America’s Ambassadors of Hate
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.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/04/america-s-ambassadors-of-hate.html