Out of Harm’s Way

CGE Staff June 1, 2012

NEARLY SIX MONTHS AGO, the White House unveiled a global blueprint for promoting and protecting the rights of LGBT individuals, countless numbers of whom live in countries where they are imprisoned, blackmailed, and in places like Iraq, sometimes crushed to death with cement blocks.

The State Department’s 2011 Human Rights Report, released last week, provides a grim, if incomplete, catalog of such atrocities. A gay and transgender resource center in Cape Town, South Africa, documented about 10 cases per week of lesbians targeted with brutal sexual assault, often referred to as “corrective rape.” Violence and extortion at the hands of police officers is pervasive in El Salvador, Turkey, Indonesia, and Cote d’Ivoire. National leaders denounce homosexuality as “the divorce of humanity from its integrity” (Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) and “strange behavior that even God will not tolerate” (Gambian president Yahya Jammeh). And for country after country, the sentence “There were no known LGBT organizations” appears throughout the report like a rasping chorus. Continue Reading