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The hosannas are flying in response to news that the United States will sign onto a United Nations General Assembly declaration urging all of its member states to decriminalize homosexuality. “The Administration’s leadership on this issue is a rebuke of an earlier Bush administration position that sought to deny the universal application of human rights protections to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals,” said Mark Bromley of the Council for Global Equality. Joe Solmonese of the Human Rights Campaign applauded the State Department’s decision as “a welcome step forward as it signals to the world that, after years of a hostile administration, the United States recognizes the humanity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people at home and abroad.”
The decision by the Obama administration to support the French-drafted statement and thereby join 66 other countries in denouncing government-endorsed homophobia represents a welcome reversal from the policies of its predecessor. In December the Bush administration refused to sign the decree, citing the bogus rationale that the declaration’s legal stipulations would impinge on the ability of state governments to legislate on matters of sexual orientation–based discrimination (in most states it remains legal to fire someone because of their sexuality). While the statement is sponsored by a diverse set of democratic nations ranging from the entire European Union to Israel and Japan, it is opposed, naturally, by a motley crew of Muslim states, African dictatorships, and the authoritarian behemoths of China and Russia. Those governments signed onto a rival declaration drafted by Syria stating that the resolution would “usher into social normalization, and possibly the legitimization, of many deplorable acts, including pedophilia.” With this laudable turnaround, the United States finds itself not only on the right side of a fundamental human rights issue but in pleasant and proper company.
This auspicious move by the new administration, however, carries the danger of lulling gay rights activists into a sense of complacency. International homophobia is something so entrenched that mere statements protesting it will have little to no effect in mitigating its horrendous consequences. While the decision of the Obama administration marks a welcome change in American foreign policy, it is ultimately a hollow victory.
That such a progressive statement would emerge from the United Nations is unusual. Ever since its establishment in 1945, the U.N. has been little more than a money pit and a propaganda platform for the world’s worst human rights abusers. Throughout most of its existence, the U.N. was a sideshow to the larger drama of the Cold War. The Soviet Union and its satellites routinely denounced American “imperialism” and very little was achieved in forwarding the cause of international peace, the reason for the U.N.’s creation. Although the superpower rivalry is long over, the U.N. still functions mainly as a way for global Lilliputians to tie down the American Gulliver.
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