The Left’s sexual colonialism

A few essays and columns for you this week.

At The European Conservative, I have an interview with the author of a new dystopian novel, Exogenesis, that explores bio-ethical themes (among others). Peco Gaskovski also writes the excellent Substack newsletter “Pilgrims in the Machine,” exploring how the digital age is deforming our culture: “Resisting the ‘Machine’: An Interview with Peco Gaskovski.”

On that subject, on the podcast I had a discussion with Covenant Eyes founder Ron DeHaas, the pioneer of accountability software and a man responsible for helping thousands of people to get free of pornography.

Also at The European Conservative, I have an essay on Ernest Hemingway and the children he lost to abortion—a subject that has been largely ignored by his critics despite the fact that one of his most famous short stories deals with the subject: “Lost by Something’: Hemingway and Abortion.”

Finally, as always, I’ve got plenty of other short, regular culture updates on The Bridgehead, and you can get a copy of Prairie Lion: The Life and Times of Ted Byfield here and here, and my other books here.

The Left’s sexual colonialism

On August 29, a CNN headline went viral: “Two men in Uganda are facing separate charges of ‘aggravated homosexuality,’ an offense punishable by death under the country’s controversial new anti-gay laws.” The clarifying community note attached to the tweet provided important context: “One man is accused of having a sexual relation with a disabled man, the other of a sexual act with a 12-year-old child. Both are charged with ‘aggravated homosexuality,’ defined as same-sex relations with someone who is HIV-positive, a child, an elderly person, or disabled.”

Consider the difference between the narrative provided by CNN and the reality behind the headline. Now consider the fact that the mainstream press has been doing this for years—and the impact that has had on the public perception of many issues. They’re doing this to us on purpose.

Another recent example of this comes from the Guardian. In July, they published an article on the “social imperialism” of the American religious Right titled, “U.S, religious Right at center of anti-LGBTQ+ message pushed around the world.” According to the Guardian, a handful of American evangelical leaders lobbying African leaders are largely responsible for legislation they refer to as ‘anti-LGBTQ+,’ patronizingly ignoring the fact that Africans are, by wide margins, far more socially conservative than Westerners on nearly every issue.

But the Guardian insists that this is a case of the Christians taking their culture wars abroad: 

Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America often function as petri dishes for strategy as U.S. groups abroad help craft legislation and fight legal battles. The new global front in culture wars is in turn empowering a resurgent domestic religious right that is pushing book bans, Pride flag bans, and record 491 state level bills targeting LGBTQ+ rights.

The “religious Right’s play in Africa, where it has successfully lodged itself in many nations’ political and elite establishment, is about ‘power and money’” and has allegedly transformed laws around the world.

Additionally, the report claims, the religious Right is attempting to “redefine human rights”—which is precisely what the sexual Left has been doing at the international level for decades. Austin Ruse of the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM) sends out weekly missives detailing the machinations of activists at the UN to get abortion and LGBT-supporting language in treaties and formal documents of every kind; Marguerite Peeters described the phenomenon of how institutions were infiltrated and colonized in The Globalization of the Western Sexual Revolution (2012); sociologist Gabrielle Kuby did the same in The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom.

In short, the Guardian is claiming that an international cabal of Christian leaders is doing what cosmopolitan sexual revolutionaries have been doing with staggering success for over half a century. It isn’t just that this report isn’t true—it’s that it is precisely the opposite of the truth.

Nigerian human rights activist Obianuju Ekeocha described what the West has been perpetrating on Africa in her essential 2018 book Target Africa: Ideological Neo-Colonialism in the Twenty-First Century as well as the 2019 documentary Strings Attached. So-called humanitarian aid, she writes, nearly always comes with strings attached—contraceptives, demands for the legalization of abortion, perverse Western-style sex education, and the replacement of traditional African values with post-modern Western ones. The desperate need of many African countries for Western foreign aid is exploited to push for the imposition of a top-down sexual revolution. 

Progressive Western leaders spend billions of dollars funding abortion in countries where it is illegal. Strings Attached shows Paul Cornelissen, regional director of Marie Stopes International for South Africa, telling a chuckling audience in a private meeting that “We do illegal abortions all over the world.” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sends tens of millions of taxpayer dollars overseas to fund abortion in developing countries, as well—and when a Conservative MP asked then-Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland if she was confident that Canadian cash wasn’t being used to fund illegal abortion overseas, she refused to answer.

The Biden Administration, too, has turned the U.S. into a neo-colonial power pushing progressive values on poorer, weaker countries. They are going further than any previous administration in pushing for the legalization of same-sex ‘marriage’ in other countries, most recently in Serbia. The state department has added same-sex ‘marriage’ to its 2022 Human Rights Report, considered in diplomatic circles to be the definitive human rights view of the countries listed. Last year, the Biden administration came under fire for spending $20,000 in taxpayer dollars to fund drag shows in Ecuador. The U.S. is also pushing to secretly include abortion in global treaties. 

But the Guardian would have us believe that a few Christian groups are imposing their views on unwilling African populations, and that this is also serving as a testing ground for laws in Hungary and American red states. The brazenness of this level of gaslighting is almost impressive—but it needs to be called out. The truth is that rich Western countries are pushing the LGBT agenda and abortion in developing countries, promising them cash in exchange for their souls—but you won’t read that in the mainstream press.