How "The Family" Made Uganda the Frontline Against Homosexuals

Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family, interviewed David Bahati, a member of the Parliament in Uganda, who says he wants "to kill every last gay person" and introduced legislation to eradicate homosexuality in Uganda.

In an interview on NPR's Fresh Air, Sharlet comments on the direct links between Bahati and the politically influential Religious Right Fellowship known as "The Family" in Washington, D.C.:

"I discovered ... that there was this very direct relationship," Sharlet says. "And [the Fellowship members] are emphatic and saying: 'We haven't killed any gay people in Uganda. This isn't what we had in mind. We didn't pull the trigger.' And that's true. They didn't pull the trigger. But there's a sense in which they built the gun, which was this institutional idea of government being decided by small groups of elite leaders like Bahati, getting together and trying to conform government to their idea of Biblical law. And this is what their American benefactors wanted them to do."