In West Africa, Trudeau soft peddles his gvmt’s strident LGBT advocacy
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau began a two-day
visit to the impoverished West African nation of Liberia this week by treading
delicately around his government’s frank encouragement of homosexual and
transgender status in Canada and internationally.
Global Affairs Canada’s website offers more than 130
links to projects around the world from Kashish to Manila and Dominica with
which it is promoting homosexuality, but Trudeau shied from touting the issue
in the heart of a region that is strongly opposed to that agenda.
Yet he is signalling that he will advocate “LGBT
rights” in an address Saturday morning in Madagascar when speaking to La
Francophonie, a consortium of the world’s nations with close ties to French
language and culture.
Trudeau came to Liberia to talk about the $11.5
million his government was spreading across West Africa over the next five
years to advance the economic and social status of women. He encouraged the
development of agriculture and condemned violence against women without
controversy.
But at a joint press conference with President Ellen
Johnson Sirleaf a reporter asked him about the opposition to same-sex
“marriage” in Liberia. (Sirleaf has won a Nobel Prize for her efforts towards
the advancement of women but has been criticized for not applying herself
similarly to the LGBT agenda.)
Trudeau responded, “The fact is, different countries
have different paces of evolution in terms of recognizing and enshrining those
rights, but we can see that there has been tremendous progress over the years
in many different areas.”
When Sirleaf was asked to comment, she said,
"Liberia has no laws that restrict the rights of individuals to their own
choices.”
While Liberia itself was not included in the Pew Forum
on Religion and Public Life’s 2013 world survey on homosexuality, disapproval
of homosexuality ranged from 96 percent in Senegal and Ghana just to the west
to 98 percent in Nigeria just to the east.
Liberian law does not mention homosexuality in its
penal code, but it does criminalize as “sodomy” and “deviate sexual
intercourse” any kind of non-genital sexual relations between unmarried
partners, whether in same-sex or opposite-sex couplings.
According to a U.S. Department of State report in
2012, documented reports of harassment and violence against LGBT people are
few, perhaps out of fear that complaints would bring retaliation.
“The...culture is strongly opposed to homosexuality,”
the report stated. “LGBT persons were cautious about revealing their sexual
identities, and groups that supported the rights of LGBT persons did so quietly
due to fear of retaliation.”
