American activists are spreading anti-gay fear and anger around the world

[DonViejo]

America’s Ambassadors of Hate

The global battle for LGBT rights will not start, or end, with rainbow flags in Sochi. American activists are spreading anti-gay fear and anger around the world.

While gay rights are expanding and public acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people is growing rapidly in the United States, American activists and missionaries who’ve built their careers condemning homosexuality have taken their message overseas, and with horrifying success.

From Kingston to the Kremlin and the streets of France, they’re warning that “what happened in America could happen to you,” stirring up hatred, helping to promote antigay laws like those in Russia, Uganda and Nigeria, attempting to defeat pro-gay laws in Europe, and tacitly encouraging the persecution of activists in places like Cameroon, where one was found brutally murdered in his home last year. Another died last month after he was imprisoned for texting love-letters to a man he admired.

“The messaging is coming from the United States,” Chad Griffin of the Human Rights Campaign told an attentive audience at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos. “We are exporting the hate from our country to their countries.”

The messengers are pretty far out, even by Tea Party standards, but they’re taken all too seriously when they go abroad, and they use that to try to regain credibility in the United States. “They have this access to policymakers overseas that they just don’t have here,” says Rebecca Parks at the HRC office in Washington. “We laugh them off as members of the fringe at our peril.”

Take American evangelist Scott Lively author of The Pink Swastika, blaming the Holocaust on Nazi homosexuals. . He is also the co-founder of a group that the hate-trackers at the Southern Poverty Law Center, calls “the virulently anti-gay” and “currently active more in Eastern Europe than in the U.S.” And Lively proudly takes credit for his role campaigning since 2006 for the law passed last year by the Russian Duma, which ostensibly bars homosexual “propaganda” targeting children. “Go Ruskies!” he proclaimed at the time.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/04/america-s-ambassadors-of-hate.html

[quinnox]

1. Not much can be done about this, the first amendment does apply

Its another case of that famous saying, it goes something like - "I might absolutely hate what you say, but I'll fight to the death for the right to say it"

[Behind the Aegis]

5. Something can be done, and that is to shine the light on this trash.

I am fully supportive of free speech, but hate speech must be combated.

[Behind the Aegis]

2. KICK

[Behind the Aegis]

3. We export so much crap, so it isn't a surprise we export hate too.

[William769]

4. Kick & recommended.