Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jul 8, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA).
Complying with a 2021 directive from President Joe Biden, the U.S. State Department has released its third annual whole of government “progress report” on advancing what it calls the “human rights” of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI+) persons around the world.
The U.S. Department of State-led initiative details how various federal agencies are participating in the sweeping American foreign policy effort, which now includes allowing refugees and asylum seekers to select their gender on U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) forms “without the need to provide supporting documentation or to match the gender listed on their identity document.”
The State Department report says it considers this and dozens of other LGBTQI+ “human rights” initiatives detailed in the report, including U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funding of a “Transformation Salon” in India “to enhance the career and entrepreneurial opportunities for the transgender community” in that country, activities that “advance our national security.”
According to the latest report, U.S. government agencies are pouring tens of millions of dollars into dozens of projects and grants to organizations worldwide that support gender ideology, transgenderism, and “combat so called ‘conversion therapy’ practices,” among other specified LGBTQI+ “human rights” priorities.
“Promoting and protecting the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons is a U.S. foreign policy priority,” read the State Department statement that accompanied the report.
The report opens a window into how the U.S. government, under the Biden administration, is specifically leveraging foreign aid programs and its influence with international financial institutions and the United Nations to pressure countries into embracing and disseminating its favored LGBTQI+ policies.
The Department of State alone, the report notes, over the last five years has authorized more than $3.2 million in small grants to “116 LGBTQI+ organizations in 73 countries.” The report indicates that USAID, meanwhile, has dedicated “more than $7 million to support activities at USAID missions that integrate LGBTQI+ equities” and “leveraged more than $11 million from private philanthropy to advance the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons.”
As part of the report the Peace Corps, for its part, pointed to its celebration of “Pride events at headquarters and posts” and commitment to “fostering opportunities among the LGBTQI+ community to serve abroad.”
The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), meanwhile, touted that in fiscal year 2023 it served 799,000 “men who have sex with men (MSM)” and “more than 85,000 transgender persons in more than 50 countries.”
Related efforts cited in the report include new U.S. Department of Agriculture grant and agreement rules that “include protections against discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression.” The State Department also indicated it is developing similar rules related to department-funded foreign assistance.
Advancing LGBTQI+ ‘human rights’ includes banning ‘conversion therapy’
Among the efforts highlighted in the report is the administration’s commitment to “prevent conversion therapy practices (CTP) globally.”
Although the report does not define the term, CTP is understood as any therapy directed toward changing “an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity” including “behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”
The report indicates that the U.S. State Department, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of the Treasury, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and USAID have shared “current science-based knowledge with medical professionals and public officials regarding the harms of CTP.”
However, as previously reported by the National Catholic Register and CNA, the scientific basis for the sweeping attacks against CTP is sharply disputed. Referencing the work of Father Paul Sulllins, for example, Jennifer Roback Morse, founder and president of the Ruth Institute, contends that “the claim that sexual orientation change therapy is always harmful is not supported by the available evidence.”
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
“Among the efforts highlighted in the report is the administration’s commitment to prevent conversion therapy practices [CTP] globally” (CNA).
What this Administration’s policy infers is that homosexuality and the entire spectrum of related perverse behavior is not simply a lawful right, rather that it’s also a moral good that cannot be opposed in any manner. Biden and the cabal of morally deranged politicians who manage him declare themselves the ultimate authority on anthropology and human rights. It’s a devastating affront to religious belief, and unconstitutionally its practice.
Our Vatican perpetrates a somewhat similar policy by actions and inference while saying to a subdued Catholic population and divided world that it teaches otherwise.
From the perspective of the concrete and eternal truth and the perennial Catholic Church, in a mere 1,700 years Western civilization has degenerated from a theologically proposed and polytheistic notion of the nature of God (the wedge of Arianism) to now a secularly (and statist) imposed polyhedral notion of the nature(s) of both Man and the Church.
The tribal LGBTQ religion has already annexed the civil state, and now begins to annex the Church itself through a catchy blessing–extracted one “couple” at a time (Fiducia Supplicans).
What to do when both candidates deny the Sanctity of human life from the moment of conception to natural death, and the Sanctity of the marital act within The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, although one candidate currently is prosecuting Catholics for being, in essence, Catholic, and you know it is likely that the second candidate, being weak in his convictions, could possibly cave to the pressure of the atheistic materialistic, overpopulation alarmist globalist who view human life to be a burden and not a Blessing?
Ironically the solution to justifying the engaging in of demeaning sexual acts, that regardless of the actors or the actor’s desires, even if the actors are a man and woman united in marriage as husband and wife, are physically, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually abusive, is to reorder persons according to sexual desire/inclination , which sexually objectifies the human person (and in the case of followers of The Christ, is in direct violation of God’s Commandment regarding lust and the sin of adultery) as if all our beloved sons and daughters are merely a means to an end and the desire to raise young gentlemen and young ladies can now be labeled “sex discrimination”.
Strike the Papacy, “scatter the sheep”, and pretend you can build a bridge between those who claim that lust can in essence, be Love, when Love, is in essence, devoid of every form of lust.
Blasphemy is what Blasphemy does.
Interesting podcast on First Things on the decline of “pride”.