American Christians Persecute Gays? Hardly.

A couple days ago, The Economist ran an article that accused American Christians of being the cause of the persecution of gays around the world. The article focused particularly on Africa, though it did not limit its claims to that continent. According to The Economist the reason Africans despise homosexuality is “an influx of conservative Christians, mainly from America, who are eager to engage African clergy in their own domestic battle against homosexuality.” This is pure propaganda and The Economist should be ashamed it ever published this article.

For starters, let’s point out a few facts about Christians and the West. It is fashionable for gay rights groups and liberal westerners to talk about how horrible America is to gays. If you believe the things they say, around every corner in America lurks an obsessed Christian waiting to string up any gays they can find. This is utter crap. In fact, gays owe Christians a huge debt for the introduction of the concept of “love they neighbor,” a tolerance generating concept that is not at all common in non-Christian countries.

Moreover, it is ludicrous to equate Christianity with persecution of gays. Consider that despite the fact that America is a Christian nation, with almost 90% of Americans claiming to be some form of Christian, America is stunningly tolerant of homosexuality. Yes, many American Christians view homosexuality as a sin. And many non-Christians find homosexuality repulsive. Yet, despite this, homosexuality is no longer a crime anywhere in the country and, legally speaking, gays have no fewer rights than heterosexuals in any state. Further, gays have the right to marry in some states, they have the right to civil unions in others -- something singles and polygamists and others don't have. Many states even allow gay couples to adopt children. And most states include gays in their anti-discrimination laws. We even have openly gay lawmakers and celebrities, and actual crime against gays is rare, despite the media propaganda to the contrary.

Now compare how gays are treated in the rest of the world. Here are a handful of examples:

• In Iran, homosexuality is illegal with a penalty of death for men and 100 lashes for women.

• In the Muslim parts of Nigeria, it is punishable by death for men and 50 lashes plus six months in prison for women. In the Christian parts, men face 14 year prison sentences.

• In Jamaica, it’s punishable by ten years hard labor.

• In Malawi, it’s punishable by 14 years in prison with corporal punishment.

• In Malaysia, it’s punishable by 20 years in prison with whippings.

• A bill in Uganda will make it a criminal offense to “fail to report” gay people, and would make gay sex punishable by death.

• In Iraq, Americans put gay rights into their constitution, but Shia militias routinely kidnap and murder gays, with some claiming that Iraqi security forces are complicit.

• In Africa, something called “collective rape” is common, which involves groups of assailants raping lesbians to “cure” them of their lesbianism.

• And on and on. All told, 80 countries criminalize homosexual sex or homosexuality.

Yet, Christian America is the bad guy? Give me a break.

Are we really to believe that conservative American Christians have put these laws into place in Muslim countries? And American Christians have convinced Muslim militias to murder gays. . . the same Muslims who kill Christians? Are we to believe that Africans, like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, who were associated with “godless communists,” not Christianity, suddenly chose to become the agents of white American Christians? These are the same Africans who demonize whites as official policy. Mugabe, who describes gays as “worse than dogs or pigs,” has been systematically killing the remaining white farmers in his country. No white American Christian group has his ear. What about Thabo Mbeki? He fought to prevent AIDS treatment in South Africa, and he claims that Westerners caused AIDS to wipe out blacks. He’s now doing the bidding of Jimmy Swaggert? Yeah, sure.

And if white Christians are so effective in brainwashing Africans, then why haven’t they stopped polygamy, a common African practice? Are we to believe that Christians went to Africa to encourage them to hate gays, but decided not to bother with polygamy?

This is all entirely ridiculous and paranoid. It is wishful thinking.

What The Economist and their friends on the left don’t want to admit is that the rest of the world is not following the West on this issue. The left loves the idea of watering down western values with the introduction of non-western values. But they only love this on their terms. And when these other cultures don’t conform to the views the left wants, then the left doesn’t know how to react. At first, they tried to use institutions like the UN to force liberal social values upon these countries, but these countries called this what it was -- “cultural colonialism.” And then these countries learned to band together and turn the UN to their advantage. Soon the UN was pushing “conservative” African and Muslim values.

Now the left finds itself in a catch-22. If it calls out these countries, then it exposes itself as cultural imperialists who want to impose their own "deviant western values" in place of "African values." It would also weaken the case for importing foreign values through these “new world order” institutions like the UN, because the left's argument is premised on the idea that these third world countries have values that are superior to ours. Thus, by calling these countries out, the left will lose credibility in the West and the non-west. But if it doesn’t call them out, then the values that will be imported will increasingly be the kinds of values the left cannot stand, and institutions like the UN will come to haunt the left.

So with no good options, the left has chosen to try to shift the blame to evil American conservatives and American Christians by claiming that these groups have “warped” these Avatar-like perfect cultures. This appears to be a tantrum-induced response, or it's delusional wishful thinking. Or it might be part of a strategy to trick Africans, Asians, Middle Easterners and South Americans into thinking that the values they hold dear are not really their own values, but have been forced upon them by evil American conservatives. Good luck with that.

In any event, things are turning ugly for the left, as they always do, and I would expect them soon to stop professing a love for foreign values. But, by then, it may be too late. Leftist-created institutions like the UN have already been co-opted, and these countries are only getting more insistent that the world recognize their values. Indeed, soon, the left may find itself struggling against institutions like the UN as these countries use the UN and other similar bodies to seek to undo those "deviant Western values," even in the West.

And that leads us to an old adage: if you play with fire, you will get burned.