Meet The Commanders Of Mike Pompeo's God Hates Fags Commission On 'Human Rights'!

Yes, there is an Aunt Lydia too. In fact, she is the boss!

Since everything is hell now, and terrible, disgusting and/or heartbreaking news comes out of Washington about a thousand times a minute, you might not have heard about Secretary of State Jesus-Willikers McWestboroBaptist and his new international commission on human rights. Doesn't that sound nice? Human rights are a great thing! And Mike Pompeo's new commission is focused on "unalienable rights," and we certainly agree, we don't want any Sigourney Weaver aliens mucking around in our human rights!

Pompeo explained earlier this week, when he officially announced the Commission on Unalienable Rights:

The commission is composed of human rights experts, philosophers, and activists, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents of varied background and beliefs, who will provide me with advice on human rights grounded in our nation's founding principles and the principles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

That sounds just great, but this is Mike Pompeo, so you are probably wondering where the fundamentalist Christian Jesus Hitler poison is. Perhaps this line will give you a clue?

As human rights claims have proliferated, some claims have come into tension with one another, provoking questions and clashes about which rights are entitled to gain respect. Nation-states and international institutions remain confused about their respective responsibilities concerning human rights.

Human rights clashing with other human rights, whatever (gay) could he possibly (gay) mean ? (He means God Hates Fags. And also women.)

He's being coy about it, and we understand why. It's really not acceptable in polite western society to say you're assembling a far-right religious body in order to take Chick-fil-A shits all over the LGBT community. Such awful sentiments are also notably absent from Pompeo's press comments, or from the accompanying op-ed he wrote in the Wall Street Journal :

America's Founders defined unalienable rights as including "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." They designed the Constitution to protect individual dignity and freedom. A moral foreign policy should be grounded in this conception of human rights.

Yet after the Cold War ended, many human-rights advocates turned their energy to new categories of rights. These rights often sound noble and just. But when politicians and bureaucrats create new rights, they blur the distinction between unalienable rights and ad hoc rights granted by governments. Unalienable rights are by nature universal. Not everything good, or everything granted by a government, can be a universal right. Loose talk of "rights" unmoors us from the principles of liberal democracy.

Pompeo is just super-upset about all these newfangled "rights" that he doesn't view as "unalienable" (granted by Pompeo's Landover Baptist version of God), especially the ones that started cropping up after the Cold War. Does he need to dress up in drag and lip sync it out for you?

Secondly, you need to know the phrase "natural law," the intellectual-soundin' religious-right-ese buzzphrase that most closely translates as ... surprise, it translates as God Hates Fags! It is the "philosophy" that underpins most of religious right "scholarship" today, and featured in the dissents against Obergefell v. Hodges , which gave gays and lesbians the right to marry. Though the phrase isn't splattered all over this week's announcements, they gave away the game back in May when the State Department announced this was going to happen:

The Commission will provide fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation's founding principles ofnatural lawand natural rights.

Basically, the idea is that rights come from God, God made them male and female, so NO BUTTSEX OR TRANSGENDERS. It is a very scholarly movement. As LGBTNation reports, Family Research Council hate group leader Tony Perkins used it in 2012 to argue against marriage equality, saying it violates "natural law." And here's that same hate group leader, praising this new "natural law" commission:

"We applaud the creation of this commission as another way of ensuring that the protection of these fundamental rights – the most foundational of which is freedom of religion or belief – is a core element of strategic policy discussions," said Perkins.

Right. Because their white supremacist religious freedoms trump all the other rights, especially the gross ones Mike Pompeo doesn't like.

Here's some ABC News reporting on Princeton University bigot Robert George, who is pretty much the author of the concept of "natural law," who is extremely well known to LGBT activists for his vicious work against LGBT equality, and who was reportedly a big part of the formation of Pompeo's new commission:

Use of the term "natural law" has concerned some advocacy groups and department staff, as it is interpreted in this case as "God-given" or religiously-based rights that affect issues like sexuality, abortion rights, and more. In particular, the phrase has been prominent in the work of Princeton professor Robert George.

George has played a prominent role in the creation of the commission, according to a source familiar with the plans for the commission. George, co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage, a nonprofit that advocates against same-sex marriage, is among the 15 academics recommended to make up the panel, according to the source.

Author of the 1999 book "In Defense of Natural Law," where he argued against homosexuality and abortion rights and in favor of religious liberty, George also wrote the original concept note that outlined a vision for the commission, the source said.

The commission "is absolutely about those issues, but it's not explicit in the paper," the source said. "It questions whether and which human rights are universal."

In other words, they're admitting that all the innocuous-sounding words they're using are a Trojan horse for institutionalizing bigotry in Secretary Jesusfucker's State Department.

George is not on the board of the commission Pompeo announced this week, but oh the garbage humans who are! Masha Gessen runs down some of the list in The New Yorker , and GLAAD chased down some more of 'em:

• There's the chair, Mary Ann Glendon from Harvard, who thinks gays are gross, and that American efforts to promote LGBT equality abroad are "neo-colonialism." (Weird how they are concerned about that for the first time ever.) GLAAD also notes that Glendon " recently wrote a blurb for a viciously anti-trans book, calling the book -- which culminates in a plan of action that calls for the complete erasure of trans people -- 'eminently readable and insightful.'" Oh good, because the Trump administration needed another "Final Solution" type person in the room. Right Wing Watch also notes that Glendon did not like how the Boston Globe investigated sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, arguing that "[I]f fairness and accuracy have anything to do with it, awarding the Pulitzer to the Boston Globe would be like giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Osama bin Laden." SHE SEEMS NICE.

• There's Christopher Tollefsen from the University of South Carolina, who, as Gessen points out, "has argued that the Pope went too far when he suggested that the use of contraceptives may be permissible to prevent transmission of the Zika virus to newborns." Oh, that hippie liberal gay pope! Tollefsen hates trans people too, surprise.

• There's Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson, who thinks gays getting married is "one of the signs of the End Times."

• There's Meir Soloveichik, who thinks gay marriage is a slippery slope to bestiality.

And so many more! And like, maybe one out of the entire group isn't a verified bigot! And several are severe anti-abortion activists!

This shit is dangerous, and people need to know that, despite completely dumb fucking arguments from stupid fucking quislings who work at the White House, there is zero question that the Trump administration is the most viciously anti-gay in modern history, and the people Trump has hired have been empowered to do great damage to Americans they don't think are made quite as much in God's image as they fancy themselves to be.

Gone (at least for now) are the days of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telling the world that women's rights are human rights and gay rights are human rights. In Mike Pompeo's world, that only counts if your lady rights or gay rights aren't currently hurting the thin-skinned feelings of conservative white Christian people. If they are, you are fucked.

Under His eye, y'all!

[ Wall Street Journal / ABC News ]

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