Back to the Bully Pulpit

Gay Pride March Zagreb, Croatia in 2007

In 1995, then–first lady Hillary Clinton famously declared that women’s rights are human rights at a United Nations conference in Beijing. With more than a decade under our belts since then, the question arises: Will the next president (or first lady) make a similar statement about gay rights on the international stage?

After eight years in which the Bush administration has failed to support gay rights stateside, let alone around the world, the opportunity is there for the next president to use his bully pulpit to champion equality and decry state-sanctioned oppression of gay people. As a superpower and beacon of democracy, human rights activists say, this country should use its influence to lobby against LGBT-related abuses. For starters: working with the 86 United Nations member countries that consider homosexuality a crime, including the seven that punish it by death, to change their minds.

“The U.S. hasn’t been as clear and insistent on LGBT issues as it has on issues like violence against women and human trafficking,” says Michael Guest, the gay former ambassador to Romania who now serves as senior adviser to the Council for Global Equality (formerly the LGBT Foreign Policy Project). “By giving the level of support to LGBT groups that it allocates for women, the poor, ethnic and religious minorities, and the disabled, the U.S. could pull off a hat trick: It could financially support the work of those groups, send a clear signal that they’re being taken seriously, and show repressive governments that it’s keeping tabs on those who subject their citizens to arbitrary arrest and abuse.”

But it’s up to the next president to lead the way. One of the key uses of presidential power is “to show moral leadership,” says Scott Long, head of the LGBT program at Human Rights Watch. “Saying something about [gay rights] would be an incredibly powerful message.”

There’s no shortage of places where such a stand could make a difference. Just this summer, officials in Saudi Arabia, a longtime American ally, arrested 21 men for allegedly being gay—an offense punishable by flogging or imprisonment in the kingdom—and police in Dubai arrested 17 foreigners on charges of cross-dressing or otherwise violating gender norms. And in many countries where homosexual relations are legal, conditions are far from perfect: In Russia, Poland, Croatia, Latvia, and Moldova, pride marches are routinely banned by authorities or attacked by protesters; in South Africa, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2006 and bans discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in its constitution, lesbians have been subject to “corrective rape.” Long says U.S. intervention would have the most impact in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, eastern Asia (he names South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan), and Eastern Europe (Croatia, Romania, and Poland, for example).