In MercatorNet
As June approaches, get ready for the official celebration of “Gay Pride Month” by US embassies abroad.
If sodomy and same-sex marriage
are constitutional rights, what is their relationship to American
foreign policy? Despite the tremendous controversy regarding these
issues within the United States, the Obama administration has gone
ahead and placed them at the center of US diplomacy. Why? In Libido Dominandi,
E. Michael Jones wrote that the rationalization of sexual misbehavior
“could only calm the troubled conscience in an effective manner when it
was legitimized by the regime in power… [which] went on in the name of
high moral purpose to make this vision normative for the entire
world.”
Therefore, the Obama
administration, after promoting homosexual rights and marriage in the
US, has undertaken the task of universalizing the rationalization for
sodomitical behavior and is doing so with high moral rhetoric – in this
case, by appropriating the language of human rights.
The effort began in earnest on
International Human Rights Day, December 6, 2011, with a powerful pair
of events. President Obama issued a memorandum for the heads of
executive departments and agencies, directing them “to ensure that US
diplomacy and foreign assistance promote and protect the human rights
of LGBT persons”. Mr Obama said
that, “The struggle to end discrimination against lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons is a global challenge, and one
that is central to the United States commitment to promoting human
rights”.
The departments and agencies
included the Departments of State, the Treasury, Defense, Justice,
Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, and Homeland
Security, the United States Agency for International Development
(USAID), the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Export Import Bank,
the United States Trade Representative, and “such other agencies as the
President may designate.” All US agencies engaged abroad were directed
to prepare a report each year “on their progress toward advancing
these initiatives”.
Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, explained,
“They
have directed their embassies everywhere to monitor and assist
domestic homosexual movements whether the host country and their people
accept it or not. The US is very powerful and can force governments to
submit to its social-policy views. They are intent on forcing
homosexual ‘marriage’ and homosexual adoption on countries that are
offended by such things. They are intent on forcing sexual orientation
and gender identity as new categories of non-discrimination that will
trump the rights of religious believers… Most people recognize that the
homosexual lifestyle is harmful to public health and morals. The
effect of the Obama policy is to offend billions of people and force
this view on reluctant governments. This is most especially offensive
to countries that are predominantly Christian and Muslim. In fact,
Christianity and Islam are among the chief obstacles of this agenda and
policy.”
State Department sophistry
While President Obama took the
action, Hillary Clinton, then US Secretary of State, gave the rationale
in an International Human Rights Day speech on the same day, December
6, in which she proclaimed that that “gay rights are human rights, and
human rights are gay rights”. She also announced that the US would give
more than US$3 million to a new Global Equality Fund in order to help
civil society organizations promote homosexual advocacy.
Mrs. Clinton came energetically
to the defense of those “forced to suppress or deny who they are to
protect themselves from harm. I am talking about gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgender people”, whom she described with a strong
Rousseauian echo as “human beings born free and given bestowed equality
and dignity…” But, if they were born free, why are they not free now?
No doubt, because society oppresses them, just as South Africa once
oppressed its black population through apartheid – an example Mrs.
Clinton gives. But history overcame that, and since, as Rousseau
taught, man is a product of history, history can overcome this, too.
Thus, Mrs. Clinton ends with the admonition, “Be on the right side of history”.
It is a testimony to the
influence of Rousseau that Secretary Clinton should have appealed to
history for the vindication of “gay” rights rather than to moral
principle. Had it been the latter, she would have had to say rather
that, in order “to protect themselves from harm”, LGBT persons should
“suppress” precisely that part of themselves inclined to indulge in
disordered sexual acts, just as anyone should resist their inclinations
to immoral acts, whatever their kind.
Mrs Clinton averred that “being
LGBT does not make you less human”. That is certainly so, unless you
consistently give in to one of these disordered inclinations. In a
parallel case, being an alcoholic also does not make you less human.
However, practicing alcoholism by living life in an inebriated stupor
does make you less human in the Aristotelian sense that it impairs your
Nature or incapacitates you fulfilling it. If it is virtue that
enables man to reach his natural end in becoming fully human, then it
is vice that prevents him from doing so, thus making him less human.
Fully embracing the
rationalization of the same-sex cause, Secretary Clinton espoused
“gender identity” as equivalent to being black or being a woman. It is
“who they are”. In a moment of humility, she stated that, “my own
country’s record on human rights for gay people is far from perfect.
Until 2003, it was still a crime in parts of our country.”
It was? What was it?
Being homosexual or lesbian was not a crime in the United States, so
what was she referring to? Mrs. Clinton never said, but the it
to which she alluded is sodomy, the elephant in the room. She repeated
the mantra that “it is a violation of human rights when governments
declare it illegal to be gay…” and “it should never be a crime to be
gay”. One would have to agree in so far as persecution of and violence
against homosexuals is concerned but, as Austin Ruse has pointed out,
“Such attacks upon individuals are already recognized as violations of
human rights in international law particularly in the 1966 Covenants implementing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and
other existing treaties”. This, then, is moving beyond that to the
moral and legal endorsement of certain behavior. Some governments
continue to have laws against homosexual acts, which is not the same
thing as violating their rights as human beings. Was Mrs Clinton saying
that it is a violation of human rights to declare sodomy illegal?
Apparently, for that would be
consistent with an understanding of Section 1 in the Obama directive,
instructing agencies abroad to engage in “Combating Criminalization of
LGBT Status or Conduct Abroad”(emphasis added). What kind of conduct
might this be? The only conduct that is or has been consistently
criminalized by many countries is sodomy. Morally speaking, sodomy is a
fairly unattractive act. Why should it not be criminalized? Perhaps
there are prudential reasons for not doing so, but what might be the
moral objections to such laws?
The somewhat evasive answer in the Presidential Memorandum
is because “no country should deny people their rights because of who
they love…” In her speech, Mrs Clinton echoed this response and set
this test: “We need to ask ourselves, ‘How would it feel if it were a
crime to love the person I love?’”
Well, that depends.
What if the person one loves is
already married? What if the person one loves is a sibling? How about a
teacher in love with a student? Or a pastor in love with a choir boy?
Or an uncle with his niece? Acting upon any of these loves in a sexual
relationship is, in most places, a crime. It is not so much whom one loves, but how one loves. How it would feel
does not really matter since, in each of these cases, it is morally
wrong to sexualize the relationship. Feelings do not change the moral
nature of an act.
Why, if all the above cases
deserve prohibition, do homosexuals deserve an exemption when it comes
to sodomy? Secretary Clinton never said why we should feel for them and
not for any of those mentioned above, nor did she raise any of the
above examples of criminal love as violations of human rights. Why not?
Rationalizing immoral behaviour
As with all rationalizations
for moral misbehavior, Mrs. Clinton’s speech was rife with denials of
reality, three of which came in one sentence. She said, “Now, there are
some who say and believe that all gay people are pedophiles, that
homosexuality is a disease that can become caught or cured, or that
gays recruit others to become gay. Well, these notions are simply not
true”.
Well, these notions have to be
seen as not true for her to promote the “gay” agenda internationally
and get away with it. I have never met anyone who believes that all
homosexuals are pedophiles, but many of them are certainly pederasts.
By setting up the pedophile straw man, Mrs. Clinton avoids this
unpleasant reality. Whether homosexuality is a disease or not (it is
certainly a disorder), there is ample evidence that it can be cured. Of
course, a fair number of people float into homosexuality in their
youth and float out again as they mature – no cure required. So much
for its being an immutable characteristic.
Others who have become immersed
in this life and who later wish to leave it have successfully done so
through a variety of therapies. In 1995, the New York Times reported that
“Dr Charles W. Socarides offered the closest thing to hope that many
homosexuals had in the 1960s: the prospect of a cure. Rather than brand
them as immoral or regard them as criminal, Dr Socarides, a New York
psychoanalyst, told homosexuals that they suffered from an illness whose
effects could be reversed.” Dr Socarides said that his cure rate was
about one third. For Secretary Clinton to deny this is an enormous
disservice to the very people whose rights she purports to be defending.
Lastly, the bigger the lie, the
bolder the assertion – as in Mrs. Clinton’s outright denial that “gays
recruit others to become gay”. In my professional career in the arts, I
witnessed such recruitment, saw its occasional success, and was
several times the object of it. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of
the homosexual subculture could not possibly make such a statement.
Otherwise, Mrs. Clinton could have referred to homosexual literature, such as Lavender Culture (1994),
in which Gerald Hannon described the need for a youth recruitment
campaign: “I believe…we have to behave in a certain way vis-à-vis young
people. I believe that means we have to proselytize… The answer is to
proselytize. Aggressively so”. He added that, “To attract young people
to the gay movement in large numbers should be the challenge to the next
phase of the movement. It is a challenge we have set ourselves…” This
is not to say that all homosexuals recruit, but to assert that none do
is a complete denial of reality – which, after all, is the point of the
rationalization.
The State Department celebrates
What this is all about was very clear from the 2006 Yogykarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity,
adopted by the International Commission of Jurists, the International
Service for Human Rights, and homosexual activists to influence the
interpretation of the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all UN human rights treaties, and international law as a whole. One requirement of the Principles
is to: “Repeal criminal and other legal provisions that prohibit or
are, in effect, employed to prohibit consensual sexual activity among
people of the same sex who are over the age of consent…” This is the nub
of the issue. It is not the status of homosexuals that is so much the
matter, as it is the status of their conduct.
In 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, France introduced a statement at the UN General Assembly, titled Joint Statement on Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Human Rights. It proclaimed that,
“We urge States to take all the necessary measures, in particular
legislative or administrative, to ensure that sexual orientation or
gender identity may under no circumstances be the basis for criminal
penalties, in particular executions, arrests or detention”. The
Statement was signed by 66 nations.
Under the George W. Bush
administration, the United States declined, but in 2009 the Barack
Obama administration signed the Statement. While the Statement did not go as far as the Yogykarta Principles, it was clearly headed in that direction. The majority of the criminal penalties it was decrying were not, as the Statement
disingenuously suggests, aimed at orientation, but at activity. It is
the activity that must be vindicated and blessed as a universal human
right.
One of the most immediate
results of the priority given to the homosexual cause by President
Obama and Secretary Clinton has been the profusion of “gay pride”
commemorations and celebrations in US embassies abroad. June is the
month singled out for this because, in 2000, President Bill Clinton
declared June “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month”, with the last Sunday
reserved as Gay Pride Day. June was chosen to commemorate the
anniversary of the Stonewall riots as the beginning of “gay”
liberation. Ever since, every government agency has observed it. As of
2011, it moved overseas as part of US foreign policy.
Therefore, the US Embassy in
Islamabad celebrated its first-ever lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender (LGBT) “pride celebration” with an event on June 26, 2011.
The embassy said the purpose of meeting was to demonstrate “support for
human rights, including LGBT rights, in Pakistan at a time when those
rights are increasingly under attack from extremist elements throughout
Pakistani society.” Richard Hoagland, the US deputy chief of mission,
was quoted on the embassy website, as saying, “I want to be clear that the US Embassy is here to support you and stand by your side every step of the way”.
However, it is Pakistan’s Penal
Code, not extremist elements, that, in Section 377 (introduced at the
time of British colonialism), states, “Whoever voluntarily has carnal
intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal,
shall be punished… with imprisonment of either description for a term
which shall not be less than two years nor more than ten years, and
shall also be liable to fine.”
If the Pakistani embassy in
Washington DC held a public event in which it encouraged that the
domestic laws in the United States be changed in order to
re-criminalize sodomy, we might be somewhat surprised and irritated.
Why should the Pakistani people be less annoyed by the US Embassy
telling them to change its laws in order to decriminalize sodomy? Why
exactly is that our business?
All Islamic groups in Pakistan
condemned the “pride” event as a form of “cultural terrorism” against
democratic Pakistan. Students protested against what they called “the
attempts of the United States to promote vulgarity in Islamic societies
under the pretext of human rights”. One speaker at a demonstration said,
“Now the United States wants to project and promote objectionable,
unnatural, abnormal behaviors under the pretext of equality and human
rights, which is not at all acceptable… If you destroy the morality of
the society, you have destroyed it completely.”
In Nairobi, Kenya, June, 2012,
the US Embassy hosted what is thought to be the first “Gay Pride” event
in that country. John Haynes, a public affairs officer at the US
embassy, introduced the event:
"The US government for its part has made it clear that the advancement
of human rights for LGBT people is central to our human rights
policies around the world and to the realization of our foreign policy
goals". Homosexual acts are illegal in Kenya, just as they were in
parts of the United States until 2003. Now, as part of our foreign
policy, apparently we tell Kenya to change its laws.
The US Embassy in Vientiane,
Laos, proudly displays webpage news from its 2012 “first-ever Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Pride event on June 25 in
Vientiane. The event, called ‘Proud to be Us!’, was produced by a group
of young Lao LGBT activists and featured music, dance, skits, and
dramas exploring issues faced by LGBT people in Laos today, such as
discrimination, gender roles, and sexual health”.
On the webpage of the US
Embassy in Prague, Czech Republic, a joint statement was issued which
the US ambassador, Norman Eisen, had signed. It declared:
“On the occasion of the 2nd annual Prague Pride Festival (2012), we
express our solidarity with the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
communities of the Czech Republic in their celebration… The Prague Pride
Festival reminds us that ensuring LGBT rights is an important aspect
of fulfilling our broader international human rights commitments since
the full recognition of those rights is still one of the world’s
remaining human rights challenges. Safeguarding human rights and
guarding against intolerance requires constant vigilance in the Czech
Republic, as in all our countries. Therefore today, we align ourselves
with the Prague Pride participants…”
This type of thing at US embassies has become standard. As then-Secretary of State Clinton proclaimed in June, 2012:
“United States Embassies and Missions throughout the world are working
to defend the rights of LGBT people of all races, religions, and
nationalities as part of our comprehensive human rights policy and as a
priority of our foreign policy. From Riga, where two US Ambassadors and
a Deputy Assistant Secretary marched in solidarity with Baltic Pride;
to Nassau, where the Embassy joined together with civil society to
screen a film about LGBT issues in Caribbean societies; to Albania,
where our Embassy is coordinating the first-ever regional Pride
conference for diplomats and activists to discuss human rights and
shared experiences”.
Forcing other countries to adopt US standards
As in Pakistan, there has been
some blowback from the effort to legitimize sodomy and promote same-sex
marriage. When the acting ambassador in El Salvador, Mari Carmen
Aponte, wrote an op-ed in a major Salvadoran newspaper, La Prensa Grafica,
implying that the disapproval of homosexual behavior is animated by
“brutal hostility” and “aggression” by “those who promote hatred”, a
group of pro-family associations fought back. On July 6, 2011, they wrote,
“Ms.
Aponte, in clear violation of the rules of diplomacy and international
rights laws, you intend to impose to (sic) Salvadorans, disregarding
our profound Christian values, rooted in natural law, a new vision of
foreign and bizarre values, completely alien to our moral fiber,
intending to disguise this as ‘human rights’… The only thing we agree
with from your article, is to repudiate violence against homosexuals,
bisexuals, transsexuals, etc.; Against these, just the same as against
skinny, fat, tall or short ... This of course does not mean accepting
the legal union between same sex individuals or to add new types of
families like bisexual, tri-sexual, multi-sexual and the full range of
sexual preferences. Not accepting the legitimacy of ‘sexual diversity’
does not mean we are violating any human right. There can be no talk of
progress if this is how ‘modern’ is defined. We prefer to feel proudly
‘old fashioned’, keep our moral values, preserve our families and
possess the clarity of what defines good and evil.”
As mentioned above, Secretary
Clinton said that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are
gay rights”. The problem with this should be self-evident. The
promotion of gay rights must come at the expense of the promotion of
human rights because the two notions are immiscible. One is founded on
the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God and the other on moral
relativism, which eviscerates the very idea of natural rights and the
natural law on which they are based. If you have one, you cannot have
the other. You have your rights by virtue of being a human being, and
not by anything else – not ethnicity, not religion, not race, not
tribe, not sexual orientation.
I deplore, for instance, the
persecution of Baha’is in Iran and the persecution of Ahamdis in
Pakistan. Being a Baha’i or being an Ahmadi no doubt constitutes the
identity of these people who are being persecuted. Nonetheless, there
is no such thing as Ahmadi rights or Baha’i rights: there are only
human rights. And our defense of them comes precisely at the level of
principle in the inalienable right to freedom of conscience, freedom of
religion, and freedom of expression.
Were we to construct such a
thing as Ahmadi rights or Baha’i rights or “gay” rights, we would be
eviscerating the foundations for those very human rights, which have to
be universal by definition in order to exist. If one has rights as a
Baha’i, what happens to those rights if one converts to, say
Christianity? Does one then lose one’s Baha’i rights and obtain new
Christian rights? What happens to one’s “gay” rights if one goes
straight?
One does not possess or attain
rights in this way. They are inalienable because one possesses them by
virtue of one’s human nature – not due to any other specificity
regarding race, class, gender or religion. Either they exist at that
level, or they do not exist at all. If someone tries to appropriate
human rights for something that applies to less than everyone, then you
may be sure that they are undermining very notion of human rights. If
there are abuses, and this includes abuses against homosexuals, then
they should be opposed from the perspective of human rights, not
manufactured rights that obtain to just a specific group.
If the United States wishes to
promote democratic principles and constitutional rule in other
countries, but insists on inserting a manufactured right such as “gay”
rights as integral to that program, it will be rejected overall by
religious people and by those who, through the examination of moral
philosophy, have arrived at the existence of human rights from natural
law. If we wish not only to make ourselves irrelevant, but an object of
derision in the Muslim and other parts of world, all we have to do is
openly promote the rationalization of homosexual behavior, which is
explicitly taught against as inherently immoral by Islam and, in fact,
by every minority religion in those Muslim-majority countries,
including Christianity and Judaism.
If we wish to make this part of
American public diplomacy, as we have been doing, we can surrender the
idea that the United States is promoting democracy in those countries
because they are already responding, “If this is democracy, we don’t
want it, thank you; we would rather keep our faith and morals.” This
approach not only undermines the foundation of human rights abroad but
here, as well.
But, of course, democracy is
not the real goal; the goal is the universalization of the
rationalization for sodomy. This is now one of the depraved purposes of
US foreign policy. The light from the City on the Hill is casting a
very dark shadow.
