A little over a year ago, while trying to secure votes to pass a $1.2-trillion spending package, House Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly told the fiscal conservative members of his party to vote for the bill in part because it banned flying Pride flags over U.S. embassies. Johnson’s tactics were not a surprise. Before running for Congress, Johnson worked as an attorney for an anti-LGBTQ+ organization and on more than one occasion had argued in court against legalizing same-sex marriage. Still, it was rather telling that with a government shutdown deadline looming, Johnson was not able to rally his troops around the bill’s merit but rather their dislike of rainbow flags.
When President Biden signed the spending bill with the ban, he promised Americans that his administration would work around the clock to find a way to lift the ban. Five months later, Biden dropped out of the race, and today the moratorium on Pride flags is still in place. Not sure how much money the country is saving from the policy, but I do know the message that it sends to the rest of the world can’t be worth it.
The United Nations Refugee Agency believes there are more than 44 million refugees around the world. That’s triple the number of people fleeing conflict or persecution from just a decade ago. The nations contributing the most refugees are Afghanistan and Syria, with 6.4 million each, followed by Venezuela (6.1 million) and Ukraine (6 million).
In Afghanistan, death is the maximum sentence for being queer, while in Syria it’s punishable by up to three years in prison. In Venezuela, being LGBTQ+ isn’t a crime, but police still harass the community by raiding bars. In Ukraine, members of the LGBTQ+ community can serve in the military to fight in its war with Russia, but same-sex relationships are not legally recognized. That means if the love of your life died in battle, the government would not even have to notify you. They’re just gone and it’s up to the surviving partner to figure out if their loved one is buried and if so, where.
The 19th-century American poet Emma Lazarus said she wrote the sonnet “The New Colossus” to raise money for the construction of the Statue of Liberty because she believed the statue would serve as a welcome sign for new immigrants arriving in the New York harbor.
“A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles,” Lazarus wrote shortly after the Civil War in 1883. Between 1880 and 1920, more than 20 million immigrants — mostly from Europe — made their way to the U.S.
During that four-decade stretch, it wasn’t just heterosexuals coming to our shores in search of a better life. And it’s not only heterosexuals among the estimated 44 million refugees around the world. This is why until last year, the Pride flag flew over U.S. embassies during June, to let the desperate souls fleeing persecution know that they would find comfort in the arms of the Mother of Exiles. Now that is no longer true — not because of a strategic foreign policy decision but because some members of Congress — like Johnson — simply don’t like queer people. Strange behavior from a political party that claims it doesn’t like identity politics.
Last month, Russian-born tennis player Daria Kasatkina announced she had defected from her home country and become an Australian citizen because she is openly queer. She said that as an out athlete, she “didn’t have much choice.”
Last year, while Republicans were trying to de-gay the flagpoles of our embassies, the world also learned that Russia’s Supreme Court declared the rainbow flag was forbidden in its country. If Ukraine falls, what rights its LGBTQ+ residents have will most likely fall with it.
Kasatkina’s decision to leave her home country made her a political refugee. Now she’s in the land Down Under.
The United States used to be the kind of country that welcomed the persecuted, but I guess she didn’t see us as the best option. Hard to blame her.
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