State Department Pushes Gay Sodomy as Human Right

By | November 5, 2020

Ambassador Richard Grenell, a driving force behind gay promotion in the Trump administration.

GENEVA, November 6 (C-Fam) If social conservatives had one complaint against the Trump administration, it would be the continued practice started by the Obama administration of promoting the homosexual agenda through bilateral and multilateral means.

This week the U.S. is participating in a little known and even less understood human rights process called the Universal Periodic Review connected to the UN Human Rights Council that allows governments to criticize each other on established human rights norms.

The complaint from UN member states and from U.S. social conservatives is the U.S. is using the process to advance rights that are not unalienable and certainly not established by human rights agreements. Specifically, the U.S. and many leftist European governments are using the process to pressure poorer governments in the developing world to make sodomy legal.

It should be emphasized that gay sex is not a part of any human rights treaty, nor is it mentioned in any non-binding UN resolutions, yet the U.S. has pressured governments more than 100 times on the issue. There are three sessions per year with typically 14 nations examined at each session.

Just this week, the U.S. pushed Malawi and Liberia to legalize sodomy, something that was illegal in several U.S. states until the Supreme Court imposed it in the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision.

State Department representative Sean Garcia told Malawi on Monday that they should “decriminalize LGBTI status and conduct.” On Tuesday, Mark Cassayre told Liberia to “decriminalize same-sex sexual relations between consenting adults.”

According to research conducted by Rebecca Oas, Vice President for Research at C-Fam, such pressure from the United States started in December 2009 under the Obama administration. Since the beginning of the UPR in 2008, the Obama administration promoted sexual orientation and gender identity issues in the UPR in 16.6% of country reviews. This has actually increased under the Trump administration to 17.5% of country reviews.

In the Universal Periodic Review, gay sex has been the nearly exclusive focus of only a few mostly European countries while the target countries are mostly those from the developing world. Pope Francis has called such pressure “sexual colonialism.”

The ongoing promotion of gay sex as a human right seems to contradicts the Trump administration’s recently completed Commission on Unalienable Rights that was supposed to promote long-established human rights like political self-determination, freedom of the press and others, and not things like gay sex.

The effort to push these novel rights comes from the State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor now headed by conservative law professor Robert Destro, who took a leave of absence from the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America. Social conservatives had hoped Assistant Secretary Destro would be able to stop the practice. The problem is that the State Department has long been home to a very powerful and organized pressure group of homosexual employees. One high ranking State Department official told the Friday Fax that no matter what the subject, every State Department meeting must deal in some way with the gay issue.

Governments are free to ignore the criticism coming in the Universal Periodic Review. The U.S., for instance, has been pressured on restrictions on U.S. funding for abortions overseas. The U.S. — even under the Obama administration — has rejected such criticism of U.S. law.

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