For Man To behave Like Woman Is Not A Choice: Ugandan President Signs Anti-Gay Bill

24 02 2014

For Man To behave Like Woman Is Not A Choice: Ugandan President Signs Anti-Gay Bill

Statement on Homosexuality by H.E. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni President of the Republic of Uganda Responding to H.E. Obama’s statement on Homosexuality
18th February 2014
I have seen the statement H.E. President Obama of the USA made in reaction to my statement that I was going to sign the anti-homosexual Bill, which I made at Kyankwanzi. Before I react to H.E. Obama’s statement, let me, again, put on record my views on the issue of homo-sexuals (ebitiingwa, bisiyaga in some of our dialects). Right from the beginning of this debate, my views were as follows:
1. I agreed with the MPs and almost all Ugandans that promotion of homosexuality in Uganda must be criminalized or rather should continue to be criminalized because the British had already done that;
2. those who agreed to become homosexuals for mercenary reasons (prostitutes) should be harshly punished as should those who paid them to be homosexual prostitutes; and
3. exhibitionism of homosexual behavior must be punished because, in this part of the World, it is forbidden to publicly exhibit any sexual conduct (kissing, etc) even for heterosexuals; if I kissed my wife of 41 years in public, I would lose elections in Uganda.
The only point I disagreed on with some of the Members of Parliament (MPs) and other Ugandans was on the persons I thought were born homosexual. According to the casual observations, there are rare deviations in nature from the normal. You witness cases like albinos (nyamagoye), barren women or men (enguumba), epa (breastless women) etc.
I, therefore, thought that similarly there were people that were born with the disorientation of being attracted to the same sex. That is why I thought that that it was wrong to punish somebody on account of being born abnormal. That is why I refused to sign the Bill and, instead, referred it to our Party (the NRM) to debate it again.
In the meantime, I sought for scientific opinions on this matter. I am grateful to Ms. Kerry Kennedy of the USA who sent me opinions by scientists from the USA saying that there could be some indications that homosexuality could be congenital. In our conference, I put these opinions to our scientists from the Department of Genetics, the School of Medicine and the Ministry of Health. Their unanimous conclusion was that homosexuality, contrary to my earlier thinking, was behavioural and not genetic. It was learnt and could be unlearnt. I told them to put their signatures to that conclusion which they did. That is why I declared my intention to sign the Bill, which I will do.
I have now received their signed document, which says there is no single gene that has been traced to cause homosexuality. What I want them to clarify is whether a combination of genes can cause anybody to be homosexual. Then my task will be finished and I will sign the Bill.
After my statement to that effect which was quoted widely around the World, I got reactions from some friends from outside Africa. Statements like: “it is a matter of choice” or “whom they love” which President Obama repeated in his statement would be most furiously rejected by almost the entirety of our people.
It cannot be a matter of choice for a man to behave like a woman or vice-versa. The argument I had pushed was that there could be people who are born like that or “who they are”, according to President Obama’s statement. I, therefore, encourage the US government to help us by working with our Scientists to study whether, indeed, there are people who are born homosexual. When that is proved, we can review this legislation. I would be among those who will spearhead that effort. That is why I had refused to sign the Bill until my premise was knocked down by the position of our Scientists.
I would like to discourage the USA government from taking the line that passing this law will “complicate our valued relationship” with the USA as President Obama said. Countries and Societies should relate with each other on the basis of mutual respect and independence in decision making.
“Valued relationship” cannot be sustainably maintained by one Society being subservient to another society. There are a myriad acts the societies in the West do that we frown on or even detest. We, however, never comment on those acts or make them preconditions for working with the West.
Africans do not seek to impose their views on anybody. We do not want anybody to impose their views on us. This very debate was provoked by Western groups who come to our schools and try to recruit children into homosexuality. It is better to limit the damage rather than exacerbate it.
I thank everybody.
Yoweri K. Museveni Gen. (Rtd)
P R E S I D E N T
18th February 2014.


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Obama Fights Little Nuns: War on Religion by JOAN FRAWLEY DESMOND

4 01 2014

nun1jpg-065cf5f65d3ed5ae_largeWASHINGTON —The U.S. Department of Justice registered its opposition to a temporary injunction for the Little Sisters of the Poor, after Justice Sonia Sotomayor directed the administration to respond by Jan. 3, 10am Eastern.
The Little Sisters of the Poor, a religious order of nuns who care for the elderly and the poor, had petitioned the high court for an 11th-hour reprieve, and, on Dec. 31, Justice Sotomayor granted a temporary stay, while requesting the administration to respond to the petition within three days.
“The solicitor general, on behalf of respondents, respectfully files this memorandum in opposition to the emergency application for an injunction pending appellate review or, in the alternative, a petition for a writ of certiorari before judgment and injunction pending resolution,” stated the Justice Department in papers filed with the high court at the Jan. 3 deadline.
The administration’s stance underscored its commitment to upholding one of the most contentious elements of the Affordable Care Act, even when the plaintiff challenging the law was a religious order dedicated to sesrving the needy.
The brief, filed by Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr., echoed many of the administration’s past objections to an exemption for religious nonprofits and restated the importance of providing contraception and other services free of charge to female employees. It further argued that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act did not apply to the Little Sisters’ specific concerns, and it noted that not one court of appeals had ruled on the merits of cases filed by religious nonprofits.
The White House has provided an “accommodation” for religious nonprofits that object to the mandate on moral grounds but are not exempt from compliance with the federal law. Under the accommodation, the government requires objecting religious employers to sign a self-certification form that allows the mandate’s provisions to be implemented by a third-party administrator. The Little Sisters contend that signing the form makes them complicit in the provision of services that violate their deeply held moral and religious beliefs.

‘Permission Slip’ for Abortion Drugs and Contraceptives
“The government demands that the Little Sisters of the Poor sign a permission slip for abortion drugs and contraceptives or pay millions in fines. The sisters believe that doing that violates their faith and that they shouldn’t be forced to divert funds from the elderly poor they serve to the IRS,” said Mark Rienzi, senior counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and lead counsel for the Little Sisters, in a statement released after the Justice Department filed its brief opposing a temporary injunction.
The Obama administration has defended its “accommodation” as a reasonable solution for religious nonprofits that oppose the mandate on moral grounds, arguing that nothing more is required than for the Little Sisters and other plaintiffs to sign a self-certification form.
But Rienzi said that the government’s insistence that plaintiffs sign the form suggested that the action was important.
“The government now asks the Supreme Court to believe that the very thing it is forcing the nuns to do — signing the permission slips — is a meaningless act. But why on earth would the government be fighting the Little Sisters all the way to the Supreme Court if it did not think its own form had any effect?” Rienzi said.
“If the administration believed its contraceptive mandate was valid, it would join the Little Sisters’ request for Supreme Court review because the government has lost almost all of the cases in the lower courts. Instead, its brief today is devoted to trying to keep the court out of the issue, which would leave hundreds of religious organizations subject to massive fines for following their religion.”
For-profit and nonprofit employers have filed a total of 91 legal challenges against the HHS mandate. The U.S. bishops have pressed for a broad exemption that would shield all employers who object to the mandate on moral grounds.
The Becket Fund is representing a number of for-profit and nonprofit plaintiffs that have filed legal challenges to the mandate, including the Eternal Word Television Network. The Register is a service of EWTN.
The Becket Fund also represents Hobby Lobby, a large craft-store chain, and the Supreme Court has agreed to hear oral argument for this case in March, with a decision expected by late June.

Government’s Arguments
In the brief filed with the high court today, the Justice Department was intent on explaining why the legal issues in the Hobby Lobby case were different from the lawsuit filed by the Little Sisters, with the apparent goal of discouraging the justices from taking up this case or granting a temporary injunction for all religious nonprofits that will face massive financial penalties if they do not comply with the mandate.
“Applicants are not … situated like the for-profit corporations that brought suit in Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. v. Sebelius. … The employer-applicants here are eligible for religious accommodations set out in the regulations that exempt them from any requirement ‘to contract, arrange, pay or refer for contraceptive coverage,’” stated the brief.
The Justice Department’s brief further noted that the religious order was covered under a “church plan,” which meant that it was “exempt from regulation under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA).”
While ERISA is responsible for enforcement of the mandate, church plans are specifically excluded from its enforcement authority.
Since the church plans would not be subject to enforcement, the government argued, the religious freedom of organizations holding such plans was not under threat.
The administration offered the same argument in papers filed in a Brooklyn court, where the Archdiocese of New York and four New York-area Catholic nonprofits sought relief from the mandate.
In that case, Judge Brian Cogan provided two Catholic schools and two healthcare services with a permanent injunction. He said the legal challenge had merit, despite the fact that the church plans were actually shielded from ERISA’s enforcement authority.
According to Cogan, “Plaintiffs allege that their religion forbids them from completing this self-certification, because, to them, authorizing others to provide services that plaintiffs themselves cannot is tantamount to an endorsement or facilitation of such services. Therefore, regardless of the effect on plaintiffs’ TPAs [third-party administrator], the regulations still require plaintiffs to take actions they believe are contrary to their religion.”

Other Concerns
In its brief filed with the high court today, however, the Justice Department acknowledged the plaintiffs’ fears that the self-certification form could be used in the future to authorize enforcement of the mandate. Such enforcement could be put in effect, stated the Justice Department, “if Congress were to amend the Affordable Care Act … to grant the government ‘some authority outside of ERISA to enforce’ the contraceptive-coverage provision or if the departments ‘promulgate new regulations that apply to church for the courts.’”
While dismissing the plaintiffs’ concerns as irrelevant in the short term, the government’s brief noted, “if relevant new regulations were issued, applicants could renew their request for injunctive relief in light of the changed circumstances.”
During a Jan. 3 conference call with the press, Eric Rassbach, deputy general counsel with the Becket Fund, also noted another reason for the Little Sisters’ concern about signing the self-certification form. The Little Sisters had also contracted with another third-party administrator, Express Script, Inc. (ESI), a prescription drug provider, which is not a “church plan.”
During a Jan. 3 interview with the Register, Daniel Blomberg, a lawyer with the Becket Fund, told the Register: “ESI provides pharmaceutical drugs, such as Plan B and ella, and they have made no such guarantees [that they will not provide it to patients covered under their plans] and have no religious objection to providing it.”
The self-certification form “authorizes whomever receives it that they have permission to provide the drugs, and it is the means of reimbursement for ESI. Until Express Script receives that form, they will not get paid for the cost of the drugs,” added Bloomberg, who noted that the government accomodation provides incentives for third-party administrators to offer such provisions when religious employers refuse to do it directly.
He noted that, in papers filed with a lower court, the government had dismissed the Little Sisters’ fears about signing the form as an “invisible dragon.” In fact, said Bloomberg, the LIttle Sisters had every reason to avoid signing a document that would trigger such provisions. And he noted that when criminal conspiracy charges are filed, those who “give material aid and assist someone to do wrong” are also held accountable.

Next Step Is Unclear
It is not yet clear what steps the high court will take now. Rassbach said during the press call that the Little Sisters’ lawyers would file a reply with the court, but he could not provide a timeline for when Sotomayor, or the entire court, might respond.
Douglas Laycock, an expert on religious-freedom issues at the University of Virginia Law School, told the Register, “A stay for three days after hearing from only one side tells you that she takes the issue seriously, but it doesn’t tell you what the whole court will do after they hear from both sides.”
Joan Frawley Desmond is the Register’s senior editor.

Courtesy of NCR


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Obama to restore science to its rightful place if it supports his agenda

2 06 2013

Obama: To restore science to its rightful place if it supports my agenda

t a recent press conference proposing the launch of a federally funded brain-mapping initiative, President Barack Obama embraced the title of “scientist-in-chief” bestowed on him in an introduction by Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “Given my grades in physics, I’m not sure [I’m] deserving,” said the president — before going on to note that “I hold science in proper esteem, so maybe that gives me a little credit.” This was an echo of his inaugural promise to “restore science to its rightful place.” Four years into his administration, with another four years to go, we are now well positioned to revisit that promise — to reconsider its meaning and to see whether the scientist-in-chief has lived up to the pledge even on its own terms.

Politicians, journalists, and academics regularly throw around the terms “pro-science” and “anti-science” to denigrate their opponents and to advance their own views. This rhetoric is often effective because the American people hold science and scientists in great regard: for decades, surveys show, Americans have had more confidence in the leadership of the scientific and medical communities than in that of lawmakers, organized religion, the press, and most other institutions. So posing as a defender of science and attacking its supposed enemies is an easy way to score political points; the president’s inaugural promise is an instance of this political strategy, as we noted in these pages four years ago.

Americans’ high esteem for the scientific enterprise is rooted in our gratitude for the advances in medicine and technology that it makes possible, as well as for the insights into the wonders of nature — from the structure of the atom to the history of the cosmos — that science alone can reveal. Unfortunately, the good standing of science is all too often abused by those who invoke its authority as a way to shut down policy debates. The usefulness of new technologies and the promise of new medical treatments are routinely exaggerated to deflect needed consideration of the moral and social controversies arising from innovation. Policymakers simplistically speak of increasing government spending on scientific research and ramping up the role of science, technology, engineering, and math in our educational system as solutions to our economic woes. And scientific knowledge, which can be an essential tool for policymaking, is frequently used as a cover for political and ideological agendas.

An examination of President Obama’s first four years in office shows that, unsurprisingly, his administration has followed the advice of science only insofar as it has supported or justified his political agenda.

Since the Second World War, the U.S. government has invested a great deal of money — over $4.5 trillion in constant 2005 dollars — on scientific research and development, following a bipartisan consensus that scientific knowledge is an important foundation for economic growth, rising standards of living, and national security. But in much of his rhetoric and policymaking, President Obama has twisted that rationale, treating science as a symbol of the need for more government spending.

For instance, at the April 2013 press conference announcing his proposed brain-mapping initiative, the president repeated a claim that he had made in his most recent State of the Union address: “every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy — every dollar.” This figure can be traced to a study published by the research firm Battelle Technology Partnership Practice. But the economic modeling used to generate that figure has been criticized for including as benefits of the Human Genome Project some things that were actually costs, such as the salaries of the scientists and technicians involved in the project. The study also unrealistically claimed that economic activity across the entire genomics industry could be counted as “induced impacts” of the Human Genome Project — including, again, expenditures that might be better considered costs than benefits.

Few would dispute that basic scientific research of the sort performed in the Human Genome Project — or, for that matter, the proposed brain-mapping project — can be a worthy way for the government to spend taxpayer dollars. But exaggerating the promise of these endeavors can undermine the value of science in the long run, when overhyped projects fail to deliver. (As one commentator told the journal Nature, the lack of noticeable practical benefits flowing from the vaunted Human Genome Project in the decade-plus since its completion has led some of the lawmakers who supported the $3.8 billion project to wonder, “where are the goodies?”) But President Obama still seems unafraid to overpromise, claiming of the new brain project that the knowledge of the human mind it seeks not only “could be” but “will be transformative.”

The president’s expression of unqualified high hopes for this project fits his rhetorical pattern of invoking science to justify his broader political agenda — in this case, his aim of increasing the government’s role in the economy. During the same press conference, he paused twice to criticize the “arbitrary, across-the-board cuts” imposed by the recent budget sequestration, and explicitly tied the proposed brain-mapping project to “other grand challenges like making solar energy as cheap as coal or making electric vehicles as affordable as the ones that run on gas.” The talk of “grand challenges” has been another hallmark of the Obama administration’s approach to science and technology funding, although it seems to have resulted less in serious scientific accomplishments than in cronyism and corporate welfare — the kind of politically motivated venture capitalism that led to the disastrous loan guarantees for green-energy companies like the solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra.

The Obama administration’s handling of two prominent issues relating to energy and the environment — the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository and the Keystone XL pipeline — merit particular attention. These cases highlight the administration’s lack of transparency and demonstrate the limited extent to which scientific advice can be expected to influence controversial policy decisions, while revealing the difficulty of sticking to the president’s 2009 promise to “base our public policies on the soundest science.”

Yucca Mountain was the site designated by federal law for the long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel, a project that faced persistent opposition from both Nevadans and anti-nuclear activists ever since the site was first suggested in the mid-1980s. Despite widespread scientific consensus that underground storage is the safest approach for disposing of nuclear waste, and billions of dollars and decades of research demonstrating the safety of the Yucca facility, the Obama administration used every tactic it could devise to halt the project. The administration even went so far as to start dismantling the project while still legally required to continue it.

Meanwhile, the Keystone XL pipeline controversy also demonstrates the limits of using science to dictate policy. An exhaustive study of Keystone’s potential environmental impact by the State Department found that the construction and operation of the pipeline would cause “no significant impacts” to nearby habitats and communities. But opposition to Keystone is not only based on concerns over the environmental impact of the pipeline itself, but also on the threat of climate change posed by the use of petroleum from the Canadian oil sands. In a 2011 open letter, several activists described the pipeline as a “1,500-mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent,” quoting climate scientist James Hansen’s claim that Canadian oil sands must be “left in the ground” if we are to have any chance of “stabiliz[ing] earth’s climate.”

Of course, no matter how much President Obama — or any other president faced with the choice of whether to build the pipeline — might want to base his decision only on the “soundest science,” the decision is an unavoidably political one. Some scientists report that the pipeline is a comparatively safe way to transport oil, but others contend, not incompatibly, that building and using the pipeline will contribute devastatingly to climate change. Meanwhile, the existence of the global marketplace suggests that if the pipeline is not built, Canada will export its oil-sands resources to some other country. And all this must be weighed against the U.S. economy’s ever-growing energy needs. Politics cannot be reduced to science or avoided by invoking the authority of science.

The Obama administration may not have distorted scientific evidence to suit its political agenda in the Yucca and Keystone cases — indeed, the State Department study on Keystone has drawn fire from the president’s environmentalist supporters for not condemning the pipeline. But the administration has not acted in accordance with the president’s 2009 statement that “promoting science isn’t just about providing resources” but about “listening to what [scientists] tell us, even when it’s inconvenient — especially when it’s inconvenient.” Instead, when science has confronted the administration with its own inconvenient truths, the administration has pursued a strategy of misdirection, delay, and inaction. We may disagree with the administration’s policy decisions in these cases and we certainly disapprove of its political tactics, but casting these issues as conflicts between science and politics would be a mistake — the same sort of mistake made by those critics who wrongly accused the Bush administration of waging a “war on science.”

In spite of the claims made by our scientist-in-chief and his allies that they, unlike their conservative political opponents, hold science in the “proper esteem,” the politicization of science is in many ways a greater temptation for the left than for conservatives. The Obama administration’s simplistic equation of government-funded scientific research with innovation appeals to the left’s impulse for economic collectivism; in his infamous “you didn’t build that” campaign speech, President Obama said that it was the government “investing” in “basic science” that “keeps us as a leading-edge economy.” (Never mind that the private sector spends twice as much on R&D as the federal government.) And the conceit of putting science in its “rightful place” above politics, although drawing from many motivations, also neatly matches the progressive desire to shift the policy process away from democratic oversight and toward the centralized control of government agencies which can implement technocratic reforms.

Science is a vital part of American democracy and rightly enjoys a special position of trust and, on questions about the natural world, of epistemic authority. But this authority is based in no small part on the perception that science is an objective, disinterested means of pursuing the truth. Elevating science to a position of political authority is bound to change that perception, and indeed to corrupt the scientific spirit of disinterested objectivity. At this halfway mark in his presidency, we continue to disagree with President Obama’s implication that restoring science to its “rightful place” means putting it above politics. Rather, preserving the rightful place of science means remembering that its indispensable contribution to the crafting of policy must be balanced by the contributions of ethics, culture, economics, religion, and other sources of wisdom, and that science, like the rest of society, must be governed democratically.

— Adam Keiper and Brendan P. Foht
This article was first published in The New Atlantis


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How to Destroy America

23 05 2013

How to Destroy America

In 1887 Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years prior: “A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from
the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship.”

“The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:
>From bondage to spiritual faith;
>From spiritual faith to great courage;
>From courage to liberty;
>From liberty to abundance;
>From abundance to complacency;
>From complacency to apathy;
>From apathy to dependence;
>From dependence back into bondage.”
The Obituary follows:

Born 1776, Died 2016 It doesn’t hurt to read this several times. Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning
the last Presidential election:
Number of States won by: Obama: 19 Romney: 29
Square miles of land won by: Obama: 580,000 Romney: 2,427,000
Population of counties won by: Obama: 127 million Romney: 143 million
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Obama: 13.2 Romney: 2.1

Professor Olson adds: “In aggregate, the map of the territory Romney won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of the country.
Obama territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in low income tenements and living off various forms of government
welfare…”

Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the “complacency and apathy” phase of Professor Tyler’s definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation’s population already having reached the “governmental dependency” phase.
If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million
criminal invaders called illegals – and they vote – then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.

If you are in favor of this, then by all means, delete this message.
If you are not, then pass this along to help everyone realize just how much is at stake, knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our
freedom..


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Why is America promoting Sodomy as human right?

14 05 2013

Why is America promoting Sodomy as human right?

June is the official celebration of “Gay Pride Month” by US embassies abroad.

If sodomy and same-sex marriage are constitutional rights, what is their relationship to American foreign policy? Despite the tremendous controversy regarding these issues within the United States, the Obama administration has gone ahead and placed them at the center of US diplomacy. Why? In Libido Dominandi, E. Michael Jones wrote that the rationalization of sexual misbehavior “could only calm the troubled conscience in an effective manner when it was legitimized by the regime in power… [which] went on in the name of high moral purpose to make this vision normative for the entire world.”

Therefore, the Obama administration, after promoting homosexual rights and marriage in the US, has undertaken the task of universalizing the rationalization for sodomitical behavior and is doing so with high moral rhetoric – in this case, by appropriating the language of human rights.

The effort began in earnest on International Human Rights Day, December 6, 2011, with a powerful pair of events. President Obama issued a memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies, directing them “to ensure that US diplomacy and foreign assistance promote and protect the human rights of LGBT persons”. Mr Obama said that, “The struggle to end discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons is a global challenge, and one that is central to the United States commitment to promoting human rights”.

The departments and agencies included the Departments of State, the Treasury, Defense, Justice, Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Export Import Bank, the United States Trade Representative, and “such other agencies as the President may designate.” All US agencies engaged abroad were directed to prepare a report each year “on their progress toward advancing these initiatives”.

Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, explained,

“They have directed their embassies everywhere to monitor and assist domestic homosexual movements whether the host country and their people accept it or not. The US is very powerful and can force governments to submit to its social-policy views. They are intent on forcing homosexual ‘marriage’ and homosexual adoption on countries that are offended by such things. They are intent on forcing sexual orientation and gender identity as new categories of non-discrimination that will trump the rights of religious believers… Most people recognize that the homosexual lifestyle is harmful to public health and morals. The effect of the Obama policy is to offend billions of people and force this view on reluctant governments. This is most especially offensive to countries that are predominantly Christian and Muslim. In fact, Christianity and Islam are among the chief obstacles of this agenda and policy.”

State Department sophistry

While President Obama took the action, Hillary Clinton, then US Secretary of State, gave the rationale in an International Human Rights Day speech on the same day, December 6, in which she proclaimed that that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights”. She also announced that the US would give more than US$3 million to a new Global Equality Fund in order to help civil society organizations promote homosexual advocacy.

Mrs. Clinton came energetically to the defense of those “forced to suppress or deny who they are to protect themselves from harm. I am talking about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people”, whom she described with a strong Rousseauian echo as “human beings born free and given bestowed equality and dignity…” But, if they were born free, why are they not free now? No doubt, because society oppresses them, just as South Africa once oppressed its black population through apartheid – an example Mrs. Clinton gives. But history overcame that, and since, as Rousseau taught, man is a product of history, history can overcome this, too. Thus, Mrs. Clinton ends with the admonition, “Be on the right side of history”.

It is a testimony to the influence of Rousseau that Secretary Clinton should have appealed to history for the vindication of “gay” rights rather than to moral principle. Had it been the latter, she would have had to say rather that, in order “to protect themselves from harm”, LGBT persons should “suppress” precisely that part of themselves inclined to indulge in disordered sexual acts, just as anyone should resist their inclinations to immoral acts, whatever their kind.

Mrs Clinton averred that “being LGBT does not make you less human”. That is certainly so, unless you consistently give in to one of these disordered inclinations. In a parallel case, being an alcoholic also does not make you less human. However, practicing alcoholism by living life in an inebriated stupor does make you less human in the Aristotelian sense that it impairs your Nature or incapacitates you fulfilling it. If it is virtue that enables man to reach his natural end in becoming fully human, then it is vice that prevents him from doing so, thus making him less human.

Fully embracing the rationalization of the same-sex cause, Secretary Clinton espoused “gender identity” as equivalent to being black or being a woman. It is “who they are”. In a moment of humility, she stated that, “my own country’s record on human rights for gay people is far from perfect. Until 2003, it was still a crime in parts of our country.”

It was? What was it? Being homosexual or lesbian was not a crime in the United States, so what was she referring to? Mrs. Clinton never said, but the it to which she alluded is sodomy, the elephant in the room. She repeated the mantra that “it is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay…” and “it should never be a crime to be gay”. One would have to agree in so far as persecution of and violence against homosexuals is concerned but, as Austin Ruse has pointed out, “Such attacks upon individuals are already recognized as violations of human rights in international law particularly in the 1966 Covenants implementing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other existing treaties”. This, then, is moving beyond that to the moral and legal endorsement of certain behavior. Some governments continue to have laws against homosexual acts, which is not the same thing as violating their rights as human beings. Was Mrs Clinton saying that it is a violation of human rights to declare sodomy illegal?

Apparently, for that would be consistent with an understanding of Section 1 in the Obama directive, instructing agencies abroad to engage in “Combating Criminalization of LGBT Status or Conduct Abroad”(emphasis added). What kind of conduct might this be? The only conduct that is or has been consistently criminalized by many countries is sodomy. Morally speaking, sodomy is a fairly unattractive act. Why should it not be criminalized? Perhaps there are prudential reasons for not doing so, but what might be the moral objections to such laws?

The somewhat evasive answer in the Presidential Memorandum is because “no country should deny people their rights because of who they love…” In her speech, Mrs Clinton echoed this response and set this test: “We need to ask ourselves, ‘How would it feel if it were a crime to love the person I love?’”

Well, that depends.

What if the person one loves is already married? What if the person one loves is a sibling? How about a teacher in love with a student? Or a pastor in love with a choir boy? Or an uncle with his niece? Acting upon any of these loves in a sexual relationship is, in most places, a crime. It is not so much whom one loves, but how one loves. How it would feel does not really matter since, in each of these cases, it is morally wrong to sexualize the relationship. Feelings do not change the moral nature of an act.

Why, if all the above cases deserve prohibition, do homosexuals deserve an exemption when it comes to sodomy? Secretary Clinton never said why we should feel for them and not for any of those mentioned above, nor did she raise any of the above examples of criminal love as violations of human rights. Why not?

Rationalizing immoral behaviour

As with all rationalizations for moral misbehavior, Mrs. Clinton’s speech was rife with denials of reality, three of which came in one sentence. She said, “Now, there are some who say and believe that all gay people are pedophiles, that homosexuality is a disease that can become caught or cured, or that gays recruit others to become gay. Well, these notions are simply not true”.

Well, these notions have to be seen as not true for her to promote the “gay” agenda internationally and get away with it. I have never met anyone who believes that all homosexuals are pedophiles, but many of them are certainly pederasts. By setting up the pedophile straw man, Mrs. Clinton avoids this unpleasant reality. Whether homosexuality is a disease or not (it is certainly a disorder), there is ample evidence that it can be cured. Of course, a fair number of people float into homosexuality in their youth and float out again as they mature – no cure required. So much for its being an immutable characteristic.

Others who have become immersed in this life and who later wish to leave it have successfully done so through a variety of therapies. In 1995, the New York Times reported that “Dr Charles W. Socarides offered the closest thing to hope that many homosexuals had in the 1960s: the prospect of a cure. Rather than brand them as immoral or regard them as criminal, Dr Socarides, a New York psychoanalyst, told homosexuals that they suffered from an illness whose effects could be reversed.” Dr Socarides said that his cure rate was about one third. For Secretary Clinton to deny this is an enormous disservice to the very people whose rights she purports to be defending.

Lastly, the bigger the lie, the bolder the assertion – as in Mrs. Clinton’s outright denial that “gays recruit others to become gay”. In my professional career in the arts, I witnessed such recruitment, saw its occasional success, and was several times the object of it. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the homosexual subculture could not possibly make such a statement.

Otherwise, Mrs. Clinton could have referred to homosexual literature, such as Lavender Culture (1994), in which Gerald Hannon described the need for a youth recruitment campaign: “I believe…we have to behave in a certain way vis-à-vis young people. I believe that means we have to proselytize… The answer is to proselytize. Aggressively so”. He added that, “To attract young people to the gay movement in large numbers should be the challenge to the next phase of the movement. It is a challenge we have set ourselves…” This is not to say that all homosexuals recruit, but to assert that none do is a complete denial of reality – which, after all, is the point of the rationalization.

The State Department celebrates

What this is all about was very clear from the 2006 Yogykarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, adopted by the International Commission of Jurists, the International Service for Human Rights, and homosexual activists to influence the interpretation of the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all UN human rights treaties, and international law as a whole. One requirement of the Principles is to: “Repeal criminal and other legal provisions that prohibit or are, in effect, employed to prohibit consensual sexual activity among people of the same sex who are over the age of consent…” This is the nub of the issue. It is not the status of homosexuals that is so much the matter, as it is the status of their conduct.

In 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, France introduced a statement at the UN General Assembly, titled Joint Statement on Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Human Rights. It proclaimed that, “We urge States to take all the necessary measures, in particular legislative or administrative, to ensure that sexual orientation or gender identity may under no circumstances be the basis for criminal penalties, in particular executions, arrests or detention”. The Statement was signed by 66 nations.

Under the George W. Bush administration, the United States declined, but in 2009 the Barack Obama administration signed the Statement. While the Statement did not go as far as the Yogykarta Principles, it was clearly headed in that direction. The majority of the criminal penalties it was decrying were not, as the Statement disingenuously suggests, aimed at orientation, but at activity. It is the activity that must be vindicated and blessed as a universal human right.

One of the most immediate results of the priority given to the homosexual cause by President Obama and Secretary Clinton has been the profusion of “gay pride” commemorations and celebrations in US embassies abroad. June is the month singled out for this because, in 2000, President Bill Clinton declared June “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month”, with the last Sunday reserved as Gay Pride Day. June was chosen to commemorate the anniversary of the Stonewall riots as the beginning of “gay” liberation. Ever since, every government agency has observed it. As of 2011, it moved overseas as part of US foreign policy.

Therefore, the US Embassy in Islamabad celebrated its first-ever lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) “pride celebration” with an event on June 26, 2011. The embassy said the purpose of meeting was to demonstrate “support for human rights, including LGBT rights, in Pakistan at a time when those rights are increasingly under attack from extremist elements throughout Pakistani society.” Richard Hoagland, the US deputy chief of mission, was quoted on the embassy website, as saying, “I want to be clear that the US Embassy is here to support you and stand by your side every step of the way”.

However, it is Pakistan’s Penal Code, not extremist elements, that, in Section 377 (introduced at the time of British colonialism), states, “Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished… with imprisonment of either description for a term which shall not be less than two years nor more than ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.”

If the Pakistani embassy in Washington DC held a public event in which it encouraged that the domestic laws in the United States be changed in order to re-criminalize sodomy, we might be somewhat surprised and irritated. Why should the Pakistani people be less annoyed by the US Embassy telling them to change its laws in order to decriminalize sodomy? Why exactly is that our business?

All Islamic groups in Pakistan condemned the “pride” event as a form of “cultural terrorism” against democratic Pakistan. Students protested against what they called “the attempts of the United States to promote vulgarity in Islamic societies under the pretext of human rights”. One speaker at a demonstration said, “Now the United States wants to project and promote objectionable, unnatural, abnormal behaviors under the pretext of equality and human rights, which is not at all acceptable… If you destroy the morality of the society, you have destroyed it completely.”

In Nairobi, Kenya, June, 2012, the US Embassy hosted what is thought to be the first “Gay Pride” event in that country. John Haynes, a public affairs officer at the US embassy, introduced the event: “The US government for its part has made it clear that the advancement of human rights for LGBT people is central to our human rights policies around the world and to the realization of our foreign policy goals”. Homosexual acts are illegal in Kenya, just as they were in parts of the United States until 2003. Now, as part of our foreign policy, apparently we tell Kenya to change its laws.

The US Embassy in Vientiane, Laos, proudly displays webpage news from its 2012 “first-ever Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Pride event on June 25 in Vientiane. The event, called ‘Proud to be Us!’, was produced by a group of young Lao LGBT activists and featured music, dance, skits, and dramas exploring issues faced by LGBT people in Laos today, such as discrimination, gender roles, and sexual health”.

On the webpage of the US Embassy in Prague, Czech Republic, a joint statement was issued which the US ambassador, Norman Eisen, had signed. It declared: “On the occasion of the 2nd annual Prague Pride Festival (2012), we express our solidarity with the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities of the Czech Republic in their celebration… The Prague Pride Festival reminds us that ensuring LGBT rights is an important aspect of fulfilling our broader international human rights commitments since the full recognition of those rights is still one of the world’s remaining human rights challenges. Safeguarding human rights and guarding against intolerance requires constant vigilance in the Czech Republic, as in all our countries. Therefore today, we align ourselves with the Prague Pride participants…”

This type of thing at US embassies has become standard. As then-Secretary of State Clinton proclaimed in June, 2012: “United States Embassies and Missions throughout the world are working to defend the rights of LGBT people of all races, religions, and nationalities as part of our comprehensive human rights policy and as a priority of our foreign policy. From Riga, where two US Ambassadors and a Deputy Assistant Secretary marched in solidarity with Baltic Pride; to Nassau, where the Embassy joined together with civil society to screen a film about LGBT issues in Caribbean societies; to Albania, where our Embassy is coordinating the first-ever regional Pride conference for diplomats and activists to discuss human rights and shared experiences”.

Forcing other countries to adopt US standards

As in Pakistan, there has been some blowback from the effort to legitimize sodomy and promote same-sex marriage. When the acting ambassador in El Salvador, Mari Carmen Aponte, wrote an op-ed in a major Salvadoran newspaper, La Prensa Grafica, implying that the disapproval of homosexual behavior is animated by “brutal hostility” and “aggression” by “those who promote hatred”, a group of pro-family associations fought back. On July 6, 2011, they wrote,

“Ms. Aponte, in clear violation of the rules of diplomacy and international rights laws, you intend to impose to (sic) Salvadorans, disregarding our profound Christian values, rooted in natural law, a new vision of foreign and bizarre values, completely alien to our moral fiber, intending to disguise this as ‘human rights’… The only thing we agree with from your article, is to repudiate violence against homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, etc.; Against these, just the same as against skinny, fat, tall or short … This of course does not mean accepting the legal union between same sex individuals or to add new types of families like bisexual, tri-sexual, multi-sexual and the full range of sexual preferences. Not accepting the legitimacy of ‘sexual diversity’ does not mean we are violating any human right. There can be no talk of progress if this is how ‘modern’ is defined. We prefer to feel proudly ‘old fashioned’, keep our moral values, preserve our families and possess the clarity of what defines good and evil.”

As mentioned above, Secretary Clinton said that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights”. The problem with this should be self-evident. The promotion of gay rights must come at the expense of the promotion of human rights because the two notions are immiscible. One is founded on the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God and the other on moral relativism, which eviscerates the very idea of natural rights and the natural law on which they are based. If you have one, you cannot have the other. You have your rights by virtue of being a human being, and not by anything else – not ethnicity, not religion, not race, not tribe, not sexual orientation.

I deplore, for instance, the persecution of Baha’is in Iran and the persecution of Ahamdis in Pakistan. Being a Baha’i or being an Ahmadi no doubt constitutes the identity of these people who are being persecuted. Nonetheless, there is no such thing as Ahmadi rights or Baha’i rights: there are only human rights. And our defense of them comes precisely at the level of principle in the inalienable right to freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and freedom of expression.

Were we to construct such a thing as Ahmadi rights or Baha’i rights or “gay” rights, we would be eviscerating the foundations for those very human rights, which have to be universal by definition in order to exist. If one has rights as a Baha’i, what happens to those rights if one converts to, say Christianity? Does one then lose one’s Baha’i rights and obtain new Christian rights? What happens to one’s “gay” rights if one goes straight?

One does not possess or attain rights in this way. They are inalienable because one possesses them by virtue of one’s human nature – not due to any other specificity regarding race, class, gender or religion. Either they exist at that level, or they do not exist at all. If someone tries to appropriate human rights for something that applies to less than everyone, then you may be sure that they are undermining very notion of human rights. If there are abuses, and this includes abuses against homosexuals, then they should be opposed from the perspective of human rights, not manufactured rights that obtain to just a specific group.

If the United States wishes to promote democratic principles and constitutional rule in other countries, but insists on inserting a manufactured right such as “gay” rights as integral to that program, it will be rejected overall by religious people and by those who, through the examination of moral philosophy, have arrived at the existence of human rights from natural law. If we wish not only to make ourselves irrelevant, but an object of derision in the Muslim and other parts of world, all we have to do is openly promote the rationalization of homosexual behavior, which is explicitly taught against as inherently immoral by Islam and, in fact, by every minority religion in those Muslim-majority countries, including Christianity and Judaism.

If we wish to make this part of American public diplomacy, as we have been doing, we can surrender the idea that the United States is promoting democracy in those countries because they are already responding, “If this is democracy, we don’t want it, thank you; we would rather keep our faith and morals.” This approach not only undermines the foundation of human rights abroad but here, as well.

But, of course, democracy is not the real goal; the goal is the universalization of the rationalization for sodomy. This is now one of the depraved purposes of US foreign policy. The light from the City on the Hill is casting a very dark shadow.

Robert R. Reilly is the author of The Closing of the Muslim Mind. He is currently completing a book on the natural law argument against homosexual marriage for Ignatius Press.


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