This is pretty big news:

The Obama administration bluntly warned the world against gay and lesbian discrimination Tuesday, declaring the U.S. will use foreign assistance as well as diplomacy to back its insistence that gay rights are fully equal to other basic human rights.

Now let’s compare Hillary Clnton’s statement on this…

“Gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights,” she said. “It should never be a crime to be gay.”

…with Rick Perry’s response:

“Promoting special rights for gays in foreign countries is not in America’s interests and not worth a dime of taxpayers’ money,” a Perry campaign statement said.

What a cocknugget! Perry is employing the tried and tested Republican approach to gay issues, which is to treat basic human rights as “special rights” when they’re applied to gay people. This argument can really obfuscate the issue when you’re talking about gay marriage—it tends to devolve the conversation into a useless argument about marriage as a right—but here his whinging about “special rights” makes it sound like he’s siding with the Taliban. You can’t apply an anti-gay-marriage argument to a human rights argument, because then you’re arguing against the right to not be stoned to death just for being yourself. (For the record, Mitt Romney’s response was just as douchey as Perry’s, but it used slightly more diplomatic language. Which is maybe a metaphor for the whole Romney campaign.)

2 replies on “Obama Administration Tells Rest of World to Stop Gay Discrimination”

  1. I think the problem with people that side with Perry is that they don’t -really- believe that gay people exist. God didn’t make gay people, therefore they don’t exist. Gay is a choice, so if you choose to be gay, you are siding with satan. Etc.

    Although, I feel that as churches change their rhetoric, the attitude of the populace evolves, and vice versa. I feel that we are trending towards general acceptance. We just have to stop “otherizing” gays in politics, making gay rights special when basically all we want is to have the same rights as everyone else.

  2. Forget what Perry and Clinton said, what the Obama administration declared is a joke.
    “The Obama administration bluntly warned the world against gay and lesbian discrimination Tuesday, declaring the U.S. will use foreign assistance as well as diplomacy to back its insistence that gay rights are fully equal to other basic human rights.”
    Name one Middle Eastern country besides Israel that even recognizes gay rights. Is he declaring war on every Islamic country with that declaration or what?

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