Among the many firsts President Obama will be remembered for, especially in the LGBT community, are the record number of openly gay ambassadors he has appointed around the world. In fact, Obama has appointed more openly gay ambassadors than any other U.S. president combined, including those to Spain, Denmark, Australia and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Austria. And just recently Ted Osius was confirmed by the Senate to serve in Vietnam.
But one ambassadorship that stands out in particular is the appointment of James Brewster, the ambassador to the ultra-conservative Dominican Republic. With his husband Bob Satawake, Brewster represents American interests in a country openly hostile to homosexuality in general and Brewster in particular. “I don’t think that most people agree with what they said, but people think that the U.S. doesn’t recognize that for us to have a gay ambassador is like an insult,” says Omar Fernandez, a bank employee and Catholic here, reports Ezra Fieser on CSMonitor.com.
“The words that were used and I think the conversations coming from such a strong sense of hate really were shocking to me,” Brewster told The Christian Science Monitor in his first interview with a foreign news outlet. “My objective after seeing it was to make sure that we took it in context. And we saw the outpouring of support.”
You might expect such hate from locals. But leaders of the Catholic Church were equally vociferous in their criticisms. The conservative archbishop of Santo Domingo, Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez, referred to Brewster using a derogatory slur for homosexuals. The leader of evangelical Christian churches called for protests, and Dominicans filled social media sites with anti-gay comments.
The objective, Brewster explains, is to balance the stated mission with the more subtle message that gay rights are, while far from universal, American rights. The Obama administration said last year that the advancement of LGBT rights around the world would be a priority. “No matter where you are, and no matter who you love, we stand with you,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in June 2013.
For Brewster, however, despite a relative failure to move the dial in this tropical Caribbean country on all matters gay, a sense of religiosity informs his outlook: “The great thing about Dominican culture is that they’re a very proud culture that has a strong faith,” says Brewster, who vacationed here for 15 years before becoming ambassador. “For me, any time I look at anyone who has a strong faith, my hope is that their understanding that loving everyone as they would love themselves is going to be the thing that wins.”
This is great!
Don’t confuse faith with the cultish belief… the expression of years of peer-pressure from a dictatorial church.
Before the ambassador’s arrival, did not the present Dominican government deprive one million black Dominicans of their citizenship?
Their strong Christian faith is what will bring them around to a stronger sense of justice once they can (as most American Catholics have) look past the misguided words of their Catholic Church leaders.
It’s great that this very intelligent and capable ambassador recognizes that possibility.