February 15, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — President Trump is keeping in place a special international LGBT “envoy” established by the Obama administration to promote acceptance of homosexuality, bisexuality and transgenderism abroad in the name of U.S. foreign policy.
The decision to preserve open homosexual Randy Berry as Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTI Persons was reported Monday by the homosexual newspaper Washington Blade. It is another blow to pro-family advocates who oppose the LGBT agenda and are counting on Trump to root out homosexual and abortion activists from the foreign affairs bureaucracy after eight years of Obama’s leftist policies.
"If this report is true," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, "keeping Berry only signals to the world that the extreme agenda of the Obama years is still deeply entrenched in the State Department."
A career foreign service officer who speaks Spanish and Arabic, Berry was given the international “LGBT Envoy” position in 2015. The appointment delighted homosexual activists, who in recent years have turned their attention to less developed nations overseas after accomplishing much of their agenda in the West.
Berry is a committed pro-LGTQ activist who is dedicated to seeing other nations adopt the postmodern Western legal system that grants “rights,” including “marriage,” based on homosexuality and extreme gender deviance. In December, he joined other openly homosexual U.S. diplomats in speaking at an “LGBT Leaders” conference in D.C. sponsored by the Gay & Lesbian Victory Institute.
The Center for Family & Human Rights (C-Fam) reported last month that Berry was moved in the waning days of the previous administration to a State Department agency where “’the Obama agenda will be hardest to overcome.’" C-Fam said Berry has “stirred controversy for his part in inserting the homosexual rights agenda into the U.S. office dealing with religious freedom abroad.”
Another source told C-Fam’s "Friday Fax" that Berry “not only oversaw the incorporation of LGBT into the religious freedom office, something not included in the Congressional mandate that set the office up, but he also oversaw the persecution and eventual exit of employees, foreign service officers, Christians, who objected to mixing LGBT with religious persecution.”
Sodomy is not a “human right”
In many nations today, sodomy is illegal, as it was almost universally in the Americas before and at the time the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights were formed — and in many states up until the Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court decision in 2003. For centuries, homosexuality has been considered immoral under Western jurisprudence, rooted in Judeo-Christian scripture and teaching.
“Non-discrimination is a category of human rights that has never included sexual orientation and gender identity but which activists are trying to get countries to accept,” C-Fam reported.
In African nations like Kenya, where homosexuality is illegal, Obama’s “neo-imperialistic” promotion of homosexuality was unpopular. “The fact remains that this issue is not really an issue that is in the foremost mind of Kenyans,” said Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta during an Obama state visit in 2015.
Caribbean nations, too, strongly resisted Obama’s pro-LGBT priorities. In Jamaica, a 2014 poll found that 91 percent surveyed supported keeping the country’s anti-buggery law, which American diplomats like Berry were working diligently to overturn. (Buggery is an English term for homosexual sodomy.)
Strike Three?
This is the third time since his election that Trump has disappointed pro-family activists who oppose the LGBTQ agenda:
As the new president-elect, he said in an interview that legalized homosexual “marriage” is “settled” law. Critics noted that Trump did not say the same about Roe v Wade, a much older Supreme Court decision.
He refused to remove Obama’s 2014 pro-LGBT executive order for federal contractors, which forces private businesses and ministries to adopt pro-homosexual and pro-transgender policies.
He now continues Obama’s pro-LGBTQ foreign policy promoting “human rights” based on aberrant sexual and gender behaviors.
On the conservative side, pro-family advocates praised Trump and newly installed Attorney General Jeff Sessions for reportedly discontinuing Obama’s highly controversial policy of pushing transgender bathroom and locker room “rights” in public schools nationwide (allowing gender-confused boys into girls’ private spaces).
Social conservatives also praised Trump for nominating a conservative, pro-life judge, Neil Gorsuch to replace Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Which way will Trump go?
Perkins has called on Trump to remove “embedded” liberal “sexual activists” put in place by Obama from the U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy.
“The Obama administration has systematically filled the ranks of State with LGBTQ and abortion activists,” Perkins wrote in December. “Unless the next Secretary of State is willing to resist and remove this embedded agenda, the promotion and protection of true human rights, like religious liberty, will continue to languish.”
Perkins said that if the report on Trump retaining Berry is true, “it will be a disappointing development for people at home and abroad — not to mention a major setback in getting the State Department back on track with its statutorily defined mission of promoting human rights and religious freedom.”
At the December Gay & Lesbian Victory Institute conference for LGBT international leaders attended by LifeSiteNews, homosexual and transgender activists were hopeful that many of Obama’s pro-LGBT policies would be hard for Trump to reverse.
“The toothpaste is so far out of the tube,” said veteran activist Susan Fulton, who is pushing to solidify Obama’s policy change allowing openly “transgendered” people (e.g., men who want to live as “women”) to serve in the military.
But now there is a larger question for Trump’s conservative supporters and his “progressive” foes: Is he inclined to overturn Obama’s pro-LGBTQ policies at all, or does he consider maintaining those policies part of his repeated campaign promises, including those he made at the Republican National Convention, to defend the “LGBTQ community”?