Some gay activists overseas are urging President Barack Obama to back off his aggressive push for American-style global gay rights, which has made their cause more difficult in their countries, and, in some cases, even led to increased violence.
A report by the Associated Press says the president is facing new obstacles as he pushes other countries to sideline their family cultures in favor of greater social respect for gays and homosexuality, not just government tolerance or disinterest. That policy was implemented and pushed by Hillary Clinton when she was working as Secretary of State.
The U.S. has deployed its diplomats and spent tens of millions of dollars to try to block anti-gay laws, punish countries that enacted them, and tie financial assistance to respect for LGBT rights. It was a mission animated in part by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s declaration that “gay rights are human rights.”
Yet the U.S. encountered occasional backlash, including from some rights groups that said public pressure by the West made things worse.
Even where special legal protections for gays were enacted to some extent, “in Latin America, those changes have been accompanied by increasing violence against LGBT people,” the report continues, noting that, in Gambia, the United States’ “decision to revoke the country’s preferential trade status following an LGBT crackdown” only escalated anti-gay sentiment.
In February of 2014, President Yahya Jammeh of Gambia referred to homosexuals as “vermin,” and likened them to “malaria-causing mosquitoes.” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called the comments “unacceptable” and called upon the international community to denounce the leader’s statements.
Nevertheless, Obama’s demand that other countries embrace his radical LGBT agenda came to a head in 2015 in Kenya, where the country’s leaders warned the American president not to bring his “gay agenda” with him, or else “we shall tell him to shut up and go home.”
According to AP:
Warned in no uncertain terms ahead of his visits to keep quiet about gay rights, Obama called for equal legal treatment for gays while standing next to President Uhuru Kenyatta, who brushed it off and insisted it was “not really an issue.”
Bisi Alimi, a Nigerian gay rights activist, said that advocacy was critical to helping dissolve what for many Africans has been a persuasive argument against gay rights: that the U.S. and other rich nations are engaging in paternalism and cultural colonialism.
“We should not forget that Obama’s father is Kenyan,” Alimi said by phone from London, where he fled after being physically attacked in Nigeria. “There was no better place for him to say that than in a place where his nationality wouldn’t be questioned, where he wouldn’t be seen as a Westerner telling us how to live our lives.”
In Uganda, the Obama administration’s decision to revoke visas for Ugandan officials as well as aid to the country in retaliation for its “Kill the Gays” legislation, eventually gave gay rights opponents the ammunition to assert Washington, D.C. was dictating to their country.
A diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks even demonstrated that LGBT activists in Uganda demanded that U.S. diplomats use “quiet diplomacy – not public statements” to encourage the gay rights agenda, says AP.
As secretary of state, Democrat presidential candidate Clinton forced the issue of gay rights in 2011 in her speech to the U.N. in which she said, “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.” The speech was meant to dovetail with one in Beijing in 1995 when, as First Lady of the United States, she equated human rights with women’s rights.
“I never expected these issues could be elevated so fast and at such a high level,” said Mira Patel, a former State Department adviser who now works on Clinton’s campaign.
On Wednesday national security adviser Susan Rice again attempted a favorite scheme by the Obama administration: threatening to block U.S. funds to entities that won’t conform to his ideology. Obama has used the same strong-arm tactic with states that refuse to enact his “transgender bathroom” policy and those that have passed laws eliminating abortion business Planned Parenthood’s funding.
Rice announced the United States has issued a new rule that bars U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contracts from being awarded to any clinics, food programs, or shelters that refuse services to gays or transgenders.
However, Rice admits the situation is tricky.
“What we don’t want to do to the extent we can avoid it is expose individuals who aren’t wanting to be exposed and to put individuals at risk,” she reportedly said.
Obama, aided by an activist judiciary and a narrative that equates LGBT “rights” with the civil rights of black Americans, has achieved same-sex marriage in the United States and is now pressing for government-backed injection of the gender ideology into Americans’ K-12 schools and everyday lives.
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