WASHINGTON, Mar 23 2017 – Several religious officials, including pastors from across the Caribbean, have called on the United States to halt the promotion of LGBT and intersex rights abroad.
A report published in the Washington Blade, a LGBT publication, said 289 Ministers of Religion from The Bahamas, St. Maarten, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana made the request in a letter sent to US President Donald Trump on January 31.
“We write to you as concerned Christian ministers and churches from the Caribbean region (including the Bahamas) who hope and pray that the United States, under your leadership, will once again cast a light from ‘The City upon a Hill’ of which your American forefathers and President Ronald Reagan so frequently spoke,” the letter said.
“Sadly, during recent years, that City has too often cast shadows instead of light.”
“We refer specifically to the policies of the U.S. State Department and other government agencies involved in foreign policy that have undertaken to coerce our countries into accepting a mistaken version of marriage.”
According to the Washington Blade, the letter specifically notes the appointment of Randy Berry as the special U.S. envoy for the promotion of LGBT and intersex rights in 2015 was central to “the promotion of same-sex marriage” in American foreign policy.
It also questions then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2011 speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council in which she said “gay rights are human rights.”
“We have our rights by virtue of being human beings and not by anything else — not our ethnicity, not our religion, not our race, not our tribe and certainly not our sexual orientation,” the letter continued.
The leaders also pointed out that “several of your government agencies” are “using executive orders to foist transgender confusion through the bathroom issue on your public schools by threatening the loss of federal funds.”
“Please understand that this same kind of coercion is being used against our countries to force us to fall in line with the entire same-sex agenda.”
Last year, the Obama administration advised public schools that Title IX of the U.S. Education Amendments of 1972 requires them to allow trans students to use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity.
Trump rescinded this guidance on February 22.
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