The British colonial origins of anti-gay laws - The Washington Post

Although the attached article is a bit dated (Oct 2014), it offers an interesting perspective and an added layer to the "Exportation of Hate" chronicle: "a common narrative is that acceptance and tolerance of homosexuality is a foreign, or alien, Western imposition on indigenous cultures."  As Han and O'Mahoney point out,

The idea that the so-called tolerance towards homosexuality somehow sprang from a western source doesn’t hold.  As our research shows, this narrative is not only wrong-headed but the opposite of the historical facts.  Instead, for many countries, including some of those mentioned above, criminalization laws were based on British imperial legal instruments, like the Indian Penal Code Section 377A, introduced and imposed on these countries by Britain when they were colonized.

This "it's foreign" plot-line does not necessarily hold true "we found that former British colonies are much more likely to have laws that criminalize homosexual conduct than former colonies of other European powers, or than other states in general."  And at quick glance one could say that individuals such as Scott Lively, Brian Brown, and Mike Bickle are taking advantage of that understanding of history.

It seems that when the British Empire was introducing legal systems around the world, one of the laws they included was the law against sodomy, which was not decriminalized in England and Wales until 1967. By this time, most of the “Winds of Change” wave of decolonization had left former colonies independent of changes in British legislation.  By contrast, after the French Revolution, the French Empire decriminalized sodomy between consenting adults, and spread this Enlightenment legacy among its colonies.  So, as the figure below illustrates, former French colonies were much quicker to decriminalize.
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Highlighting the colonial origin of anti-gay legislation is an important way to counter the narrative that tolerance of homosexuality is a neo-colonial imposition.  The Economist simultaneously downplays the importance of the colonial legacy and claims that Western criticism of the new anti-gay laws allows post-colonial governments to paint themselves as forging an independent path.  This confused message misses the potential power of undercutting the false narrative that tolerance of homosexuality is equivalent to colonialism.  Another strategy is to publicize the numerous examples of accepted homosexual practices and relations in various pre-colonial African cultures.

The British colonial origins of anti-gay laws - The Washington Post