — done quietly.”
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