by cmsellers » Wed Feb 20, 2019 6:36 am
So, the Trump Administration
has proposed an initiative to pressure countries to decriminalize homosexuality. Reaction seems to have generally been in the vein of "how can we trust Trump on this when he's rolled back LGBT rights at home?" as with GLAAD's statement.
Now, there's no question at all to me that he's doing this for the wrong reasons. The only countries that still have the death penalty for homosexuality are Muslim-majority nations which incorporate sharia to some degree into their civil codes. A disproportionate number of countries that criminalize homosexuality again use sharia, while all of them are third-world countries of the sort Trump would call shitholes.
This seems calculated to me for Trump to say "look at these liberals, they won't support anything I do, even advancing gay rights!" A cynical part of me wonders if he's hoping to inspire an anti-gay backlash in the developing world. But Hanlon's Razor applies, and the more realistic part of me thinks that this is mainly a way for him to "own the libs" and give his base a talking point.
When the US wants to influence other nations towards freedom and democracy, we tend to be subtle about it (the occasional military intervention aside), because even this causes a backlash that drives these countries towards China, which doesn't care what you do to your people. I think that even if Obama had done what Trump did, announcing a big-bold initiative to change other countries' laws on homosexuality, the countries where homosexuality is illegal would have pushed back hard.
Weirdly enough, the fact that it's Trump pushing this makes me cautiously optimistic that most countries won't take it seriously enough for a backlash to be a problem; they'll just sort of ignore the whole thing. And I don't think it will achieve his stated goal. Best-case scenario, a few Caribbean nations that don't really enforce their laws will change them in an attempt to curry favor with the US, which is nice, but not worth risking a backlash, especially not when any country that would change its laws under public American pressure would presumably do so under private pressure.
Of course, I could be totally wrong. If any countries which actively enforce laws against homosexuality change those laws because of American pressure, I'll add this to the very short list of things Trump has done that I approve of, whatever his intentions.