At least one archly right-wing anti-LGBTQ activist is finding plenty of encouragement from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s new Commission on Unalienable Rights. On Thursday, rabidly right-wing Brian Brown, whose organization is called the International Organization for the Family, told his supporters that Pompeo’s new outfit provides “an extraordinary opening to push for clear and consistent recognition of the natural family.”
And of course, given Brown’s narrow-minded zealotry, the “natural family” means marriage between a man and a woman. Are you really surprised?
Additionally, Right Wing Watch (RWW) reports, Brown said it “gives us a forum to challenge American foreign policy that has in the past advanced the extreme agenda of the left that has been cloaked in the language of so-called human rights.”
Pompeo’s commission was allegedly created with no input from the State Department’s human rights framework and under the guise of “natural law,” it will scrutinize the U.S.’s human rights policy. And natural law is something that has been long supported by others within the religious right.
“Natural law theory has been used for a long time by Catholic church leaders and theologians who reject LGBT people’s identities and their relationships,” said Bob Shine, of New Ways Ministry.
RWW’s Peter Montgomery notes there are many variants of natural law theory, “but as applied to sexuality and gender, it essentially argues that people whose sexual expression or gender identity is not ‘natural,’ or who have non-procreative sex, are defying the ‘natural law’ of God.
Unsurprisingly, Pompeo’s commission is dominated by conservatives, and he has tried to downplay any policy-related impact the commission may have. But, Montgomery notes, “Brown’s enthusiasm makes it clear that the religious right believes that the commission’s work is likely to be used to provide intellectual justification for further reversing U.S. advocacy for the rights of LGBTQ people and women as elements of U.S. foreign policy.”
However, what many folks don’t know is that Pompeo’s commission is reportedly the creation of Robert George, founder of the National Organization for Marriage where Brown (conveniently enough) has served as president since 2011. George, according to RWW, is the intellectual catalyst behind the anti-equality movement. Although he’s not a member of the commission he’s connected professionally to several of its members, including chairwoman Mary Ann Glendon, a noted anti-abortion activist “who has dismissed U.S. and European advocacy for LGBTQ human rights globally as ‘neocolonialism.'”
And how strange is it that this commission has the phrase “unalienable rights” in its title when its main mission may be aimed at destroying the rights of others?
Brown is the very definition of bombastic in this video from 2014.
Featured image courtesy of the video above
