Exporting Homophobia

When the U.S. State Department released its annual report on human rights on Wednesday, countries like Iran, Pakistan and Zimbabwe scored very poorly, as they have for many years past.

But trumpeting these countries' shoddy rights' records was apparently no disincentive to prevent the United States from joining up with them earlier this year to ban two pioneering gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights groups from participating in human rights discussions at the United Nations.

At the end of January, these homophobic nations voted to keep the two groups from participating in the Economic And Social Council (ECOSOC), the only body at the United Nations that allows nongovernmental organizations to distribute materials and observe its meetings. This privilege is known as "consultative status" and, of the 2,700 groups that enjoy it, not one of them is an organization working exclusively for queer human rights.

Evidently, the groups' attempt to join the conversation wasn't even worth discussing. Rather than letting the groups present their case to the council, their applications were rejected out of hand and without review, a move the Associated Press called "almost unprecedented."

While the council rejected only two groups, the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) and LBL, the Danish Association of Gays and Lesbians, the vote was viewed as a snub to queer human rights workers around the world. And having the United States weigh in on the opposing side only added gravitas to the position. As Scott Long of Human Rights Watch put it, "Like it or not, the U.S. is the most powerful nation in the world. So the example that the U.S. sets is an example for other nations."

Like it or not indeed. Slowly and steadily, it seems, the Bush administration is waging a quiet war on homosexuals abroad in the name of Christianity by pushing so-called "Christian values."

None of this will surprise those who follow the Bush administration's stance on anything queer-related. The current administration's role in striking the fear of God in opponents of same-sex marriage around the 2004 election certainly hasn't gone unnoticed by queer rights groups in the United States, and neither has its cozy friendship with evangelical Christians, who often fault homosexuality for contributing to the "moral decline" of the nation.

While queer Americans certainly have their battles cut out for them, the U.S. vote sent an ominous message of intolerance and, essentially, abandonment to queers in other countries by siding with nations like Sudan and Iran, where homosexuality is punishable by torture, imprisonment and, on occasion, death.

Human rights advocates see the ECOSOC vote as another element of the Bush administration's pro-Evangelical, anti-gay agenda, and a powerful one at that. "By denying these groups a voice in the U.N.'s human rights processes, the government has effectively denied a place for LGBT people globally," Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), wrote in an email.

Long said queer human rights groups face consistent opposition from what he calls "the trinity" -- the Vatican, conservative Islamic groups and Evangelical Christian groups. "In domestic policy, the U.S. government and its Evangelical allies are anti-Islamic," he said, "but internationally, they're happy to make alliances."

Such alliances sometimes support governments and organizations that are, as Long puts it, "violently homophobic." Recently in Iran, two gay teenagers were sentenced to hanging on trumped-up charges of kidnapping and rape. Iran, Egypt and other nations also routinely engage in the torture of homosexuals by subjecting them to physical "examinations" that "prove" gayness, threaten individuals with unwanted hormone treatments and perform state-sanctioned undercover sting operations to find homosexuals, who are often subjected to violent police beatings and torture, as Doug Ireland reported for In These Times.