I was surfing over at Joe.My.God and noticed a very interesting tweet from the State Department a couple of hours old:
The press statement from the State Department reads:
We are increasingly concerned about the situation in the Republic of Chechnya, where there have been numerous credible reports indicating the detention of at least 100 men on the basis of their sexual orientation. Some reports indicate many of those arrested have been tortured, in some cases leading to death. We categorically condemn the persecution of individuals based on their sexual orientation or any other basis.
We are deeply disturbed by recent public statements by Chechen authorities that condone and incite violence against LGBTI persons. We urge Russian federal authorities to speak out against such practices, take steps to ensure the release of anyone wrongfully detained, conduct an independent and credible investigation into these, reports and hold any perpetrators responsible.
Reading further into the comment section at JMG, I re-learned something that I recalled reading of once upon the announcement of Rex Tillerson’s appointment to the State Department; Rex Tillerson’s leadership role in ensuring that the Boy Scouts of America would accept openly gay Boy Scouts.
Here’s a 12/14/16 report from McClatchy:
And from 2010 to 2012. Rex Tillerson – Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of state and the CEO of ExxonMobil – headed the Boy Scouts as a national push began to let openly gay boys join the group.
Tillerson wasn’t president of the organization in 2013, when the group finally allowed gays to participate, but he was “intimately involved” in the push, according to Zach Wahls, an Eagle Scout who co-founded Scouts for Equality, a national campaign to end discrimination in the Boy Scouts.
“My understanding is that he saw the writing on the wall,” Wahls said. “He supported the policy change even though that changed the conservative culture. This is a guy who is able to write an eight figure check for fun. He has a lot of institutional power within the Boy Scouts.”
Tillerson’s fellow Boy Scouts board member, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, recommended Tillerson to Trump for the defense chief job.
The Exxon CEO, an Eagle Scout who lives in Bartonville, north of Fort Worth, is a rock-ribbed conservative who’s donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates over the years and leads a company accused of misleading the public on the effects of climate change. But he saw liberalizing Boy Scout membership policies as a way to save an organization in decline.
For that reason, social conservatives
were not at all happy with The Occupant’s choice of Rex Tillerson to lead the State Department and for that very reason of Tillerson’s advocacy for the Boy Scouts of America.
I have no problem accepting that Secretary Tillerson is genuinely concerned about the harassment and murder of LGBTI persons in Chechnya.
I also have no problem accepting Tillerson’s ineptitude in his job performance as Secretary of State, to this point; an ineptitude that, in part, has exacerbated the possibilities of diplomatic solutions in “hotspots” like Syria and North Korea.
Syria’s alliance with Russia coupled with The Occupant’s administration’s apparent need to seemingly distance itself from its own….odd (and possibly traitorous) relationship with Russia, I can (and do) also read this as a small step in telling Russia and Vladimir Putin to “talk to the hand.”
Given the recent and ongoing “palace intrigue” involving The Occupant’s son-in-law, senior adviser, and Mr. Everything, Jared Kushner and a possible attempt to help The Occupant’s quite flaccid poll numbers and “normalize” him to the American public, a small move like this doesn’t hurt.
Given the breadth and depth of just how badly this administration has performed in both the domestic and foreign policy arenas its first two and a half months in office, this State Department tweet concerning the harassment and murder of LGBTI’s in Chechnya seems an awful lot like “pinkwashing” to me, in the scheme of things.
The State Department’s concern for LGBT Chechens is duly noted.