WASHINTON, D.C., January 26, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – President Joe Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has vowed to fill a position that was created during the Obama administration: “United States Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTI Persons.”
Blinken said this in comments to members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.
The position was originally created in 2015 by then-Secretary of State John Kerry to oversee the government’s efforts to “support the human rights of LGBT people around the world.” Randy Berry, an American diplomat, was chosen as the U.S. Envoy for “LGBTI Rights,” but later vacated the role when he was nominated by Trump and confirmed by the Senate to be the next U.S. Ambassador to Nepal. After that, the role remained vacant during the rest of Trump’s presidency.
Now, according to Blinken, filling the role is a matter “of some real urgency.” Blinken stated concern over increased violence as a reason to fill the office again: “We've seen, I believe, the highest number of murders of transgender people, particularly women of color, that we've seen ever.”
“And so I think the United States playing the role that it should be playing in standing up for and defending the rights of LGBTQI people is something that the Department is going to take on and take on immediately,” he said.
Blinken wants to see “pride” flags flown at American embassies as well as a total “repudiation” of Trump’s former Secretary of State’s Unalienable Rights Commissionreport. In fact, a link to former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo’s report leads to a blank U.S. Department of State webpage, suggesting the Biden regime has scrubbed it from the site.
The 60-page report was issued in the summer of 2020 and focused on actual threats to freedom of religion and property rights. Pompeo cautioned against “endorsing new claims of human rights.”
Leftists did not take kindly to Pompeo’s “hierarchy” of rights or that abortion and same-sex unions were not lumped in as fundamental human rights.
CNN reported that about 200 leftist “human rights” groups signed a letter complaining about Pompeo’s human rights commission. They complained, “The report makes a deeply disturbing distinction between ‘unalienable rights’ and what it describes as the ‘social and political controversies’ of ‘abortion, affirmative action, [and] same-sex marriage’.”
The letter lauded BLM protests and the 1619 project and complained that Pompeo saw both as assaults claiming that, “The Secretary’s willingness to use a speech purportedly about human rights to suggest that a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times series and largely peaceful protestors demonstrating against racial injustice are part of an ongoing ‘assault’ on America’s rights tradition calls into question the very premise upon which the Commission’s work is based.”
It is unclear how the appointment of a Special U.S. Envoy for “LGBTI Rights” in a Biden administration will bring clarity to potentially litigious situations or how it will weigh “LGBTI rights” against other human rights when they intersect. It is also unclear how the envoy will treat nations where same-sex “marriage” has not been introduced, homosexual activity is illegal, or homosexual activity is viewed as offensive and immoral.