Honduras Is Test of New US Policy on Gay Rights Around the World - by Tim Johnson

From U.N. chambers to the halls of the State Department, global pressure on countries to protect the rights of gay people and transgender people is rising.

For Josue Hernandez, the new emphasis can't come fast enough.

The 33-year-old Honduran gay activist bears the scar of the bullet that grazed his skull in an attack a few years ago. He's moved the office of his advocacy group four times. Still, he feels hunted in what is arguably the most homophobic nation in the Americas. "We are in a deplorable state," Hernandez said of gays in Honduras. "When we walk the streets, people shout insults at us and throw rocks. Parents move their children away." From U.N. chambers to the halls of the State Department, global pressure on countries to protect the rights of gay people and transgender people is rising.

Laws criminalizing homosexuality have led the U.S. and British governments to threaten economic assistance to Malawi, Ghana and Uganda in Africa. "It does translate into dollars and cents," Bromley, chairman of the Council for Global Equality, a Washington-based advocacy group, said, referring to the economic assistance, but "conditionality really is not the main tool in the tool kit." 

He said a greater emphasis on providing training and funding to gay rights groups operating in difficult environments, such as Russia, has the potential for lasting impact, while U.S. diplomats bring up gay rights as part of broader human rights discussions.

Note EU-Digest: the other area which needs urgent attention when it comes to Gay Rights is the Middle East . Homosexuals of the Arab world stay out of sight because they are condemned by religious leaders, oppressive regimes and their own relatives. 

Notorious for its adherence to Wahhabism, a puritanical strain of Islam, and as the birthplace of most of the 9/11 hijackers, Saudi Arabia is the only Arab country that claims sharia, or Islamic law, as its sole legal code. The list of prohibitions is long: It’s haram—forbidden—to smoke, drink, go to discos, or mix with an unrelated person of the opposite gender. The rules are enforced by the mutawwa'in, religious authorities employed by the government’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. 

This legal and public condemnation notwithstanding, the kingdom leaves considerable space for homosexual behavior. As long as gays and lesbians maintain a public front of obeisance to Wahhabist norms, they are left to do what they want in private. In an an interview by a Western Newspaper a Syrian who moved to Riyadh in 2000, even calls the Saudi capital a “gay heaven.” 

Nevertheless homosexuality is illegal in Saudi Arabia and is punished by flogging, jail or death.

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