In December, the Obama administration announced a global gay-rights push. Officials declared gay rights to be human rights and issued a memo saying the treatment of gays abroad would be considered when assessing U.S. foreign aid. Gay-rights activists (and progressives, generally) swooned. I didn’t.
In a Contentions post, I noted that the initiative allowed Obama to shirk America’s unique role in actually securing human rights around the world, while earning praise from identity-politics activists. The administration’s failure (and disinclination) to maintain an American presence in Iraq after 2012 meant that anti-gay barbarians such as al-Qaeda and Iranian proxies would stay behind and prey upon Iraq’s homosexuals without fear of American influence. If Obama really wanted to protect gay rights from history’s most vicious anti-gay forces, I wrote, he’d keep America in Iraq (and Afghanistan) instead of issuing memos and giving speeches. And if the progressives singing his praises really felt that gay rights were human rights they’d have been more inclined to support George W. Bush’s freedom agenda and less eager to cut and run in our wars abroad. How tragic to have been proven so right so soon.
