Dominican Catholic school bars US ambassador who brings his ‘husband’ on school visits
“The entry of the United States ambassador is not allowed in this Institute San Juan Bautista,” said all three signs, the first of which appeared above the Santo Domingo private school last Monday.
The controversy over the signs is just the latest expression of the outrage felt by Catholic and Evangelical Protestant leaders at what they see as Brewster’s promotion of the homosexual agenda since being sworn in as ambassador in 2013, the same day the LGBT activist “married” his long time companion Bob J. Satawake.
“He is violating our law every time he visits a school with his husband."
“He is violating our law every time he visits a school with his husband,” Fidel Lorenzo, leader of the 9,000-church Dominican Council of Evangelical Unity told LifeSiteNews. As Lorenzo explained, the Dominican Republic is an officially Christian country which prohibits the teaching of anti-Christian values in its schools.
He described the principal of Saint John the Baptist, Father Manuel Ruiz, as a long time ally in the recently successful Catholic-Evangelical fight to ban abortion totally in the Dominican Republic. Ruiz, he said, shares his horror at the prospect of Brewster visiting schools with his partner in tow, promoting homosexuality by their very presence.
“We don’t respond to him as a homosexual. But we respond to him as an activist for others with his condition,” Lorenzo said. “Every day all the time he doesn’t respect the Vienna Convention [on Diplomatic Relations],” he added, echoing a recent public letter from the country’s Catholic bishops accusing Brewster of breaching diplomatic protocol by interfering in the country’s domestic affairs. The government, however, has given no support to the clerics.
“The Ambassador and his partner present a family model to children that is incompatible with what is enshrined in the Constitution,” the bishops wrote. Enacted in 2010 by a center-right government, the Constitution affirms marriage as the result of a “free decision of a man and a woman to contract marriage.” But Brewster and Satawake, by their public school visits “are trying to confuse our youth and children by presenting them with a distorted model of family, and disparaging in this way the authority of our laws.”
US Ambassador Wally Brewster (L) appears in a video celebrating LGBT Pride Month in 2014 alongside his same-sex partner Bob Satawake.
The dispute grew more heated when Brewster wrote an apparently taunting letter to the senior Catholic prelate, Cardinal Nicolas de Jesus Lopez Rodriguez, noting the arrival of a U.S. military plane loaded with donations for the impoverished country, asking whether the cardinal thought the U.S. should stop this kind of “interference” too.
Yes, replied the cardinal, in a letter which he too made public. “If it were up to me, I would definitely forbid it,” for though the Dominican Republic was poor, “we bear our condition of poverty with dignity, and we do not beg for humiliating charity.” The cardinal also accused Brewster of interfering in the upcoming elections and of treating the country like a “banana republic.”
However St. John the Baptist College’s principal, Father Manuel Ruiz, is highly influential in the country. As the friend both of Cardinal Rodriguez and President Danilo Medina, and the president’s appointed liaison to the Catholic Church, he had a big salary, an official residence and accompanied the country’s leader on official international trips. However when Medina tried to weaken the constitution’s prohibition on abortion in 2013, Ruiz resigned on principle. The Conference of Catholic Bishops then disavowed his action as a personal one that would not change their collaborative policy with the Medina regime.
Ruiz is certainly more in step with the episcopate with his anti-Brewster signage. When his first sign was marred overnight by the message “F**k Intolerance,” he wasted no time adding a new one above but left the damaged one up too, “to let the people judge who are the intolerant.” When the new sign was disfigured he added a third. Ruiz said the public schools “"should never allow the visit of the ambassador and his husband to a school” because it will confuse the students about what constitutes a family.
However, last Thursday the Dominican news site CDN.com.do carried a brief story reporting the signs barring the ambassador had been taken down and replaced by an image of the national coat of arms. Two explanations were offered: the administration told reporters they had taken the signs down because “when they consulted about the signs they received a mixed response,” while Fr. Ruiz said, “It is because starting Friday, the school closes its classes for the Easter period,” however, the school “reaffirmed its rejection of Ambassador James Brewster’s activism.”
Meanwhile, Fidel Lorenzo’s Dominican Council of Evangelical Unity took their complaints about Brewster right to the White House, availing themselves of its petition mechanism to launch an appeal to President Barack Obama to remove his ambassador, “for primarily promoting in his official duties an LGBT agenda inconsistent with the Christian cultural values and tradition of the Dominican Republic.” The petition noted that Brewster had started an LGBT Chamber of Commerce, in violation of the Dominican constitution banning discrimination, and had spent $1 million in USAID money to promote LGBT causes. Within a few days the petition had attracted 31,000 signatures.
So far, the U.S. State Department has not responded to either Dominican news media or to LifeSiteNews about Ambassador Brewster’s problems, though fully endorsed him when his initial appointment came under attack.
