In an essay he wrote during the time of the Civil
Rights movement, James Baldwin recounted how some of the “agitators” were
accused of being Communists, or at least puppets of them. As Baldwin pointed out, it was an incredibly
stupid allegation because, to many poor and oppressed people in the world, it made the Kremlin seem like a supporter of human
rights—which is, of course, exactly the opposite of what the McCarthyites
wanted Americans to believe.
History is irony when it’s not tragedy. At times—like now—it’s both: Someone who has fashioned himself as a
champion of peace and human rights has done more damage to both than any of the
past few predecessors in his office.
I am talking about the current US President, Barack
Obama. Like many other LGBT people, I am
glad that he has done more to bring us—especially transgender people—closer to
equality with hetero and cis people than, perhaps, all of his predecessors
combined. Of course, he had to be
prodded into some of his actions—most notably by his second-in-command, Joe
Biden, into supporting same-sex marriage.
Still, I can’t help but to wonder whether he’s actually
demonizing the cause of LGBT equality in the rest of the world, save for a few
European and a couple of Latin American countries. While we can celebrate, and push for more
change, in the majority of the world, we’re not even deemed fit to exist, let
alone marry or go into the same professions and occupations as other
people. A Jamican lesbian I know tells
me she can’t go home: “I’d be killed as soon as I got off the plane in Kingston.” A Pakistani and a Chinese gay man of my
acquaintance have expressed similar anxieties.
They all come from conservative—and, in the case of the
Pakistani and Jamaican, religious—societies in which any deviance from
cisgenderism and heterosexuality are crimes that could be punished by
death. Subtract religion from the
equation and you have China, where the law allows the state to execute someone
who loves someone of his or her own gender.
And, of course, the situation is probably even more
dire for LGBT people in some Middle Eastern countries, particularly ones like
Saudi Arabia and Iran. Even in Turkey, I
didn’t have the sense that a gay man or lesbian was particularly safe, and I
knew that my own well-being had much to do with the degree to which my gender
identity wasn’t in question.
In addition to ingrained homophobia and transphobia,
those countries and others share resentment, if not outright hatred, of the
United States—or, at any rate of its foreign policy. More precisely, those countries have
histories of economic and cultural —and, in the case of Saudi Arabia, Turkey
and Jamaica, political and military—colonialism and young people know it. So, naturally, they detest our invasion of
Iraq and our attempt to subjugate Afghanistan.
And, I imagine, they aren’t too happy about the fact that we have
military bases in over two-thirds of the world’s nations—or that we’ve
conducted drone surveillance and strikes.
Ah, yes, the drones. Some argue that they’re better than putting young Americans in harm’s way. However, that argument misses the point: the drones aren’t meant to replace “boots on the ground”. Rather, they’re meant to go above and beyond (in military terms, anyway) what live human beings can do to gather information and strike targets. Also, if they’re meant to replace soldiers and sailors and airmen, why was a drone sighted at JFK International Airport?
In the first two months of his administration, Obama ordered six times as many drone strikes in Pakistan during his first term as George W. Bush did during both of his terms. (Of course, GWB started the
drone program. Still, the facts speak
for themselves.) He also did something
that wasn’t part of Bush’s, or even Dick Cheney’s, wildest dreams: He, in essence, gave himself the right to order the murders extrajudicial killings of US citizens anywhere in the world simply by deciding they are "enemy combatants". I don’t think that even Humphrey and Nixon claimed such rights when they
were invading Southeast Asian countries, and I don’t think George W's father even thought
of such a thing when he invaded Grenada and conducted what was essentially a
drug bust against Manuel Noriega.
Now, as Jody Williams has wondered, how can a man who
won the Nobel Peace Prize—and still thinks of himself as a champion of world
peace and who has expressed his admiration for Martin Luther King Jr.—do such
things? At best, it makes him blind to
his own contradictions. At worst, it
makes him a rank hypocrite. How can the
rest of the world see him as a torch-bearer for liberty and justice?
Moreover, I can’t help but to wonder how countries and
peoples who have been subjected to his version of “peace” see his support of
women’s and LGBT rights and equality. If
other countries can see our universities, our culture and our economy—not to
mention our militarism—as manifestations of “The Great Satan”, how can they see
our (or, more specifically, Obama’s) expression of support for LGBT
equality? How can our leaders talk to
Ahmadinejad about his country’s treatment of women and gays (or denial that the
latter even exist in his country) or his revisionist views of history when our
own foreign policy is killing innocent people all around him? And, what’s going to make him, or the leader
of any conservative Muslim country or military dictatorship, believe that LGBT
people simply should have the right to live, let alone love and marry the
people they love, when a President who supports such things is killing innocent
people who just happen to live in countries deemed to be our enemies?
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