Anti-gay Family Watch denies ‘any role’ in Uganda’s harsh law. But it fed Uganda’s homophobia.

U.S.-based Family Watch fosters the homophobic climate where anti-gay legislation thrives.

 

American anti-LGBTQ activists Sharon Slater, her husband Greg, and their organization, Family Watch International (FWI), are seeking to set the record straight about their relationship to the harsh Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA) that Uganda enacted in 2023.

But the record is far from straight. “It’s complicated” as Slater herself has said about the Family Watch position on African nations’ anti-gay laws.

“Neither Family Watch nor any of its staff played any role in promoting and/or passing Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act 2023,” according to a letter to Erasing 76 Crimes from the Slaters’ attorney, Todd V. McMurtry, also representing Family Watch, an Arizona-based non-profit organization that lobbies against homosexuality and for what it describes as traditional family values.  McMurtry wrote on behalf of his clients to seek a correction to an article this news site published on June 20, 2025,  titled “Western anti-LGBTQ groups exert growing influence in Africa”.

McMurtry and his clients — FWI, its president Sharon Slater, and its legal adviser Greg Slater — dispute the accuracy of a statement in that article, attributed to the progressive news network Open Democracy, which alleged that Family Watch played “a key role in framing and passing” the AHA in May 2023. The Open Democracy article does not contain evidence that Family Watch or the Slaters proposed text for the AHA before it was introduced or urged parliament to pass it.  However, there’s plenty of evidence that the Slaters and Family Watch helped foster the homophobic climate in African nations where local politicians have introduced anti-homosexuality bills.

LGBTQ rights advocates say that FWI and Sharon Slater have provided the ideological framework and messaging used to justify the AHA, including the promotion of “conversion therapy” and false claims that LGBTQ+ people are more likely to be involved in child abuse.  The Southern Poverty Law Center, in its report that declares FWI to be a hate group, states:

Sharon Slater touts herself as an “internationally recognized leader in the effort to promote and protect the family and family values.” Her attacks on LGBT individuals — who, she repeatedly insists, are prone to disease, “significantly more promiscuous,” and “more likely to engage in pedophilia” — are presented under the guise of protecting children, who she claims are most at risk of being unwittingly indoctrinated into the sinister “global sexual rights revolution” that seeks to undermine the nuclear family, unleash sexual predation on children, undermine religious values, and sow “gender confusion.”

On the Frequently Asked Questions page of its website, Family Watch presents an argument that supporters of anti-LGBTQ laws almost always use as they violate the human rights of LGBTQ people: “Family Watch supports the rights of nations to determine their own laws with regard to sexual issues in line with their own religious and cultural values.” 

She has also told interviewer Warren Throckmorton that she hasn’t wanted American states to repeal state laws against sodomy because that could lead to protections for LGBTQ people in housing, jobs, and marriage, which she sees as problematic outcomes.

In public, the Slaters and Family Watch have presented a variety of disparate and sometimes contradictory positions about anti-homosexuality legislation.

• FWI says it has a hands-off attitude toward laws that punish LGBT people. “FWI does not dictate to nations what specific laws people should enact or protect regarding homosexual sex or whether they should fine or jail individuals”, Sharon Slater stated in 2012.
• FWI has opposed attempts by United Nations agencies to document anti-homosexuality laws and to study ways that  “international human rights law can be used to end violence and related human rights violations based on sexual orientation and gender identity.” In a statement to the 2011 Nigerian Bar Association Conference in Lagos, Nigeria, Sharon Slater said FWI said opposes anti-gay violence but insists that such a study “will be used, not just to prevent violence against homosexuals and transgenders but to advance sexual rights and harass nations that do not accept and protect these lifestyles.”

• Shortly after that conference, Greg Slater sent an email to supporters that described Nigeria as a role model, praising it for resisting international pressure. Nigerian law provides a 14-year prison sentence for same-sex intimacy, while the death penalty is the specified punishment for gay sex in the sharia law that’s in force in northern Nigeria.
• At least once, Sharon Slater said in general terms that FWI supports the human rights of homosexuals and trans people.  “LGBT people have all the rights that everyone else has”, she said at the end of a 2019 TV interview in Ghana, four years before the 2023 version of the AHA was introduced in parliament. (Her attorney cited that interview as evidence in his letter denying that FWI promoted the AHA. Erasing 76 Crimes asked FWI for more recent specific examples of opposition to the AHA before its initial passage on March 21, 2023. FWI did not respond with any such examples.)

• Passionately anti-gay Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa, formerly a volunteer coordinator for FWI, has been a strong supporter of the 2023 law and the even harsher “Kill the Gays” bill that eventually was passed in 2014 without the death penalty and then was overturned in Uganda’s Constitutional Court. Family Watch distanced itself from Ssempa, stating, “we removed his name from our website because we strongly opposed the [‘Kill the Gays’] bill.”
• Despite saying it has a hands-off attitude about anti-LGBT laws, FWI did lobby Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in 2023 to amend the recently passed but not yet enacted AHA so homosexuals seeking to change their sexual orientation would be exempt from punishment.
• One day after Parliament amended the bill and sent it back to Museveni on May 2, 2023, an FWI statement against the bill was published in a public radio article in Phoenix, Arizona   Reporting on an email received from FWI, the article stated,  “Family Watch denies supporting the anti-LGBTQ laws in Uganda …. In fact, they said they opposed the law and asked the Ugandan president to soften the bill if he were to sign it.” 
• Eight days after Museveni signed the AHA into law on May 26, FWI continued its work to distance itself from the AHA. The Internet Archive shows that on June 4, 2023, it posted the FAQ page that denies that FWI promoted the legislation. On Aug. 23,  Museveni himself issued a letter confirming Slater’s statement that she did not lobby for the bill. “Madame Slater had nothing to do with originating, canvassing for or supporting the enactment of this law”, he wrote. He added, that “when Sharon spoke to us, she advised us about creating a safe haven clause for the homosexuals and for people with unwanted same sex attraction, to get help and not punishment.  Her comments, were actually helpful when I sent back the Bill to Parliament for reconsideration and recommending to them stop efforts of criminalizing the mere fact of being a homosexual.”
• On the FAQ page of its website, Family Watch makes two seemingly contradictory statements: (1) “Family Watch has not taken a policy position on the decriminalization or criminalization of homosexuality” and (2)  “Family Watch opposes the Uganda anti-homosexuality law.”

LGBT rights activists allege that the Slaters and Family Watch have worked in private in support of the anti-LGBT legislation.

Frank Mugisha, executive director of  now-outlawed Sexual Minorities Uganda,  argued that “behind the scenes she’s heavily involved in the anti-gay legislation. Even in the first one, ten years ago, she was heavily involved.”

Fox Odoi, the only Ugandan member of parliament who voted against AHA 2023, said at the time that, “Among the Pentecostals, Sharon Slater is particularly influential […] I know they’re lobbying seriously the President to assent to the bill — both the Americans and the local Evangelicals.”

Shortly after the Ugandan parliament passed the AHA in 2023, a conference that FWI helped organize was held in Entebbe, Uganda, where speakers presented anti-sex education and anti-LGBTQ+ messages, Most of the participants and speakers were AHA promoters, which was reflected in their speeches. FWI denied organizing the conference.

But journalist/professor Kristof Titeca reported in Democracy in Africa:

“FWl tried as much as possible to mask their involvement before the conference. In a program distributed before the event Sharon Slater uses her maiden name, … while her husband appears as Greg Scott (instead of Greg Slater). A number of African participants used their real names but omitted their association with FWI. An FWI film, prominently placed in the conference program, didn’t disclose its FWI association.”

“… Opening speeches by various officials clearly mention and thank FWI as the co-organizer, and Sharon Slater herself was very much present as a central organizational figure at the conference, with one attendee describing her as ‘clearly being in charge’.  …

“The reason for this seems to be an attempt to avoid the … attention to American evangelical involvement, and the risks this entailed.  …In her speech to the conference, Slater “offered delegates assistance in drafting legislation in a variety of fields, saying, ‘We can connect you to our model legislation, positive legislation to protect the family on various issues … [including] transgenderism ….”

In connection with that conference, Ugandan human rights lawyer Nicolas Opiyo stated: “The wave of homophobia and transphobia in Uganda, and the region, has nothing to do with Ugandan or African values. It is a disguised campaign by American evangelicals through their local actors. Their campaigns have now been organised under what appears to be local professional entities such as Christian lawyers’ groups, parliamentary forums and so forth.

“Their claim about African family values is only a ‘dog whistle’, a hate campaign and an imposition of a narrow Christian worldview upon us all. Once again, the Ugandan gay community is a target of this misinformation, hate and culture wars.”

Is the FWI’s position on anti-homosexuality “complicated”? Not according to religion professor Warren Throckmorton, who interviewed Sharon Slater in 2012 and summarized his analysis of her position:

“Despite Slater saying the matter was ‘complicated,’ the activities of FWI reveal a very uncomplicated, black-and-white strategy: laws opposing homosexuality in any form should be retained, while those which might provide basic freedoms to gays are opposed as bad for everybody else. The only caveat is that they prefer that gays not be beaten or killed.”