THE
PHENOMENON known in American domestic affairs as the culture wars has gone well
and truly global. If anyone needs proof of that, consider the row that has
erupted at the United Nations in recent days over plans for a high-level
meeting next month on the fight against HIV/AIDS. The United States, the
European Union and Canada are appalled by the fact that 11 gay and transgender
groups have been barred from the gathering under pressure from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which groups 57
mainly Muslim lands. Egypt spearheaded the OIC’s diplomatic moves.
According to agency reports,
America’s UN ambassador Samantha Power (pictured) raised the matter in an
indignant letter to the president of the General Assembly. She wrote:
Given that transgender people are 49 times more likely
to be living with HIV than the general population, their exclusion from the
high-level meeting will only impede global progress in combating the HIV/AIDS
pandemic...The movement to block the participation of NGOs on spurious or
hidden grounds is becoming epidemic and severely damages the credibility of the
UN.
Around UN
headquarters on New York’s East River, the origins of this “movement” are clear
enough: it reflects a social-conservative diplomatic coalition orchestrated
mainly by the OIC and Russia, with some opportunistic support from
China. Last year, all those parties tried to overturn a decision by Ban
Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, to recognise same-sex marriages among the
world body’s staff. Feelings are running high this week because of yesterday’s International Day against Homophobia.
This traditionalist coalition has
been rallying its forces even as LGBT rights gain prominence in the diplomatic
agenda of Western countries. Ms Power, a respected writer on the subject
of genocide, has made the LGBT question a personal priority. She recently
invited 17 of her fellow UN ambassadors, including the envoy of Russia, to
watch a musical set in a small American town about a father and daughter
who are both gay.
It’s striking
that Vladimir Putin’s Russia, while taking a strident stance against Islam-inspired
terror, has been eager to team up with Islamic governments in resisting the
global movement for LGBT rights and same-sex marriage.
Moscow’s foreign-policy
rhetoric has raised the standard of “traditional” values and cultures which
have a common interest in resisting the liberal tide. As is pointed out by Lucian Leustean, a scholar of geopolitics and
religion at Britain’s Aston University, Russia’s new national-security
strategy makes prominent mention of “spiritual security”, in other words the
idea that Russia’s moral and metaphysical values are under global threat.
This converges, at least in part, with the concept of “faith
security” which has been used by the Egyptian government to justify
strict government oversight of religion, clamping down on atheism and
“blasphemy” as well as ultra-pious extremism.
And in Russia
and Egypt alike, being an international advocate for traditional values seems
perfectly consistent with dealing fairly harshly at home
with forms of religion that don’t conform to officially approved norms.
Forum 18, an independent religious-freedom campaign, said today in a report that it knew of 119 individuals who
had been prosecuted in Russia last year for exercising freedom of religion;
they ranged from Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons to followers of China’s Falun
Gong movement. Most had received fines, a few found themselves briefly in
custody. The total was a sharp rise on the 2014 figure of 23
prosecutions.
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