Gay Republican says Donald Trump is making secret progress to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide

Richard Grenell
Photo: Screenshot/Twitter

Richard Grenell, the out former U.S. ambassador to Germany, defended the Trump administration’s initiative to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide.

The initiative, which Donald Trump himself was unaware of even after it was announced, has been accused by LGBTQ activists of not doing anything, not even helping to fund local LGBTQ activists working for decriminalization. Now Grenell says that it’s making secret, behind-the-scenes progress. Trust him.

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The decriminalization initiative has been a touchy subject for Grenell, who exploded on journalists earlier this month who tried to ask him about it. But in a recent podcast with OutSports, the former Trump administration official claimed that the initiative has made “incredible progress in some countries.”

“I hesitate to ever — and this may be one of the problems why people don’t see the progress over the last couple of years — we’re very sensitive to not highlighting a country that is getting close or where we making progress because it only serves as a flashpoint for those who want to stop our progress, or the bad actors that would manipulate what we’re trying to do,” Grenell said.

Since bans on homosexuality are often part of a country’s criminal code, successful decriminalization efforts in the past several decades usually happen through courts (like in South Africa in 1998, the U.S. in 2003, and India in 2018) or a legislative body (like in Ireland in 1993, Azerbaijan in 2000, or São Tomé and Príncipe in 2012). It’s unclear how a country could be “getting close” to decriminalizing homosexuality – that is, issuing a court decision or passing a law – without that effort being public knowledge.

In the interview, Grenell blamed religion for bans on homosexuality.

“This has got to be peeled away from not just a civil society, but many religious societies that believe this is kind of a religious mandate,” he said.

It’s an odd position to take considering the Trump administration’s view that religious freedom is more important than LGBTQ rights and Grenell’s own work with the Christian conservative organization American Center for Law and Justice, which tries to implement religious laws in other countries and that Grenell himself praised for “defending religious freedom here and around the world.”

He said that laws against homosexuality have “ties to majority-Muslim countries who believe religiously in denying basic rights to gay and lesbians.” He did not mention that several countries whose bans on homosexuality have gotten international attention over the last decade – like Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Jamaica – are majority-Christian.

Grenell also blamed Barack Obama for the lack of progress….

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