Obama, the global defender of Muslims and homosexuals
In June 2009 Barack Obama went to Cairo and declared, “I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam
wherever they appear [italics added].”
Which meant, as I pointed out, that Obama saw himself as the universal enforcer of Islamic law, which of course prohibits any “insult” to Islam.
Last week, President Obama, via a directive to the State Department, and his Secretary of State, via a speech to foreign diplomats in Geneva, declared that the United States is going to fight against anti-homosexual discrimination wherever it exists.
Thus the U.S. is now the universal enforcer of Islam, and the universal enforcer of homosexual liberation—two of the major forces threatening our civilization from without and within.
And by the way, will the GOP nominee, whoever he is, challenge Obama’s positions on these issues? No. The only thing the Republicans care strongly about is the economy. (Comments begin here.)
Obama, Clinton to World: Stop Gay Discrimination
By ANNE GEARAN AP National Security Writer
GENEVA December 6, 2011 (AP)
The Obama administration bluntly warned the world against gay and lesbian discrimination Tuesday, declaring the U.S. will use foreign assistance as well as diplomacy to back its insistence that gay rights are fully equal to other basic human rights.
In unusually strong language, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton compared the struggle for gay equality to difficult passages toward women’s rights and racial equality, and she said a country’s cultural or religious traditions are no excuse for discrimination.
“Gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights,” she said.
Clinton’s audience included diplomats from Arab, African and other nations where homosexuality is criminalized or where brutality and discrimination against gay people is tolerated or encouraged.
[LA notes: the following paragraph appears in the Daily Mail’s version of the AP story, but not in ABC News’ version.]
[Many of the ambassadors in the audience responded with stony faces and rushed out of the room as soon as Mrs Clinton finished speaking.]
She said nothing about consequences or penalties the U.S. might apply to nations it judges poor protectors of gay rights, but she spoke shortly after President Barack Obama directed the State Department and other agencies to make sure U.S. diplomacy and foreign assistance promote gay rights.
Clinton named no countries with specifically poor records on gay rights, although the U.S. has already pointed to abuses against gays by such friends as Saudi Arabia.
“It should never be a crime to be gay,” Clinton declared.
The Obama administration already supports the broad principles of equality Clinton articulated, but making those principles an explicit challenge to other nations is new. The White House said Tuesday’s announcement marked the first U.S. government strategy to combat human rights abuses against gays and lesbians abroad.
The order also directs U.S. agencies to use foreign assistance to protect human rights and advance non-discrimination and to work with international organizations to fight discrimination against gays and lesbians.
The speech in Geneva, home of the United Nations’ human rights body, is also part of the Obama administration’s outreach to gays and lesbians, a core Democratic constituency at home. Since taking office, Obama has advocated the repeal of the military’s ban on openly gay service members—now accomplished—and has ordered the administration to stop defending a law defining marriage as between one man and one woman.
However, Obama has stopped short of backing gay marriage, saying only that his personal views on the matter are evolving.
Clinton said she knows the United States has an imperfect record on gay rights, and she noted that until 2003 some states had laws on the books that made gay sex a crime. But there is no reason to suggest that gay rights are something only liberal, Western nations can or should embrace, she said. She said nothing about gay marriage.
“Gay people are born into and belong to every society in the world,” Clinton said. “Being gay is not a Western invention. It is a human reality.”
In her most direct challenge to nations with conservative cultural or religious mores, Clinton catalogued abuses such as targeted killings of gays, “corrective rape” of lesbians or forced hormone treatments. She likened the targeting of gays for mistreatment to “honor killings” of women, widow-burning or female genital mutilation, examples of practices the U.S. decries but has not penalized friends including Afghanistan for carrying out.
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James P. writes:
You wrote,
Thus the U.S. is now the universal enforcer of Islam, and the universal enforcer of homosexual liberation—two of the major forces threatening our civilization from without and within.
Note that these goals are contradictory. One can only fight against global anti-homosexual discrimination by fighting Islam, as Islam is the leading cause of discrimination (and especially violence) against homosexuals. Of course, we should expect liberals to remain silent on this score, or to deny that Islam is homophobic and blame it all on those wicked, wicked fundamentalist Christians.
LA replies:
Objectively the two goals may be contradictory. But from liberals’ point of view they are not contradictory, since both are intrinsic expressions of the prime liberal aim of eliminating all discrimination. So, sure, if Islam is empowered in a Western liberal society, Islam-fueled attacks on homosexuals and homosexual rights will increase. But from the liberals’ point of view, this only gives the liberals more “discrimination” to work on eliminating. Further, as you point out, they will not aim at eliminating Muslim anti-homosexual discrimination (since Muslims are themselves the discriminated-against Other and therefore can do no wrong), but against Christian and heterosexist anti-homosexual discrimination, such as it is. Let us remember that every advance of Islam in the West has become the pretext for liberals to protest against “theocracy” and “intolerance,” which always turn out to be Christian theocracy and white Western intolerance. As seen through the liberal looking glass, the more powerful and threatening Islam becomes, the more evil our own society is. Just as, the more threatening and violent blacks become, the more racist whites are. Just as, the more empowered and liberated homosexuals become, the more homophobia is an intolerable evil that must be utterly rooted out.
Daniel F. writes:
With regard to your post on Obama declaring that the U.S. is now the global defender of Muslims and homosexuals, I wonder if you have any thoughts on the obvious contradiction involved here, namely, that homosexuality is contrary to Islamic law and that Muslims persecute and punish homosexuals rather viciously. Thus, if the U.S. is really to police the world on behalf of homosexual freedom, our main targets would presumably be Islamic countries.
My own speculation is that the left’s support of lifestyle liberalism (the most prominent causes of which are gay rights, feminism and abortion) is, in the end, not really sincere. Lifestyle liberalism, I suspect, is seen by the most sophisiticated leftists as a tool to break down Western societies. What is now emerging, with the fetishistic embrace of decidedly illiberal Islam, is that the left is quite happy to have the West replaced by anything non-Western.
LA replies:
I agree with you. See my reply to James P.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 12, 2011 01:54 PM | Send