A Growing Threat to Basic Human Rights

Political Research Associates
March 19, 2009

While gender-based discrimination and oppression are nothing new abroad, for the past decade the U.S. Christian Right has been aggressively exporting its campaigns against reproductive rights and gay rights to countries around the world. Recently, exporting homophobia and discrimination against the LGBTQ communities in Africa has entered a new phase, especially with a homophobic conference in Uganda held March 5-8, 2009 sponsored by Family Life Network (see box). Meanwhile, there are continued battles over access to abortion, not only in Africa, but in Europe, South and Central America, Asia, and South Asia.

In 2003, conservative Christians successfully shifted the foreign aid policy of the United States so that it promotes abstinence-only education abroad through HIV/AIDS relief grants channeled to the Christian Right base of the George W. Bush Administration. An Institute of Medicine report confirms that these programs are one of the biggest obstacles to challenging the global HIV/AIDs epidemic, which sees five million new cases of HIV each year. The Obama administration has shown interest in changing the policy, which was renewed by the Democratic Congress in 2008 with some of its controversial elements intact.

Christian conservatives in the United States have always been concerned with gender roles, the importance of male domination, the special role of heterosexual families in civilized society, and sexuality. In the 1960s, there was a movement by Christian conservatives to block the spread of rock music because of its dangerous sexualizing orgiastic roots in “primitive” African music.

The role of the U.S. Christian Right in Africa today is ironic since its resurgence in 1970s America was fueled by those seeking to block the integration of hundreds of all-White Christian academies. The U.S. federal government had warned that the segregated schools—from kindergarten through high school in some states—would lose their tax exempt status unless they allowed Black students to attend.

When Christian conservatives from the United States fund and support Christian groups around the world, it is a form of neocolonialism. Anticipating this criticism, the Christian Right attempts to portray access to contraception, the availability of a full range of reproductive health services, and basic human rights for gay people as the “real” colonialism. This is nonsense.

The new campaigns around the world by the U.S. Christian Right are part of a larger project to control the lives and health choices of women, return men to their prior status of holding unfair superior powers and privileges in society, and police the acceptable boundaries of sexual expression—and even love itself.

Resources provided by Canon Jim Naughton Episcopal Diocese of Washington (D.C.)

Planned Parenthood

Catholics for Choice

The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC)

Background on the Religious Right

Reproductive Health Reality Check (RH Reality Check)

About the Right

Other Key Players

Political Research Associates

Other Research Resources:

Media Transparency

Use the Media Transparency Funding database to research grantees and funders. For example:

 

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