Several weeks ago, when the Ugandan high court struck down an anti-gay law that would have punished homosexual acts by death, the world of pro-gay rights organizations and their supporters breathed a collective sigh of relief. Never mind that the draconian measure was struck down on procedural grounds or that Uganda will very well take up the law again (when it is likely to pass). But for National Organization of Marriage president Brian Brown, the defeat, unlike in the United States, is not another nail in the coffin of LGBT progress, but a temporary setback in a string of victories he and his ilk hope to achieve abroad.
Writing for Yahoo News, Liz Goodwin documents the growing movement among some of the most prominently anti-gay activists here in the United States who, accepting that America is a lost cause when it comes to stemming the tide of LGBT equality, have literally taken their show on the road. “Brown is just one of many in the American “traditional marriage” movement who are aggressively pushing their message abroad now that they face an increasingly tough sell at home. In so doing, he is making common cause with foreign activists whose anti-gay rights crusades are more robust—and more resoundingly successful—than America’s homegrown one. Among them are Americans who actively worked behind the scenes to support the passage of Russia’s law preventing gay people from adopting, as well as Uganda’s law that punishes homosexuality with up to a lifetime in prison.”
These, and other developments, are causing distress among the top gay rights organizations in America. According to Goodwin, the Human Rights Campaign has already created a budget to monitor the work of Brown and Scott Lively, an American missionary who traveled to Uganda to warn about what he described as the evils of gay people in the run-up to the passage of the country’s law that punished homosexuality with death. “The U.S. involvement in anti-gay rights international activity has become so intense that one of the premier gay rights groups in the country, the Human Rights Campaign, started up a special “global engagement program” last year to track their activities and help gay rights activists abroad. The program has a $1 million budget for its first year and five full-time staffers, and on Monday released its most comprehensive report on the internationalization of the American anti-gay rights movement.”
The report, “The Export of Hate,” names the most prominent individuals and groups—Brown among them—working to pass anti-gay rights legislation abroad. “With anti-LGBT losses mounting in the United States, and with strong indications of increased activity abroad, more must be done to expose this work and the people doing it,” the report says.
“Our primary focus is naming and shaming,” Jason Rahlan, global engagement press secretary at the Human Rights Campaign, said of the report. “My sense is a lot of Americans and even a lot of folks in the LGBT community have absolutely no idea this is going on.”
