Hard Choices

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

  Every year the State Department publishes a report detailing cases of religious persecution around the world. For example, in Iran authorities repress Sufi Muslims, evangelical Christians, Jews, Bahais, Sunnis, Ahmadis, and others who do not share the government’s religious views. We also tracked a troubling resurgence of anti-Semitism in parts of Europe; in countries like France, Poland, and the Netherlands swastikas were spray-painted on Jewish tombs, schools, synagogues, and kosher shops.

  In China the government cracked down on unregistered “house churches” and the Christians who worshipped in them, as well as Uighur Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists. On my first trip to China as Secretary, in February 2009, I attended a service in one of these house churches to send a message to the government about religious freedom.

  Our interest in protecting religious liberty and the rights of minorities went beyond a moral argument. There were also important strategic considerations, particularly in societies in transition. When I visited Egypt in 2012, the Coptic Christians wondered whether they would be accorded the same rights and respect as all Egyptians by their new government. In Burma ethnic Rohingya Muslims continue to be denied full citizenship and equal opportunities for education, employment, and travel. What Egypt, Burma, and other countries decide on protections for these religious minorities will have a major impact on the lives of their people and will go a long way toward determining whether these countries are able to achieve stability and democracy. History teaches us that when the rights of minorities are secure, societies are more stable and everyone benefits. As I said in Alexandria, Egypt, in the hot tumultuous summer of 2012, “Real democracy means that every citizen has the right to live, work, and worship as they choose, whether they are man or woman, Muslim or Christian, or from any other background. Real democracy means that no group or faction or leader can impose their will, their ideology, their religion, their desires on anyone else.”

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  Over the years, I have often returned to an argument from my speech at the UN marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Here we are at the very close of the 20th century, a century that has been scorched by war time and time again. If the history of this century teaches us anything, it is that whenever the dignity of any individual or group is compromised by the derogation of who they are, of some essential attribute they possess, then we all leave ourselves open to nightmares to come.” I urged that we learn the lesson and extend the circle of citizenship and human dignity to include everyone without exception.

  When I said those words, I had in mind not only the women and girls around the world who continued to be marginalized in so many ways but other “invisibles,” from religious and ethnic minorities to people with disabilities to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. When I look back on my time as Secretary, I’m proud of the work we did to extend the circle of human dignity and human rights to include people historically excluded.

  In January 2011, the world learned about David Kato. He was a gay activist in Uganda, well known in that country and in international advocacy circles. He had been threatened many times, including on the front page of a Ugandan newspaper, which had published a photo of David and others under the words “HANG THEM.” Eventually someone followed through on the threats. David was killed in what police said was a robbery but was more likely an execution.

  Like many people in Uganda and around the world, I was appalled that the police and government had done little to protect David after the public calls for his murder. But this was about more than police incompetence. The Ugandan Parliament was considering a bill to make being gay a crime punishable by death. A high-ranking government official—the Minister of Ethics and Integrity, no less—gave an interview in which he said dismissively, “Homosexuals can forget about human rights.” LGBT people in Uganda were routinely harassed and attacked, and the authorities did virtually nothing to stop it. When I raised these issues with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, he ridiculed my concerns. “Oh, Hillary, here you go again,” he would say. David’s death wasn’t an isolated incident; it was the result of a nationwide campaign to suppress LGBT people by any means necessary, and the government was part of it.

  I asked for a briefing on David’s life and work and read an interview he gave in 2009 in which he said he wanted to be “a good human rights defender, not a dead one, but an alive one.” He had that opportunity stolen from him, but others were continuing his work, and I wanted the United States to be firmly in their corner.

  Abuse of LGBT people is by no means exclusive to Uganda. As of this writing, more than eighty countries worldwide, from the Caribbean to the Middle East to South Asia, have in one way or another made it a crime to be LGBT. People are jailed for having same-sex relationships, for wearing clothes that go against typical gender norms, or simply for saying that they are LGBT. Uganda’s neighbor Kenya has been sending gay men to prison for years. In northern Nigeria gay men can still face death by stoning. In Cameroon in 2012, a man was sent to jail simply for sending a text to another man that expressed romantic love. I was deeply troubled when Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan and Uganda’s Museveni both signed harsh, repressive antihomosexuality bills in early 2014. Homosexuality was already criminalized in both countries, but the new Nigerian law provides for a prison sentence of fourteen years for engaging in a same-sex relationship and ten years for LGBT advocacy, and some acts under the new Ugandan law are punishable by a life sentence.

  The regime of Vladimir Putin in Russia has enacted a series of antigay laws, prohibiting the adoption of Russian children by gay couples or any couples from countries that allow same-sex marriage, and making it a crime to promote gay rights or even discuss homosexuality around children. When I pressed Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to do more to protect the rights of LGBT people, the normally cool and restrained diplomat turned nasty. Russians don’t have a problem with homosexuals, he told me, just with their “propaganda.” “Why do ‘these people’ have to go around flaunting it? Russians shouldn’t have to put up with that.” Lavrov was contemptuous of the idea of being “on the right side of history” on this issue; that was just “sentimental nonsense.” I tried to explain the steps we were taking to repeal “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and open up our military to LGBT service members, and I asked my Defense Department traveling representative Admiral Harry Harris to elaborate. The Russian side of the table started snickering. “Oh, he is gay?” one of them asked in a stage whisper. Harry isn’t and couldn’t care less about Russian jibes, but I was appalled that my sophisticated Russian counterparts were casually and cruelly parroting offensive talking points.

  The dismal state of LGBT rights around the world had been on the U.S. human rights radar for some time. Since 1993, when reporting instructions were changed to include sexual orientation, the State Department has highlighted abuses faced by LGBT communities around the world in its annual Human Rights Report and has raised the issue in our dealings with other governments, as I did with Lavrov and Museveni and others. We also did quite a bit of outreach to LGBT populations through PEPFAR, which not only helped save millions of lives but brought people who had been isolated into the public sphere.

  But I decided our human rights efforts needed an upgrade. There was too much evidence that the climate for LGBT people was deteriorating in many parts of the world. This was in stark opposition to the remarkable progress in other places, including the United States. It was a terrible irony: In some parts of the world life for LGBT people was better than ever; in others it had never been worse.

  Meanwhile, I looked for ways to make progress closer to home, by better supporting the LGBT members of the State Department family. In earlier generations talented members of the Foreign Service had been forced to resign when their sexual orientation became known. Those days were gone, but there were still plenty of rules in place that made life harder for our LGBT colleagues. So in 2009, I extended th
e full range of legally available benefits and allowances to same-sex domestic partners of Foreign Service staff serving abroad. In 2010, I directed that the State Department’s equal employment opportunity policy explicitly protect against discriminatory treatment of employees and job applicants based on gender identity. We also made it easier for Americans to change the sex listed on their passport and made it possible for same-sex couples to obtain passports under the names recognized by their state through their marriage or civil union. To support the antibullying movement started by the columnist Dan Savage, I recorded an “It Gets Better” video that went viral. I don’t know if my words of comfort and encouragement reached any at-risk teenagers, but I hope they did.

  I supported the State Department’s annual Pride event, hosted by a group called GLIFAA, Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies. As the name suggests, these are LGBT people who work in U.S. foreign affairs, so they have a strong professional stake in improving the climate for LGBT people abroad, as well as here at home. The annual Pride celebration they organized at State was at once joyful and purposeful. At the 2010 Pride celebration, after recapping some of the progress we’d made together in the past year, I turned to the terrible harms still being suffered by LGBT people worldwide. “These dangers are not gay issues—this is a human rights issue,” I said. The room burst into whoops and cheers. I went on: “Just as I was very proud to say the obvious more than fifteen years ago in Beijing, that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, let me say today that human rights are gay rights and gay rights are human rights, once and for all.” Again loud, sustained applause. Of course, I had hoped that my remarks would be well received, but I was surprised by the passionate reaction from the crowd. Clearly this was something people had been waiting to hear even more fervently than I had realized. Later Dan Baer, an active member of GLIFAA, confirmed this. “You need to say this to the world,” he told me.

  With that the work began on one of the most memorable speeches I delivered as Secretary of State.

  Most of my major speeches as Secretary were, naturally, thick with foreign policy. They laid out multiyear, multipronged strategies on complex issues. Often they included carefully worded caveats, encoded warnings, and at least a few instances of diplomatic jargon. My speechwriters worked hard to make every one accessible to the broadest possible audience, but the fact remained: Foreign policy speeches tend to be wonky, and their most fervent listeners and readers are foreign policy professionals, whether government officials, think tank experts, or journalists on the beat.

  I wanted this speech to be different. I wanted it to mean something to LGBT people in lots of different circumstances—not just the activists on the front lines, fluent in the argot of human rights, but also the bullied teenager in rural America, or Armenia or Algeria, for that matter. I wanted it to be simple and direct—the exact opposite of the over-the-top, darkly suggestive language you hear in many antigay jeremiads. I wanted it to at least have a chance at convincing dubious listeners, so it needed to be reasonable and respectful, without backing a millimeter away from its defense of human rights. Most of all, I wanted it to send a clear message to the leaders of countries everywhere: Protecting their LGBT citizens was part of their human rights obligations, and the world was watching to make sure they’d meet them.

  Before we started writing the speech, I wanted to figure out where I’d give it, since on a topic this sensitive the location and occasion would matter more than usual. It was early 2011. I had travel scheduled to just about every region of the world in the coming months. Would one of those trips be the right one? I was going to Africa in August, and we briefly considered going to Uganda and giving the speech in David Kato’s memory, but ruled that out pretty quickly. I wanted to avoid at all costs suggesting that antigay violence is just an African problem rather than a global problem, or giving local bigots an excuse to complain about U.S. bullying. I wanted the only story to be the message of the speech itself.

  We looked at the calendar; maybe we should choose a significant date rather than a significant location. The 2011 Pride celebration in June? No—if I gave the speech in the United States, it wouldn’t be the speech I envisioned. The press would cover it from a domestic political angle, if they covered it at all. (Talking about LGBT rights during Pride Month isn’t exactly newsworthy.) It just wouldn’t make the same impact.

  Eventually Jake Sullivan and Dan Baer both had the same idea: I should deliver the speech in Geneva, at the headquarters of the UN Human Rights Council. If my goal was to firmly place LGBT rights within the international community’s framework of human rights, there was no better place to do it.

  So we had a place. What about a date? We decided on the first week of December, to mark the anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, just as I had done back in 1997. The historical significance was meaningful; more practically, I was already scheduled to be in Europe that week for meetings at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Adding a stop in Geneva would be easy.

  Writing the speech wasn’t easy. I wanted to refute the most egregious myths that antigay zealots spread as truth, including those that government Ministers had said in all seriousness to me when I pressed them to treat LGBT people humanely. My speechwriter Megan Rooney researched the most outlandish examples. There were so many: that gay people were mentally ill child abusers; that God wanted us to reject and isolate them; that poor countries couldn’t afford to care about human rights; that these countries didn’t have any LGBT people at all. That’s what Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told an audience at Columbia University in 2007, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals, like in your country.” I’d heard similar things in private many times.

  In our first draft we listed five common myths and then debunked them one by one. The speech evolved quite a bit over several successive drafts, but we ended up sticking with that basic structure throughout. I knew the speech needed to be exceedingly calm and measured if it had any chance of changing anyone’s mind, so many of my edits were aimed at that; for example, “five myths” became “five issues.” I thought it was important to acknowledge that many views on LGBT people are rooted in religious and cultural traditions that hold great meaning in people’s lives and shouldn’t be treated contemptuously. “I come here before you with respect, understanding and humility,” I wrote. The strength of the ideas were undiminished by the more measured language.

  I told Megan to go back to my 1995 Beijing speech and use that as a model. After all, what I wanted to do here was very similar: name the ugly things happening to this group of people and declare that they are human rights violations, for the simple fact is that these people are human beings. That was it: no complex arguments, no thundering rhetoric, just a few unadorned assertions that were long overdue.

  There were a few strategic questions we needed to answer. First: Should we “name and shame” countries that had taken steps in the wrong direction? An early draft of the speech called out Uganda, among others. I decided that was a mistake. Any list would be incomplete; plus I knew that any country singled out for criticism would feel obligated to respond, most likely defensively and angrily. After all, the United States has made strides, but we still have work to do on equality for LGBT Americans. I wanted this speech to make leaders think, not lash out.

  Instead, we looked for examples of non-Western countries that had made great progress on LGBT rights. What better way was there to refute the myth that supporting LGBT people was a Western, colonialist practice? Happily there were many to choose from. In the end I praised Mongolia, Nepal, South Africa, India, Argentina, and Colombia and quoted the former President of Botswana.

  The second question: How should we advertise the speech? If we said it was about LGBT human rights, we knew some people—exactly the people we wanted to reach—would stay away. So we decided to bill it simply as a human rights speech marking the anniversary of the Universal Declaration, and leave it
at that.

  In the weeks leading up to the speech, once most of it was set, I kept my ears open for stories and ideas worth adding. At a meeting at the White House the Commandant of the Marine Corps shared an anecdote about the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. “I was against it and I said so at the time,” he told me. “But once it happened I saw that my fears were unfounded.” The Marines had embraced the change with proud professionalism, he added. Into the speech it went. My Legal Advisor Harold Koh suggested adding something about the importance of empathy, walking in someone else’s shoes. It ended up being one of the loveliest parts of the speech.

  Finally, we left for Europe. Switzerland was to be the third country in a five-country tour, one country per day. In Germany I led the U.S. delegation at a conference on Afghanistan. In Lithuania, I attended a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. When we finally arrived at our small, charming hotel in Vilnius, many of my staff headed to the hotel bar for a late dinner of Lithuanian specialties. But Megan and Jake were too nervous about the next day’s remarks to relax. They headed to her hotel room, sat on the floor, and with Dan Baer (who was already in Geneva) on speakerphone, went through every line of the speech. They finished just before dawn.

  Early the next morning I learned that the White House had finally approved a policy change that we had been discussing. From now on, the United States would take into account the LGBT human rights record of a country when appropriating foreign aid. This kind of policy has a real chance of influencing the actions of other governments. I was looking forward to adding it to the speech.

  On December 6, we flew into Geneva and headed to the Palace of Nations. It was looking even more palatial than usual. The building is impressive enough on a normal day; built to be the headquarters for the League of Nations, it opened in 1936, a last gasp of optimism before Europe disintegrated. Here many of the great questions of 20th-century diplomacy were arbitrated, from nuclear disarmament to the independence of nations emerging from colonialism. Its corridors and chambers are always crowded, but on this day it was thronged with people.