Welcome to Jacksonville, Florida, where a federally-funded abstinence-only program taught to more than 50,000 students has some shady and scary ties to a Ugandan pastor who wants to see gay people locked up in jail forever or executed.

Andy Kopsa over at The Florida Independent has an amazing investigative piece looking at the organization Project SOS, an abstinence-only program founded in 1993 by a woman named Pam Mullarkey. Turns out Mullarkey has worked with and praised a pastor in Uganda who has been championing a piece of legislation known as the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. That pastor? Martin Ssempa, the religious leader who travels around the country showing graphic pornography to men, women and children in order to whip up anti-gay sentiment, and who has said that LGBT people in the country deserve to be locked up in prison for life, or sentenced to the death penalty.

Mullarkey currently sits on the board of Project SOS. And Proejct SOS, since 2002, has received upwards of $6 million in federal grant money, including a recent grant in September 2010 for over $400,000. This is unacceptable. The U.S. Health and Human Services Department should not be rewarding organizations that praise the work of leading anti-gay pastors in Uganda.

To make matters worse, Project SOS has a curriculum which has been documented as "unacceptable" by the American School Health Association, and misleading by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. Why is this organization receiving so much money from American taxpayers?

Send the U.S. Health and Human Service Department a message that they should not be funding groups like Project SOS.