The Tim Walberg Pipeline
From a 2023 Entebbe speech to a 216–210 House vote
The sarcasm with which I’m using the above photo for this article is fueled by the fact that the Broadway play, “The Book of Mormon,” is set in Uganda, and the subject of this article is worthy of the line, “I’ve got maggots in my scrotum!”
On October 8, 2023, a Republican congressman from Michigan flew to Entebbe, Uganda, on a private nonprofit’s dime, took a podium in a banquet hall, and spent forty minutes telling the president of Uganda to keep killing gay people.
He did not say it that way. He said it as “stand firm.”
The president he addressed was Yoweri Museveni, who five months earlier had signed the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023. The law carries life in prison for consensual same-sex intercourse, ten years for attempted homosexuality, twenty years for “promotion of homosexuality,” and the death penalty for what the statute calls “aggravated homosexuality.”
The congressman’s name is Tim Walberg. He represents the 5th district of Michigan. As of January 2025, he chairs the House Education and Workforce Committee. On April 29, 2026, the U.S. House voted 216 to 210 along straight party lines to clear the procedural runway for his federal parental-notification bill, which would force teachers to out trans kids to their parents in every public school in the country that takes Title I dollars.
Those two facts belong in the same sentence. The American press has not put them there yet. So I will.
What He Actually Said
The video is on YouTube. The transcript was first made public by the Take Care Tim blog and confirmed by The Young Turks in late December 2023. Read it in Walberg’s own words.
“Though the rest of the world is pushing back on you, though there are other major countries that are trying to get into you and
“Though the rest of the world is pushing back on you, though there are other major countries that are trying to get into you and ultimately change you, stand firm. Stand firm.”
He named the institutions condemning the law and called their views “worthless.” The World Bank, which had just suspended new loans to Uganda. The World Health Organization. The United Nations. “Sadly, some in our administration in America” who had pointed out that the law violates universal human rights. He waved them all off. He closed with a question to his audience, which included Museveni and David Bahati, the parliamentarian who first introduced Uganda’s death-penalty bill in 2009: “Whose side do we want to be on? God’s side. Not the World Bank, not the United States of America, necessarily, not the U.N. God’s side.”
Read that last sentence again. A sitting U.S. congressman, in his official capacity, told a foreign head of state that the United States is on the wrong side of a death-penalty question, and that God prefers the head of state.
He introduced himself to that room in a sentence I keep coming back to: “I don’t see it first and foremost as a Member of Congress, I see it as a missionary of the Lord Jesus Christ” (Take Care Tim, 2023).
I am a Lutheran. I have been since the January of 1966, when my mother brought me, seven weeks old, to a baptismal font in Albert Lea, Minnesota. I run the audio-visual booth at my country church in rural Sioux Falls. I know what a missionary of the Lord Jesus Christ sounds like. The Lord Jesus Christ told the rich young ruler to sell everything and give it to the poor. He did not tell anybody to back a death-penalty law for sodomy.
Who Bought the Plane Ticket
Walberg did not pay for the trip himself. The Fellowship Foundation did. The Fellowship is a Christian-political nonprofit founded in 1935 that began the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast in 1953. It is more often called by its other name, The Family. Jeff Sharlet wrote two books about it. Netflix made a documentary. The group has a long history of using prayer-breakfast diplomacy to grow right-wing political networks in the developing world, then bringing the resulting policy back to the U.S. for replication.
Walberg’s congressional travel disclosure form acknowledges the Fellowship paid for the trip. He justified the trip’s connection to his official duties by pointing to his role as co-chair of the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast. His staff wrote on the form, with what I read as a straight face: “Meeting and strengthening relationships with global leaders will improve the United States’ relationships with foreign countries.” The relationship he strengthened was with the man who has a 20-year-old in jail awaiting a possible death sentence for consensual sex.
After the speech became public, Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, wrote a letter to Fellowship board chair Katherine Crane demanding disclosure of the group’s foreign operations. Crane declined to answer. The Fellowship still paid the new National Prayer Breakfast Foundation $46,800 in 2023, the same year it paid for Walberg’s plane ticket to Entebbe. Make of that what you will.
Six Months Later, the Court Listened
On April 3, 2024, six months after Walberg’s keynote, Uganda’s Constitutional Court refused to nullify the law. A five-judge panel led by Deputy Chief Justice Richard Buteera struck down a few provisions and left in place the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality,” the ten-year sentence for attempted homosexuality, and the twenty-year sentence for promotion. In August 2023 a 20-year-old Ugandan man became the first person charged under the act with “aggravated homosexuality.” In January 2024 Steven Kabuye, a Ugandan LGBTQ+ activist, was stabbed by unknown assailants. He survived. Most stories like his do not get filed.
That ruling did not happen in a vacuum. It happened after months of international pressure. World Bank loan suspensions. U.S. visa restrictions. UN condemnations. A statement from Pope Francis. A joint statement from PEPFAR, UNAIDS, and the Global Fund warning the law would set HIV prevention back by a generation. And it happened after a Republican congressman from Michigan flew to Entebbe and told the host country to ignore every one of them.
From Entebbe to a House Floor in Washington
In December 2024, the House Republican Steering Committee gave Walberg the gavel of the House Education and Workforce Committee. The committee has jurisdiction over the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), the federal funding stream that reaches almost every public K-12 school in the country. At his January 2025 organizing meeting, Walberg said the committee’s first priority would be advancing “President Trump’s agenda.”
On April 3, 2025, he reintroduced his marquee bill, the PROTECT Kids Act (H.R. 2616). The text is short. Any ESEA-funded elementary or middle school must obtain parental consent before changing a student’s pronouns, gender markers, or preferred name on any school form, or before allowing the student to use sex-based facilities such as locker rooms or restrooms (Library of Congress, 2026). On the same day, his committee colleague Burgess Owens of Utah introduced the Say No to Indoctrination Act (H.R. 2617), which forbids any ESEA-funded school from using federal money to teach or advance “gender ideology” as defined by Executive Order 14168, which states that sex is determined at conception and that no other definition is recognizable in federal policy.
Take the two bills together and the architecture is plain. One bill orders the school to out the child. The other bill orders the school to pretend the child does not exist on the page. The bill drafted by the man who chaired the committee comes paired with the bill drafted by his vice chair. They were filed on the same day, voted out of committee on the same day, and bundled into a single piece of legislation by the Rules Committee on April 28, 2026.
On April 29, 2026, the House voted 216 to 210 to adopt H. Res. 1224, the rule that clears all four bills the GOP wanted to bring up that week, with H.R. 2616 sitting at the top of the list. Republicans voted yea 215 to 0. Democrats voted nay 210 to 0. The roll call is in the Clerk’s record, number 141. The bill itself has not yet been voted on the floor as of the date I am writing this. It is one floor vote away.
The Children Walberg Has Decided to Lose
The argument over forced outing is not academic. It is empirical, and it has been settled. In 2024, Lee and colleagues published in Nature Human Behaviour a difference-in-differences analysis of 48 anti-transgender laws passed in 19 states between 2018 and 2022. In a sample of 61,240 transgender and nonbinary people aged 13 to 24, the 13- to 17-year-olds in states that passed these laws showed up to a 72% increase in past-year suicide attempts. The effect appeared within the first year of enactment.
Ryan and colleagues (2009), publishing in Pediatrics, documented that LGB young adults from highly rejecting families were 8.4 times more likely to attempt suicide than peers from accepting families. Walberg’s bill is a federal mechanism for guaranteeing that the rejecting family knows.
Representative Mark Takano of California, a former high school teacher, has tried to put a face on the data on the House floor. “As a teacher, I know of instances when children were outed by staff and, as a consequence, they faced severe punishment. One student was beaten by his father and transferred out of the district after he was caught being affectionate with another boy” (Boucher, 2023). Walberg has answered that abuse “would be an extremely small minority” of cases. The clinical research he is shrugging off says that small minority is the population whose kids end up dead.
Why the Two Stories Are the Same Story
The Fellowship Foundation has been doing this for fifteen years. Jeff Sharlet’s 2010 Harper’s piece traced the original Ugandan “Kill the Gays” bill, then in its first incarnation, to David Bahati’s prayer-breakfast network and to American Family insiders who provided cover and language. The pattern has held. Push the policy abroad in a country where civil society cannot push back, refine the language, then bring the architecture home.
The PROTECT Kids Act and the Say No to Indoctrination Act are the architecture coming home. The Anti-Homosexuality Act is what happens when the same architecture meets a country with weaker checks and a willing parliament. They are different scales of the same project. The man who flew to Uganda to ask for the harsher version is the man writing the milder version into U.S. federal law from the chair of a House committee.
Walberg’s office responded to the Uganda reporting with a denial that has not aged well. “Despite inaccurate reports circulating, the transcript clearly shows that Congressman Walberg never endorsed any legislation or law while in Uganda,” the office wrote. “He did call out the World Bank for repeatedly holding Uganda, a Christian nation, to a different standard than much of the rest of the world.” That statement is what a press release looks like when the video says something else and you are hoping nobody clicks the YouTube link.
My Side
I am 60 years old. I came out as transgender at 53, nine days after I steered my car at three grain trucks on a South Dakota highway and the only thing that kept me from finishing the job was the truck driver I would have taken with me. I have spent the years since then trying to be useful. I write. I run audio at church. I coach gymnastics. I am a graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. My wife and I take care of our family.
I am not the audience Walberg is trying to scare. The audience is the seventh-grade girl in Tipton, Michigan, who already knows who she is and has not yet told her parents. The audience is the trans kid in Sioux Falls whose science teacher just figured out a way to use the right name on the attendance roster. The audience is every adult in those buildings who has signed up to keep one child alive long enough to graduate.
Walberg asked his Entebbe audience whose side they wanted to be on. I will give him an answer.
Author Note: Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA & PhD graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is also a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She corrects all her papers and articles with Grammarly, because even though she has deep thoughts, she has shallow patience for punctuation. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.