Richard Grenell: An American Hero Under Attack No figure in the Trump administration has been a greater champion of equality for gay people. Daniel Greenfield
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/richard-grenell-american-hero-under-attack-daniel-greenfield/
President Trump’s new appointee to be the Acting Director of National Intelligence is under vicious attack from the left and from the LGBT Left in particular – a telling fact since no figure in the Trump administration has been a greater champion of equality for gay people.
After the attacks of September 11, the position of the Director of National Intelligence was created to coordinate all of our intelligence agencies against the external terror threat. As the Spygate scandal continues to undermine trust in the intelligence community, the position is more important than ever.
President Trump’s appointment of Richard Grenell as Acting Director has infuriated the Obama veterans and holdovers responsible for Spygate, as well as the LGBT Left.
As Trump’s ambassador to Germany, Grenell successfully led tariff negotiations with German automakers, helped gain subsidies for American energy shipments to Germany, convinced most major German companies to pull out of Iran, closed German airspace to an Iranian airline, stopped $300 million euros in gold and currency from going to Iran, and got Germany to ban Hezbollah.
Coming off this successful winning streak, Grenell is already under vicious attack because his track record shows that he can get things done, and get them done for America. And that’s the last thing that the anti-American Left wants.
The old allies of James Clapper and Susan Rice, Obama’s intelligence bosses, fear that Grenell’s appointment will finally allow Trump to clean house and expose their abuses of power, while the organized LGBT Left fears that Grenell will expose their hypocrisy and lack of concern for gay people.
Both of these big lies converge on Iran.
The Obama intel veterans have used every dirty trick, in and out of office, to help Iran. While the LGBT Left has been infuriated by Grenell’s insistence on exposing Iran’s executions of gay people.
And the truly infuriating thing for leftwing hypocrites is that Grenell is gay.
President Trump’s appointment of Grenell as acting director makes him the first openly gay cabinet member. But instead of welcoming the appointment, Grenell’s role has been met with hostility, contempt, and disdain by the very organizations who claim to be fighting for gay rights.
When Grenell led President Trump’s campaign to decriminalize homosexuality around the world, he took on Iran and other, mostly Islamic countries governed by Sharia law, where homosexuality is punishable with death.
“I want them to understand that you cannot put someone in jail or kill someone simply for being gay,” he had told a UN session on the decriminalization of homosexuality. “I want these countries to be called out, I want them to feel the pressure. This list should be read out every day.”
The countries began with Afghanistan and included Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.
Instead of welcoming Grenell’s advocacy for gay rights, the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD, funded by Harvey Weinstein, attacked or dismissed the move while attacking the Trump administration.
The Advocate complained that Grenell is “known for insulting powerful women, such as Hillary Clinton and Rachel Maddow”. GLAAD failed to note the appointment of the first openly gay cabinet member. The Human Rights Campaign spent its time touting assorted Democrats running for office, but utterly ignored Grenell’s appointment. As did the usual run of gay rights groups and publications.
“GLAAD,” Grenell later noted, “has this whole immigration thing, it’s a movement beyond anything that has to do with gays and lesbians.”
The LGBT Left did not want to talk about the execution of gay men in Iran. Instead it wanted to be part of the “resistance” to the Trump administration even if that meant letting gay people in Muslim countries die.
Out Magazine ran an op-ed claiming that decriminalizing homosexuality was an “old racist tactic”.
OutRight Action International’s executive director had attacked Grenell’s UN advocacy for the decriminalization of homosexuality by insisting that, “The drivers of violence and discrimination against LGBTQI people are stereotypical notions of who a woman or a man should be, so unless we tackle root causes, such as biological determinism, then we won’t really be able to fully defend the rights of LGBTQI people.” Forget Islamic law and its death penalties. The real threat to gay people was biology.
OutRight understandably has other priorities. It’s currently protesting the lack of diversity at the Oscars.
Grenell not only called out the brutality of Islamic countries by name, tweeting about the violations of the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights by members of the Human Rights Council, by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Somalia, Nigeria, Qatar, Egypt, Mauritania, Sudan and Libya, but challenged Europeans, as ambassador to Germany, and the LGBT Left, as an openly gay diplomat, over their hypocrisy.
“Many of our European allies have Embassies in Tehran. This barbaric act must not go unanswered. Speak up,” he had urged European nations.
“People around the world who are fighting for equality are totally annoyed at the New York, Hollywood, West Hollywood gays who raise a lot of money for black tie events, but who aren’t doing a thing to help our brothers and sisters in Lebanon who are getting arrested,” Grenell later told Dave Rubin.
Gay rights groups accused him of a covert strategy to target Iran. European diplomats wanted to go on promoting sex ed globally, instead of confronting Sharia law.
While the UN Human Rights Council, Amnesty International, and the Europeans wanted to bash Israel, Grenell wanted to talk about gay people being hanged, murdered, and arrested in the Middle East.
And while the LGBT Left wanted to attack the Trump administration over immigration, Grenell challenged it to cross the intersectional red line and address the Sharia executions of gay men.
While the LGBT Left attacked or ignored the appointment of the first openly gay cabinet member, its constituent groups have thrown their support behind Pete Buttigieg even though he’s just the mayor of a failed city.
Why do GLAAD and HRC ignore Grenell’s real achievements while focusing on Buttigieg?
Beyond taking pictures of himself in a uniform to prep for a future run for higher office, what has Pete Buttigieg done to protect gay people?
When Grenell fought to stop countries like Iran from killing gay people, Buttigieg and the LGBT Left insisted that the real challenge was in the United States.
America, not Iran, was the real threat to gay people.
Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay presidential candidate, has yet to condemn Iran’s execution of gay people. He has urged rejoining the agreement that allows Iran to develop its nuclear program without conditioning it on human rights. The closest he came to even mentioning the situation for gay people in Iran was when Meghan McCain asked him on The View about Rep. Omar’s comparison of Israel to Iran.
“People like me get strung up in Iran,” Buttigieg noted.
When the Washington Post asked Buttigieg whether he would use his foreign policy to advance gay rights, he replied that, “progress on LGBTQ rights is important, as are women’s rights and racial justice and economic justice and political speech and all the things we care about”.
Then he argued that, “it only works if we actually have our own house in order. And so from human rights to democracy promotion to LGBT issues to climate, we had better be walking the walk before we go out on the world stage and push other countries to do the same.”
The real problem, Buttigieg was saying, isn’t in Iran or in Saudi Arabia. It’s in America. Until we achieve some impossible standard of human rights perfection, we have no right to tell Muslim countries that they shouldn’t hang gay people. Only, one day, when the Oscars are truly diverse, as HRC, GLAAD, and OutRight want them to be, maybe we can address the executions of gay people in Muslim countries.
And probably not then either.
That’s why in the argument between Grenell and Buttigieg, they chose Buttigieg over actually preventing the killing of gay people. It’s also why President Trump chose Grenell.
The gay rights groups that attacked Grenell have shown where their true priorities lie.
Just as he had in Germany and at the United Nations, Grenell exposed the hypocrisy of human rights activists who use gay rights as a weapon to enforce a larger politically correct consensus with no interest in actually protecting gay people from harm.
The Democrats are promising gay people a place in an intersectional coalition, in which Rep. Omar and Islamists rank ahead of them, but in which the campaign for Oscar representation will go on. Meanwhile, President Trump and Richard Grenell, his Acting Director of National Intelligence, will actually protect the lives of gay people against Islamic terror and violence. Like the Pulse massacre.
President Trump’s new appointee has actually fought to stop Iran from killing gay people while Buttigieg and his political friends will fight to see that Iran gets all the money it needs to keep on killing gay people and everyone else.
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