Over the course of eight years, the Obama administration became a champion in the fight for LGBTQ rights abroad, changing everything from how the U.S. State Department treats our gay and transgender Foreign Service offices to how forcefully the U.S. advocated for international protections of LGBTQ individuals. As Samar Habib writes:
In 2009, Congress passed — and President Obama signed — a bill instructing the State Department to appoint “an independent officer to track violence [and] criminalization” in foreign countries on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The instruction went further, directing “diplomatic and consular missions to encourage foreign governments to reform or repeal laws” where consensual homosexual conduct was being prosecuted.
The United States was soon joined by the U.N. Human Rights Council in June 2011. That’s when, after considerable debate and lobbying, the UNHRC passed its first resolution condemning violence and persecution based on sexual orientation and gender identity, bringing LGBT people a step closer to protection under international law and the Universal Human Rights framework.
That's just a tiny glimpse of the changes that were made under policies originally pushed by Hillary Clinton as secretary of state and embraced by Obama as president. In the summer of 2010, I listened to Clinton first declare that “human rights are gay rights and gay rights are human rights, once and for all"—a sentiment Obama later codified in a presidential memorandum to advance and defend the "human rights of LGBT persons" overseas. In December 2011, Clinton highlighted that directive again in a speech at the U.N. General Assembly in Geneva.
What's obvious is that Donald Trump's administration will never be the beacon of hope abroad that the Obama administration became. The extent to which Trump retreats on Obama’s defense of LGBTQ individuals may depend on whom he ultimately picks as secretary of state—a debate that's still ongoing. But as Habib points out, the approach of Trump's VP Mike Pence to LGBTQ issues bears a lot of similarities to that of Trump's best buddy, Vladimir Putin.
In Congress, Pence said that “in embracing the advocacy of changes in laws regarding homosexuality around the world, [this legislation] advocates a set of values that are at odds with the majority of the American people.” Several years later, in December 2013, here’s how Russian President Vladimir Putin criticized advocates for international LGBT rights:
“The destruction of traditional values from above … is essentially anti-democratic, since it is carried out on the basis of abstract, speculative ideas, contrary to the will of the majority. … More and more people in the world … support our position on defending traditional values that have made up the spiritual and moral foundation of civilization in every nation for thousands of years.”
Putin’s comments came after Russia’s “gay and pedophilia propaganda” law was implemented earlier that year. Ostensibly, the law bans discussing or promoting “Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values” in the presence of children. However, it also suppresses other possibilities for LGBT life, activism and advocacy, because public protest or visibility violates that law, and because gay parents can lose their children. [...]
Both Pence and Putin say that although individual gay people should be left alone, they should not be recognized as a politically organized subgroup that can advocate for protection. Putin considers such advocacy to be propaganda.
Bottom line: for the foreseeable future, the U.S. is likely done being an international force for good on this issue. Just how hard a Trump administration will work to roll back protections for LGBTQ individuals abroad remains to be seen.