On December 6th, in a speech in Geneva marking international human rights day, Secretary of State Clinton called for all nations to embrace the goals of LGBT activism, declaring that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights,” and that, “It is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay, or allow those who harm gay people to go unpunished.”
Unfortunately, her speech, which was hailed by gay activists worldwide, was an exercise in hypocrisy, not to mention an insult to several billion people worldwide.
She rightly stated that, “It is [a] violation of human rights when people are beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation, or because they do not conform to cultural norms about how men and women should look or behave.” But this was only the tip of the iceberg.
Mrs. Clinton had the audacity to compare religious or cultural objections to homosexual practice to “the justification offered for violent practices towards women like honor killings, widow burning, or female genital mutilation,” as if the religious and moral objection to men having sex with men is somehow equivalent to the Muslim practice of honor killings or the Hindu practice of burning widows.
“In each of these cases,” she said, “we came to learn that no [religious] practice or tradition trumps the human rights that belong to all of us.” And she said this in our name, as Americans.
.She stated that “opinions [on homosexuality] are still evolving”, just as opinions evolved over time with slavery, and “what was once justified as sanctioned by God is now properly reviled as an unconscionable violation of human rights.”
In other words, if you have an issue with the lewd sexual displays at your city’s gay pride parade, or if you’re not comfortable with a man who dresses as a woman using the ladies bathroom, or if you don’t want to see a kid raised by two lesbians and thereby deprived of having a father, or if you believe that God made men to be with women, then you are the moral equivalent of a slave trader or a slave owner.
All this (and more) came from the lips of our Secretary of State at the same time that President Obama issued a memorandum instructing government officials to “ensure that US diplomacy and foreign assistance promote and protect the human rights of lesbian, gay, and transgender persons” around the world. (The president’s memorandum is far-reaching and should be read carefully.)
There was an immediate reaction from African leaders, and the Christian Science Monitor noted that, “The enshrinement of equal rights for homosexuals into US foreign policy activities has drawn quick ire from African nations, with one senior figure saying the notion is ‘abhorrent’ across the continent.”
As expressed by Uganda’s John Nagenda, a senior adviser to the president, “I don’t like her tone, at all. . . I’m amazed she’s not looking to her own country and lecturing them first, before she comes to say these things which she knows are very sensitive issues in so many parts of the world, not least Africa.”
Of course, Mrs. Clinton stated that America still had a way to go on the issue of “gay rights,” but it is sheer arrogance to claim that the religious and moral views of several billion human beings must change. Based on what criteria?
By all means we should champion the equal protection of all human beings, regardless of their perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. But that is only a small part of our government’s agenda. The greater goal is the complete normalization and even celebration of everything LGBT, with the corollary removal of all opposition, be it in word or deed.
The truth be told, the modern gay rights movement is a fruit of the radical counterculture of the 1960’s, and it is grounded not in the civil rights movement (despite persistent claims to the contrary) but in the sexual revolution, a revolution for which we are still paying the price.
And this leads to a larger question: Who appointed America as the moral leader of the world? Not only are we the world leader in exporting pornography (by a landslide), but as Bill Bennett noted, at the end of the 20th century, America had:
The highest percentage of single-parent families in the industrialized world
The highest abortion rate in the industrialized world
The highest rate of sexually transmitted diseases in the industrialized world (by a wide margin)
The highest teenage birth rate in the industrialized world (also by a wide margin)
The highest rate of teenage drug use in the industrialized world
And we are lecturing the world about morality? We are telling whole nations that their religious, cultural, and moral objections to homosexual practice are no different than the endorsement of widow burning in India or the approval of a Muslim father killing his daughter because he didn’t like the boy she was dating? Seriously?
While our country certainly has been a force for worldwide good in many ways, when it comes to sexual morality we should be hanging our heads in shame, not lecturing others.
Mrs. Clinton’s speech was a source of national embarrassment, not pride.