Originally appeared May 30, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.
The effort to promote freedom and legal equality for gays and lesbians has made significant progress in the United States and western Europe.
But there are vast portions of the world where gays and lesbians must live closeted, unrealized, unfulfilled lives blighted by the pressures of rigid social conformity, primitive religious intolerance, fear, prosecution, and even death.
In eastern and central Europe, gays face hostility from authoritarian governments heavily influenced by medieval Catholicism or reinvigorated revanchist Russian and Greek Orthodox religions.
In central and southern Africa, petty tyrants and fundamentalists ministers inveigh against homosexuality as non-African, denounce gays as criminals and threaten to have gays jailed or exiled.
In Islamic countries from Egypt and Saudi Arabia to Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, gays are persecuted, arrested, jailed and sometimes executed.
In India mobs of Hindus, unhindered by the government, have closed theaters showing a gay film. In Communist China, authorities arrest gays at their whim despite liberalization of the penal code.
If multiculturalism means that different cultures have different values and there is no way to prefer one set of values over another, then multiculturalism is a sham and the final enemy of gays and lesbians.
These are nations sunk in ignorance, superstition, barbarism, and moral darkness, and we should say so loudly and repeatedly.
But what we can do about it?
Let us try a thought experiment. Ignoring current political realities, try to imagine some of the things the U.S. government could do if it really want to help gays and lesbians in backward nations.
The U.S. State Department could protest the prosecution and jailing of gays and lesbians, warning that such actions are of "serious concern" to the U.S. government and "not helpful" in maintaining cordial relations with the world's single remaining superpower.
The State Department could designate a "sexual minorities" desk to collect, monitor and report on incidents of anti-gay persecution-arrests, jailings, beatings, acts of censorship and anti-gay statements by government officials..
That desk could make the information public rapidly on a website so target nations would see that they are being monitored. Taking a page from "Atlas Shrugged," the website could list gays and lesbians who flee foreign countries and list the skills and education they take with them so the countries could see what their bigotry is costing them.
Congress could reduce foreign aid to countries that retain sodomy laws or persecute gays. Since much U.S. foreign aid seems to end up in the bank accounts of government officials anyway, the threat of cuts could have significant impact on their behavior.
We could say to them: "You have no natural right to our taxpayers' money. If you want their money you must earn it by good behavior. Stop repressing your citizens. Repeal your sodomy laws. Halt your censorship of gay publications and websites. Educate your citizens."
The Dutch government sends small grants to gay groups in third-world countries. The U.S. could do the same. One hundred grants of $10,000 to $100,000 would cost little but help fledgling gay groups and send a clear message to anti-gay governments.
The most powerful weapons the U.S. has are its ideals of liberty and individuality, free speech, free markets and democracy. In the past we promoted those ideals through a network of U.S. radio stations around the world. We should revive and expand that project.
The Voice of America and Radio Liberty could include substantial programming about U.S. gays, the legitimacy of gay freedom, music by gay artists and reading by gay authors. Since its beginning, the VOA has done exactly one program on gays.
The U.S. could send openly gay ambassadors to anti-gay governments. Forget gay-friendly Luxembourg. Think Saudi Arabia, Namibia, Romania, Cuba, Pakistan. That would force officials to deal with someone gay who represents the world's most powerful nation. [Editor's note: In the fall of 2001, President George W. Bush named openly gay foreign service officer Michael Guest as U.S. ambassador to Romania.]
Gay ambassadors could attend public events with their partners, speak to civil groups and visit gay clubs where they exist. He or she would be an encouragement to gays and lesbians in those countries and a tacit rebuke to the government. Don't worry about sodomy laws: A nation's embassy is by law its own sovereign territory.
So long as the U.S. has an ambassador to the Vatican, that person should be gay. It is high time those men in cassocks at the Vatican secretariat met a gay men who is not repressed, closeted or a hypocrite. It might be a new concept for them.
And finally, the U.S. military must accept openly gay and lesbian servicemembers so that when troops are dispatched to serve in foreign countries, local inhabitants might see openly gay people and, it may be, find it necessary or interesting to interact with them.
This is hardly an exhaustive list of the possibilities, but it give us a sense of how little is being done that could be done, and the beginnings of an activist agenda for the next two decades.