Biden believes he is the embodiment of moral leadership, but when it comes to his positions on LGBTQ+, a good portion of the world sees America as an immoral hegemon, using cultural colonialism to threaten nations that don’t subscribe to what they see as extreme irreligious views. That’s why, when White House spokesperson John Kirby said LGBTQ+ rights are core to America’s foreign policy, he inadvertently shed light on why China is the new global powerbroker.

When China makes inroads into countries that are not its own, its policy has been to avoid interfering in that country’s social policy questions. It willingly goes into countries that, per American standards, engage in human rights abuses.

The Biden administration, however, believes that its cultural standards should be the world’s standards, something that is glaringly obvious when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights. Under the laws of most countries in Africa and the Middle East, and some in Southeast Asia, people who identify as LGBTQ+, and who act on that identification, are engaging in criminal activity.

In 2022, Russia passed a law dubbed, “Answer to Blinken,” that basically criminalizes mentioning in any public space anything related to LGBTQ+. At the time, Putin accused the West’s position on LGBTQ+ of “moving towards open Satanism.”

Image: The U.S. Embassy in the Holy See, 2022. Public domain.

Several Arab countries would agree. In all the Muslim nations that criminalize LGBTQ+ conduct, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, they do not separate church and state. Instead, national law is merged with religious law, and LGBTQ+ conduct, because it is against religious law, is also against national law. There is no human right to be LGBTQ+ in these nations.

Faced with the non-Western world’s intransigence on LGBTQ+ rights, Biden directed US agencies to use “the full range of diplomatic tools, and potentially financial sanctions and visa restrictions, when foreign governments restricted the rights of LGBTQ people.” The United States has also warned Saudi Arabia about its criminalizing LGBTQ+ conduct. “We hope Saudi Ambassador Prince Abdullah Al Saud will carefully consider how the continued persecution of Saudi’s LGBT community will negatively impact the bilateral relationship.”

Does Biden think an American alliance is more important to a country than that nation’s relationship with its God? And is anyone still wondering why it was China and not the United States that brokered a deal to restore diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia?

The United States led the charge to form the United Nations and helped formulate the principle that “[t]he United Nations has no authority to intervene in matters which are within the domestic jurisdiction of any State.” Why, then, is China excoriated for adhering to international law, while America pretends to take the high ground even as it violates its commitment to the U.N. Charter? When it comes to LGBTQ+ issues, America’s current relentless intervention “in matters which are within the domestic jurisdiction of any State” cements America’s image in both Muslim nations and non-Muslim nations as an immoral hegemon intent upon cultural colonization.