What is President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s foreign policy plan? That’s a question that few have answers to, but for hundreds of millions of people in the developing world the stakes could not be higher.
East Africa faith leaders are raising the alarm. In August, Archbishop Renatus Leonard Nkwande of Mwanza, Tanzania, said the West is “sending us missionaries of evil.” It is a strange thing for people thousands of miles away to say, yet it is a frequent refrain from Africans, Latin Americans and others frustrated by a White House fixated on the global promotion of abortion and radical gender ideology.
Over the past four years, President Biden has reinstated funding for the pro-abortion United Nations Population Fund as well as groups like International Planned Parenthood Federation. He also mobilized the entire federal government to “promote access to sexual and reproductive health and rights,” — a term that includes abortion — both in the U.S. and abroad. Vice President Kamala Harris has been the administration’s international lead on abortion, promoting it with more gusto even than Biden.
This agenda has not been welcomed in many parts of the world. Last year, 131 African lawmakers and religious leaders from fifteen countries called on the U.S. Congress not to “violate our core beliefs concerning life, family and religion.” Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ), Chair of the House Global Health Subcommittee, accused the Biden-Harris administration of “hijacking” billions in foreign aid dollars “to promote abortion.” The U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops complained that such programs are “inconsistent with Catholic teaching.”
Similarly, the Biden-Harris administration has pushed radical gender ideology through its diplomacy and foreign assistance. In South Africa, for example, U.S. tax dollars fund “comprehensive sexuality education” curricula that teach fourth graders about being “born in the wrong body,” and describes gender as being “socially constructed.”
A U.S. financed sex education manual for children as young as ten instructs students on “licking body parts,” masturbating with or without partners, watching pornography, performing oral sex, and other acts too graphic to mention here (yet somehow “appropriate” for school children). Another USAID funded program, designed for children in Rwanda and used in other African countries, discusses “sexual rights,” including a “right to express and satisfy yourself,” without any age restrictions. These and similar curricula emphasize the concepts of rights, consent, and pleasure in the context of sexual activity, while glossing over traditional norms of abstinence and saving sexual activity until marriage.
These radical programs also aren’t optional if you want money from this White House. Recipients of U.S. foreign aid must now genuflect before these radical ideologies as a condition for receiving invaluable assistance. One faith-based leader in Kenya told us that after Biden became President, he got a call from the U.S. Embassy telling him that “your website is very Christ-centered.” He subsequently had his name removed from the Embassy’s invitation list.
Many such aid recipients, particularly in Africa, lament this reality. Increasingly, religious and political leaders are speaking out against what they see as ideological colonialism. Countries like Uganda and Ghana now face economic sanctions and loss of international funding for taking steps in their own domestic legislation to oppose what they see as an aggressive LGBTQ agenda that is undermining their traditional values.
This is also demonstrated by Vice President Harris’s record to promote laws that clash with Christian or Muslim beliefs concerning life, marriage and family issues. As a U.S. Senator, Vice President Harris sponsored bills to expand abortion overseas and called for a permanent prohibition against banning the use of foreign aid to finance abortion. This is how she won her 100 percent abortion rating from Planned Parenthood and NARAL. She was the first Vice President to visit an abortion clinic, opining that opposition to abortion is “just plain old immoral.” She also spearheaded a bill to establish a permanent special global envoy at the U.S. Department of State for LGBTQ+ rights and pushed for tax-payer funding for sex-change surgeries.
As “border czar,” Vice President Harris was tasked to address the root causes of Central American migration. Part of her billion dollar aid package included $50 million to CARE International to open a regional center to promote “gender equity.” CARE is radical. The organization avoids referring to sex altogether and insists that “gender is “non-binary,” rather than male or female. This language betrays its allegiance to radical gender ideology and undermines efforts to assist women and girls.
Exporting these radical ideologies isn’t only wrong, it has serious geopolitical implications. While China is increasingly belligerent in every continent, the U.S. must forge alliances in response. Africa is the epicenter of this battle for influence. Yet officials from developing countries, well aware of the competition between China and the U.S., warn — with not a bit of irony — that, “China respects our traditional values.”
In other words, China will build African highways and infrastructure in exchange for mining rights and profits, without requiring African governments to embrace gender ideology, abort their babies, or “enlighten” their children about all manner of sexual activities and preferences. Sadly, it seems, America won’t promise the same.
During her weeklong trip to Africa last year, Vice President Harris promised that America’s relationship with the continent “will not be defined by competition with China.” But, thanks to the Biden-Harris Administration’s policies the opposite is true. The developing world will continue to define that relationship differently, to Beijing’s advantage.
