The wholly political reasons that Uganda’s Museveni and Arizona’s Brewer increased gay discrimination or decreased it are identical. In the perspective of their lives we live in a very morally bankrupt world.

Stipulate: discrimination based on sexual orientation is wrong. Morally wrong.

This week on opposite sides of the world, discriminating against sexual orientation lost all meaning except politically.

It’s so enervating to think for how long, literally decades if not centuries, we’ve worked to establish the morality of equality. Not because someone is successful or not, not because they have the potential for success or not, not even because they’re functional or not.

Discrimination of biological differences, or even culturally preordained differences (nurture vs. nature) is morally unacceptable to the human community. Biology should be left to natural selection, and culture is a sacrosanct responsibility of us being a part of it.

So you would think the increasing protection of equality achieved by LGBT in America would be exhilarating, and it has been until now.

Now it’s changed. Gov. Jan Brewer does not like gays. Her intellect does not rise to relativism. She probably hates gays, and if she does, likely because she’s probably a suppressed gay herself. That’s the dynamic.

So why did she veto a bill that would have discriminated against gays?

Because she had to compromise her values to stay in power. It had everything to do with business in Arizona and religious freedom as she defined it, but it was a compromise of her core T-Party values that have identified her until now. And compromising values was something she had insisted time and again she would never do.

So, yes we won. But there is no victory for the purity of the issue.

In Africa, Yoweri Museveni signed into law one of the most draconian anti-LGBT laws in the world.

It was a long time coming. The withering opposition movement in Uganda staged heroic battles fighting the law and in fact managed to get what was a “death to gays” law changed to “life imprisonment” although no one who has the slightest understanding of a Uganda prison believes anyone can spend a very long life in one.

Museveni told CNN that being gay was “disgusting.”

He probably believes it, for the same reason Brewer does. In fact, these are two peas from the same pod. Why did they act so differently?

Museveni is growing more and more dictatorial, more and more repressive at the same time that his opposition while dwindling is growing more and more violent.

Museveni is rallying the troops, and the troops are cut from the same mold as he is: they are grossly uneducated, horribly frightened at the fast-paced modern world, and worried about their own positions in it.

They are ready to fight, and he needs power.