WASHINGTON, D.C (LifeSiteNews) — LGBT activism groups can access millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money to promote the homosexual and transgender agenda, thanks to a State Department grant program.
The $5 million comes from the State Department’s “Global Equity Fund.”
“The Global Equality Fund (GEF) is a unique and effective public-private partnership comprised of like-minded governments and private sector entities dedicated to advancing and defending the human rights and fundamental freedoms of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI+) persons around the world,” the department’s website states.
It also “provides critical resources to civil society organizations (CSOs) and human rights defenders, including those working to increase the visibility and empowerment of queer women, transgender and other gender diverse people, intersex people, and members of other marginalized LGBTQI+ communities,” the website adds.
“Organizations and activists in foreign countries were eligible to apply. Awardees may use the $750,000 to $1.5 million to fulfill the ‘strategic framework’ of the Global Equality Fund,” The Daily Signal reported. “This framework includes projects that ’empower’ local LGBT movements, prevent ‘violence, discrimination, stigma, and human rights abuses’ against LGBT individuals, promote ‘full social inclusion” for them, and address ‘critical issues of justice.'” There will be up to six groups awarded money from the $5 million pot.
The fund drew criticism from a long-time Foreign Service Officer who now researches immigration issues for the Heritage Foundation.
“The State Department exists to promote U.S. interests and values abroad, including tolerance for diverse beliefs,” Simon Hankinson told The Daily Signal. “America should always speak out against persecution of people based on their immutable characteristics, politics, or faith.”
“But trying to impose dogmas that are highly contentious domestically, like radical gender ideology and various branches of ‘critical theory,’ will be seen as impertinent at best and cultural colonialism at worst,” Hankinson told the Daily Signal, a publication of the Heritage Foundation.
This is not the first time that a Democratic president has used the fund to push a leftist, pro-LGBT agenda.
President Barack Obama started the fund in 2011 to push the LGBT agenda, as reported by the Center for Family & Human Rights (C-Fam).
“The Obama State Department is putting enormous pressure on traditional countries to regularize, promote, and protect what many consider to be disordered, even psychotic behavior, specifically related to those who think they are the wrong sex,” C-Fam president Austin Ruse wrote in 2016.
In that year, the State Department invited “applications for groups that want to promote transgenderism in foreign countries. The grants are aimed in part at legal groups to force governments to recognize the transgender ideology, that is, the ideas aimed at normalizing transgendered behavior,” Ruse reported.
The fund is part of a promise by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2011 to make the LGBT agenda central to President Obama’s foreign policy.