How Trump's chief pink-washer is setting back LGBT+ equality Mark Gevisser
Only a week after his ad endorsing the president’s pro-gay credentials, Richard Grenell seems to have forgotten his brief
Fri 28 Aug 2020
LGBT+ adviser Richard Grenell recording his speech for the Republican convention. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP
Richard Grenell, who spoke at the Republican party’s convention on Wednesday night, is an openly gay former US ambassador to Germany who has just been appointed the Trump campaign’s senior adviser on LGBTQ+ outreach. But just a week after Grenell launched a campaign advertisement in which he describes Trump as “the most pro-gay president in American history”, he remained utterly silent on the matter at the convention podium, choosing instead to focus his speech on the president’s “America first” foreign policy.
This is unsurprising, given not only Trump’s evangelical Christian base, but also how easy it is to disprove the claims made by Grenell in the earlier ad. In it, he distorts timelines and mashes up facts to present Joe Biden as a homophobe and Trump as some kind of rainbow warrior. He even claims that the US president initiated a global campaign to decriminalise homosexuality at the United Nations last year.
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Trump, in fact, uttered a single sentence on the issue at the 2019 UN general assembly, as part of Grenell’s high-profile but empty global decriminalisation campaign. At a UN meeting he convened, Grenell said he wanted the 69 countries in which homosexuality was still illegal to be called out “on a daily basis”, and according to state department insiders, Grenell lobbied furiously for aid to these countries to be suspended if they did not drop their anti-gay laws.
If the global dynamics over LGBTQ+ rights in the past decade have shown one thing, it is that such intervention only strengthens the efforts of homophobic leaders, buttressing their claims that anti-gay policies protect their peoples’ “traditional values” and “cultural sovereignty” from the immoral west. It thus only makes life worse for LGBTQ+ people on the ground. When David Cameron was prime minister in 2011, he mooted that international aid should be conditional on decriminalisation: this caused a marked uptick in hostility to LGBTQ+ people in some African countries, and almost all the continent’s leading activists signed a statement disassociating themselves from the notion. In a similar vein, the Russian activist Igor Yasin wrote in 2013: “Russia needs its own Stonewall, not western sanctions.”
During Barack Obama’s term, the US government generally understood this, and trod carefully. It moved multilaterally and stayed in the background at the UN, working hard to support local activists. Particularly during Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state. Proactive US missions actually made a difference to LGBTQ+ activists around the world – although there were some notable mis-steps, such as the hosting of an LGBT Pride event in Pakistan in 2011, two months after the US assassination of Osama bin Laden on that country’s soil.
Some of this work has continued in the Trump years, but as elsewhere in US foreign policy, any notion of multilateralism has been thrown to the wind. And many of Grenell’s fellow Trump supporters, including conservative gay Republicans, deny that transgender people exist at all; abroad as at home, the US government has stepped away from any association with trans rights.
Meanwhile, the pro-gay stick can be used as another weapon against the US’s enemies. Listen, for instance, to Grenell’s words in his campaign ad: “President Trump fully supported our fight to crush the homophobic and barbaric Islamic terrorist organisation Hezbollah and the Iranian regime that supports them.”
This is an increasingly common tactic: rightwing European politicians, such as the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, use the alleged homophobia of Muslims to justify their anti-immigration policies, while Israel uses its pro-LGBTQ+ policies to garner support in the US and western Europe, and to promote itself as a beacon of tolerance in a hostile neighbourhood. By promoting gay rights, activists claim, Israel “pink-washes” its human rights abuse of Palestinians. Now Grenell has become a pink-washer for Donald Trump: he chases the gay vote in the US (albeit not during the RNC) by suggesting that the “American” values Trump seeks to defend – against immigrants, and foreign powers, of course – include the protection of gay people. This is all the more egregious because of the Trump administration’s actual record: its opposition, for instance, to the LGBTQ+ employment discrimination cases ruled on by the supreme court in June, on the basis of a protection of religious freedom.
In contrast, Joe Biden’s extensive LGBTQ+ platform sets out to build on the gains made during the Obama era. It also tries to strike a balance in foreign policy between, on the one hand, the “aggressive” use of “pressure tactics” such as global Magnitsky sanctions, and “culturally appropriate information campaigns” and helping local organisations and activists on the other. And, in Congress, Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris is a co-sponsor of the Greater Leadership Overseas for the Benefit of Equality (Globe) Act, which sets out a comprehensive vision for the role that the US should play in promoting global LGBTQ+ equality.
Biden and the Globe act also emphasise the importance of immigration reform for LGBTQ+ people seeking asylum in the US. As I watched Grenell put on a rainbow-coloured “Make America Great Again” cap in his pro-Trump campaign ad, I thought of Camila Díaz Córdova, who was murdered in El Salvador in 2018. A few months previously she had petitioned for asylum in the US, armed with documentation of previous threats on her life, because she was transgender. She was deported before she was given the chance to argue her case.
• Mark Gevisser is the author of The Pink Line: The World’s Queer Frontiers
Richard Grenell, who spoke at the Republican party’s convention on Wednesday night, is an openly gay former US ambassador to Germany who has just been appointed the Trump campaign’s senior adviser on LGBTQ+ outreach. But just a week after Grenell launched a campaign advertisement in which he describes Trump as “the most pro-gay president in American history”, he remained utterly silent on the matter at the convention podium, choosing instead to focus his speech on the president’s “America first” foreign policy.
This is unsurprising, given not only Trump’s evangelical Christian base, but also how easy it is to disprove the claims made by Grenell in the earlier ad. In it, he distorts timelines and mashes up facts to present Joe Biden as a homophobe and Trump as some kind of rainbow warrior. He even claims that the US president initiated a global campaign to decriminalise homosexuality at the United Nations last year.
Advertisement
Trump, in fact, uttered a single sentence on the issue at the 2019 UN general assembly, as part of Grenell’s high-profile but empty global decriminalisation campaign. At a UN meeting he convened, Grenell said he wanted the 69 countries in which homosexuality was still illegal to be called out “on a daily basis”, and according to state department insiders, Grenell lobbied furiously for aid to these countries to be suspended if they did not drop their anti-gay laws.
If the global dynamics over LGBTQ+ rights in the past decade have shown one thing, it is that such intervention only strengthens the efforts of homophobic leaders, buttressing their claims that anti-gay policies protect their peoples’ “traditional values” and “cultural sovereignty” from the immoral west. It thus only makes life worse for LGBTQ+ people on the ground. When David Cameron was prime minister in 2011, he mooted that international aid should be conditional on decriminalisation: this caused a marked uptick in hostility to LGBTQ+ people in some African countries, and almost all the continent’s leading activists signed a statement disassociating themselves from the notion. In a similar vein, the Russian activist Igor Yasin wrote in 2013: “Russia needs its own Stonewall, not western sanctions.”
During Barack Obama’s term, the US government generally understood this, and trod carefully. It moved multilaterally and stayed in the background at the UN, working hard to support local activists. Particularly during Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state. Proactive US missions actually made a difference to LGBTQ+ activists around the world – although there were some notable mis-steps, such as the hosting of an LGBT Pride event in Pakistan in 2011, two months after the US assassination of Osama bin Laden on that country’s soil.
Some of this work has continued in the Trump years, but as elsewhere in US foreign policy, any notion of multilateralism has been thrown to the wind. And many of Grenell’s fellow Trump supporters, including conservative gay Republicans, deny that transgender people exist at all; abroad as at home, the US government has stepped away from any association with trans rights.
Meanwhile, the pro-gay stick can be used as another weapon against the US’s enemies. Listen, for instance, to Grenell’s words in his campaign ad: “President Trump fully supported our fight to crush the homophobic and barbaric Islamic terrorist organisation Hezbollah and the Iranian regime that supports them.”
This is an increasingly common tactic: rightwing European politicians, such as the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, use the alleged homophobia of Muslims to justify their anti-immigration policies, while Israel uses its pro-LGBTQ+ policies to garner support in the US and western Europe, and to promote itself as a beacon of tolerance in a hostile neighbourhood. By promoting gay rights, activists claim, Israel “pink-washes” its human rights abuse of Palestinians. Now Grenell has become a pink-washer for Donald Trump: he chases the gay vote in the US (albeit not during the RNC) by suggesting that the “American” values Trump seeks to defend – against immigrants, and foreign powers, of course – include the protection of gay people. This is all the more egregious because of the Trump administration’s actual record: its opposition, for instance, to the LGBTQ+ employment discrimination cases ruled on by the supreme court in June, on the basis of a protection of religious freedom.
In contrast, Joe Biden’s extensive LGBTQ+ platform sets out to build on the gains made during the Obama era. It also tries to strike a balance in foreign policy between, on the one hand, the “aggressive” use of “pressure tactics” such as global Magnitsky sanctions, and “culturally appropriate information campaigns” and helping local organisations and activists on the other. And, in Congress, Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris is a co-sponsor of the Greater Leadership Overseas for the Benefit of Equality (Globe) Act, which sets out a comprehensive vision for the role that the US should play in promoting global LGBTQ+ equality.
Biden and the Globe act also emphasise the importance of immigration reform for LGBTQ+ people seeking asylum in the US. As I watched Grenell put on a rainbow-coloured “Make America Great Again” cap in his pro-Trump campaign ad, I thought of Camila Díaz Córdova, who was murdered in El Salvador in 2018. A few months previously she had petitioned for asylum in the US, armed with documentation of previous threats on her life, because she was transgender. She was deported before she was given the chance to argue her case.
• Mark Gevisser is the author of The Pink Line: The World’s Queer Frontiers
THE GUARDIAN
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