By Breitbart News Network | Created at 2024-12-10 16:08:34 | Updated at 2024-12-25 16:21:02
2 weeks ago
The U.S. Congress has upbraided Secretary of State Antony Blinken for “surreptitiously” introducing an LGBTQ+ agenda into international American diplomacy.
In a strongly worded letter this week, a copy of which was obtained by Breitbart News, Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, accuses Blinken of a “unilateral attempt” to reinterpret the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) to include sexual orientation and gender identity, a move exceeding the authority of the State Department and misrepresenting the U.S. position before other countries.
Blinken’s legal legerdemain seems an attempt to “circumvent the Senate,” Mast notes, and would therefore constitute “clear Department overreach.”
This ideologically motivated step shall “in no way” bind the Trump administration, Mast asserts, and indeed, “incoming State Department appointees must decisively and immediately reject it.”
All individuals possess the same rights and are already covered by the treaty, Mast writes, whereas Blinken’s maneuver is an attack on free expression and free exercise of religion “in order to further a culture war agenda that played a role in your political party losing the 2024 presidential election.”
A U.S. foreign policy that “does not take into account the support of the American people for a new rights claim risks losing domestic legitimacy,” Mast states, citing the State Department’s own report on the Commission on Unalienable Rights.
This letter provides “Congress’s public objection to your description of new ICCPR obligations and Congress’s opposition to any attempt by the Department to expand Bostock beyond its narrow holding about Title VII into the internationally recognized human rights reflected in the Senate-ratified ICCPR,” Mast declares.
The letter ends by formally requesting that Blinken produce by December 19, 2024 “all internal memoranda of other Department communications and documents regarding sexual orientation and gender identity as these terms refer or relate to ICCPR obligations.”
