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I wish that President Museveni of Uganda could meet Morag. I met her the day before she went into hospital for a hysterectomy. She had cancer of the womb. She was 22 and she had three sons, each by a different father and at least one by rape. I had buried her mother some ten years previously. Since then she had spent two spells in a young offender institution and ended up in a city which was not her own. I went to see her in hospital and then in her one bedroom flat after she and her boys had been reunited. There was little by way of luxury, unless you considered a battered television in need of repair. She asked me to look after the kids while she went out to get some groceries and before long the two toddlers and the baby began volubly to exhibit that they were missing their mother. When she returned I said to her, ‘Morag, how do you cope?’ And she said, “It’s not easy. But I’ve got to know two young men who are gay and live further down the street. Every week they come and take my oldest two to the park or to the cinema, and that gives me a break. And then sometimes at the weekend, one of them will baby-sit, and the other will take me dancing. I love that. I know that I’ll be safe. Nobody will interfere for me. Nobody will jump me when I walk home. When I’m with one of these boys I feel like a princess.” I wish President Museveni could meet Morag and hear her testimony, he who yesterday further endangered people of homosexual orientation by publicly endorsing anti gay laws in a country which already penalises same sex relations. I wish he could also meet Archbishops Welby and Sentamu who have pled for compassion on this issue. But more than that I wish the president and people like him could have stood near Jesus when he identified grace in a foreign untouchable and selfless affection in a suspected whore, for Jesus had a habit of seeing the potential where others saw a problem. Differences in religious outlook, ethnic tradition, race and culture ensure that in matters of sexual identity and behaviour there will never be unanimity, and polarised attitudes are not always formed by insight or advice. But progress is yet possible. For example, rape, abuse, humiliation were at one time thought to originate in desire or temptation; now they are recognised as perverse expressions of power. Might it not also be that when President Museveni and his legislators make a show of humiliating or criminalising those not of their persuasion, the action - in some mysterious way - might have less to do with the issue of sexual preference and more to do with what they subconsciously perceive as a challenge to their own position of dominance and power.