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Exclusive LGBT Pride Interview with Tara Sonenshine, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy

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Tara D. Sonenshine, the new Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs outlines in this exclusive interview with the New Civil Rights Movement, dozens of ways U.S. foreign policy is advanced on behalf of LGBT persons around the world.   

Under Secretary of State Tara D. Sonenshine, who is the chief of public diplomacy and public affairs at the State Department, gave an exclusive interview to The New Civil Rights Movement this week on the occasion of LGBT Pride month.  Sonenshine, who came to the State Department from the U.S. Institute of Peace as the Executive Vice-President, has a distinguished career in communications and government, including an award winning tenure in television journalism at ABC’s Nightline as a producer and reporter where she garnered 10 Emmy news awards.  She was sworn in on April 24th and  is the seventh person to hold this position (the photograph of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton congratulating Under Secretary Sonenshine following her swearing-in was provided by the author).

Just two months into her tenure, the savvy social media under secretary can be found on Twitter @Tsonenshine.  This week she makes her inaugural debut in a live global  tweet on Wednesday, June 27, 11:00 a.m. EDT. Using @StateDept with hashtag #AskState or @USAenEspanol using hashtag #AskUSA (seven other languages will also be accessible), interested followers can ask Sonenshine questions about the State Department and her responsibilities.

Since her swearing-inl, Sonenshine  has hit the ground running, traveling to China (along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the Chen Guangcheng crisis) and later to Pakistan.  In between, she delivered graduation remarks to Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs 2012 graduating class.  And not skipping a beat as she pivoted into June’s Pride month, Sonenshine enthusiastically shared the latest public diplomacy efforts to promote LGBT human rights over the weekend in Germany, where the U.S. Embassy participated  in Berlin’s famous Christopher Street Day parade.  According to Sonenshine, Ambassador Philip Murphy joined Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit, other diplomats and local politicians to open this year’s parade.  U.S. Mission staff and GLIFAA (gays and lesbians in foreign affairs agencies) representatives from Frankfurt and Hamburg came to Berlin to participate alongside their Berlin colleagues.  A cheering crowd of between 500,000 and 700,000 watched the parade wind its way through central Berlin–from Kreuzberg, through Mitte, before ending in front of the Reichstag (the national parliament building).

NCRM QUESTION:  You were recently sworn in as the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (relatively new position). What are your responsibilities? What has been the main focus in getting up to speed on your responsibilities?

ANSWER:  It is an honor for me to serve in this new position which oversees all aspects of public diplomacy. Public diplomacy is a shared means to a shared goal of extending America’s reach and security by influencing how individuals around the world come to know and understand us. It is about the advancement of our foreign policy goals through people-to- people connections in a complex, globally networked world. The under secretary’s goal is to better understand ways in which public diplomacy can bolster international relations and national security. U.S. public diplomacy leverages core American values of inclusiveness, diversity, and pluralism both in the audiences we reach and the messages we impart.  Our public engagement proceeds from a fundamental foundation and a deep historic sense of justice and fairness, openness and transparency, and inclusion of a multiplicity of voices and views.

NCRM QUESTION:  A few weeks ago during gay Pride month, State Department officers visited the offices of the Washington Blade, a national gay newspaper.  What was the purpose of the visit?

ANSWER:  The purpose was awareness building, and outreach. Journalists from 20 nations visited the offices of the Washington Blade as part of a special reporting tour organized by the U.S. State Department to brief the journalists on how the U.S. addresses LGBT-related issues.

NCRM QUESTION:  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made “people to people diplomacy” a top priority.  And she pronounced that “gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights”. How do you see  doing your job in support of these strategies and principles with the LGBT community both here in the US and abroad?

ANSWER:  Using social media and personal engagement can amplify messages. U.S. Embassies and consulates worldwide are declaring support for the human rights of LGBT people through innovative public diplomacy, including:  publishing op-eds; speaking on radio programs; using social media; hosting film screenings and performances; hosting panel discussions and round tables; and actively participating in local events. The Department supported this outreach by posting approximately 100 articles, texts, and transcripts amplifying remarks by senior administration officials and important events related to LGBT.

In addition, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) is poised to issue two new policies to advance LGBT rights:  (1) the ECA Bureau-wide diversity statement-which lists groups of underrepresented individuals encouraged to participate in its exchange programs-is about to expand to include LGBT persons; and (2) the Fulbright scholars program will begin offering the same benefits to committed same-sex partners that are currently being offered to other dependents.  ECA exchange programs offer LGBT persons who work on LGBT-related issues from around the world opportunities to meet and collaborate with their American professional counterparts.  In particular, the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), has already brought groups to the United States focusing on issues important to the LGBT community and has planned future projects on LGBT-related topics.  Other IVLPs already incorporate meetings with LGBT advocacy groups on programs that cover human rights, civic participation and gender issues.

NCRM QUESTION:  As you know, many political regimes do not prevent violence–can even encourage violence against LGBT people as documented in the State Department’s human rights reports, for example “corrective rape” of lesbians in South Africa which Secretary Clinton mentioned at the publication of the 2011 human Rights report and a repeated effort to adopt a legislative measure that criminalizes homosexuality in Uganda. What public diplomacy methods are used in these situations that can create safer spaces for LGBT people? Another example of violence perpetrated against LGBT people in Uganda occurred when a local  newspaper The Rolling Stone that named gays and published photos of them. This hostile situation led to the murder of David Kato in January 2011. What steps has the State Department taken to address these incendiary practices by local media, besides including the issue in reporting and the human rights report?

ANSWER: The Department has implemented an Urgent Response Mechanism (URM) that routinizes the U.S. Government reaction to early warning signs of crises facing LGBT individuals, defenders, and organizations by providing a framework for coordination and action between all relevant Department bureaus.  We have used the URM to respond to crises in Uganda and Iraq.  In both cases, the ongoing internal engagement facilitated by the URM facilitated our leveraging of a wide range of resources and expertise to address the situation through high-level diplomatic engagement, civil society consultation, and emergency programming. Through the creation of the Global Equality Fund, launched by Secretary Clinton in December 2011, we have strengthened our capacity to support civil society organizations and programming seeking to advance and protect the human rights of LGBT people globally.  The Department, along with USAID, has already committed over four million dollars to the fund and is engaging foreign governments and private donors to contribute to this important effort.

NCRM QUESTION:  There is early evidence that new U.S. foreign policy on LGBT human rights has energized the US Embassy’s engagement in Bosnia and Herzegovina which has made a significant difference with the local LGBT community.  I have been told Ambassador has met personally with local LGBT representatives.  This is remarkable as the LGBT community had been driven underground after violent attacks on it in 2008 and 2009. Being open and supportive in Sarajevo has created a more secure environment for the LGBT community. In what ways are embassies carrying out public diplomacy in situations like in Bosnia? And what are the challenges for public diplomacy in environments that are hostile to gay people?

ANSWER:  There are so many good examples: In Albania, Ambassador Alexander Arvizu promoted these human rights on a live regional radio program entitled, “We are different, we are equal.  No to discrimination!” and highlighted the human rights of LGBT individuals in a speech at an academy for public servants. In Kazakhstan, the Embassy has forged a close working relationship with the only NGO that promotes LGBT rights, as well as others civil society groups that support these communities. In Kyrgyzstan, the Embassy’s human rights officer met with Labrys Kyrgyzstan, the leading NGO focused on LGBT issues.  He was successful in establishing open lines of communication and cooperation with Labrys, including on documenting human rights abuses and discrimination against LGBT individuals, some of which was included in the 2011 Department of State Human Rights Report.

In Slovakia, where the 2010 Pride parade ended in violence, Embassy staff brought together more than 20 ambassadors from other nations to sign a public statement of support for the march and hosted a debate. The U.S. Ambassador marched in the 2011 parade next to the mayor of Bratislava, Slovakia’s capital. U.S Embassies and consulates worldwide hosted viewing parties of Secretary Clinton’s “Free and Equal in Dignity and Rights” speech on December 6, 2011, which also garnered over 260,000 unique users to the Department’s social media platform and reached over nine million users on Twitter in the first 24 hours.  The Department also produced a video of the Secretary’s speech, which went viral, receiving 8.5 times the number of views that typical news stories receive on YouTube.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=MudnsExyV78

NCRM QUESTION:  You have taken foreign trips to China and Pakistan since you were sworn in. What have you observed in people to people engagement and in interviews with the media?

ANSWER: What I have observed overseas is that even when there are difficult political issues dividing countries, there is still a space for citizen-to-citizen engagement.  People want education, employment and security.  There are issues of commonality in every society.  I also observed the power of information and was reminded that information is the oxygen with which a society breathes.

NCRM QUESTION:  The domestic LGBT community is very interested in the State Department foreign policy on LGBT rights. Many of us follow it closely and wish out loud that our foreign policy could be applied inside the US. What message do you have for the American LGBT community during June Pride month?

ANSWER: I think this is a time to celebrate the freedoms that America provides.  All around the world people want to come to America and learn about our country.  We have to remain open-minded, tolerant and internationally minded if we want to prosper in the global community and the global marketplace of ideas and ideals.

 The photo of Under Secretary Sonenshine speaking to Columbia SIPA graduating students was taken by the author.  The photo of Under Secretary Sonenshine in her office is courtesy of the U.S. State Department.

 

Tanya L. Domi is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University who teaches human rights in East Central Europe and former Yugoslavia.  She is a Harriman Institute affiliated faculty member. Prior to teaching at Columbia, Domi was a nationally recognized LGBT civil rights activist who worked for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force during the campaign to lift the military ban in the early 1990s. Domi has also worked internationally in a dozen countries on issues related to democratic transitional development, including political and media development, human rights, gender issues and media freedom.  She is chair of the board of directors for GetEQUAL. She is currently writing a book about the emerging LGBT human rights movement in the Western Balkans.

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Trump Declares War on ‘Woke Leftist Ideologues’ as He Moves to Reshape Entire US Military

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President Donald Trump has made clear he intends to remake the culture of the entire U.S. Military, starting at the very beginning.

“Our Service Academies have been infiltrated by Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years. I have ordered the immediate dismissal of the Board of Visitors for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard,” the Commander-in-Chief announced Monday afternoon.  The Boards ensure accountability and civilian oversight at institutions like West Point. “We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards. We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!”

“Trump campaigned on a promise to purge the U.S. military of officers he deemed ‘woke’ and has used the start of his second term to try and rid the Pentagon of diversity initiatives by executive order,” Politico reported. “The purge has begun to extend to the nation’s service academies, where Republican lawmakers have long complained that so-called ‘woke’ literature is seeping into the curriculum. The Washington Post reported on Friday that the U.S. Defense Department had begun restricting access to some books in its school systems. The service academies themselves had already begun disbanding student clubs focused on diversity in response to Trump’s executive orders, with West Point getting rid of a dozen such organizations last week, including the Asian-Pacific Forum Club and the National Society of Black Engineers Club.”

It is unclear if the President can fire members of the Boards of Visitors, who are appointed by the President to serve a term of three years.

READ MORE: The 27 Words the NSA Is Scrubbing From Its Websites: Report

As President Trump’s newly sworn-in national security cabinet members get to work in their new roles, they are making clear their priorities will be his: getting rid of “woke.”

Trump’s announcement on the firings came just one day after U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared he had “met with the leadership” of each service academy last week.

“My message was simple: stick to leadership, standards, excellence, war fighting, and readiness. These are MILITARY ACADEMIES, not civilian universities. I was impressed by the changes already underway and look forward to visiting each institution. Social Justice and DEI are OUT; History, Engineering, and War Studies are IN. We must restore the warrior ethos to the @deptofdefense — and it starts with our future leaders.”

Secretary Hegseth, who officially took office on January 25, was criticized for his remarks after the mid-air collision between a commercial airplane and an Army helicopter that took place near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and claimed all 67 lives.

The next day, Secretary Hegseth tried to blame “DEI” — diversity, equity, and inclusion — for the crash, following President Trump’s lead.

Now, Hegseth is again engaging in “culture war” attacks, this time attacking transgender service members, another attempt to purge “woke” from the Trump administration.

In a memo on Monday titled, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” (the exact same title as a Trump executive order,) the Defense Secretary announced a “pause” for all medical treatments of transgender service members, and a pause on accepting any new transgender service members into the U.S. Military.

Also on Monday, U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins posted a statement in line with Republicans’ recent attacks on the news site Politico.

“Ran across a $178,000 contract VA had with Politico and we promptly canceled it. That money can be better spent on Veterans health care!” Secretary Collins wrote.

READ MORE: ‘Stomach Turning’: Trump Defends His J6 Pardons as ‘Great for Humanity’

Longtime veterans’ activist and political commentator Paul Rieckhoff blasted Collins, and issued a warning.

“This is the first action item he [Collins] posts about as VA Sec. The very first. Not suicide, not healthcare improvements, not even bureaucratic changes. He’s taking action against Politico. The Trump administration messaging machine is synched up. And growing this week to include [the] VA. Look for attacks on DEI, trans people and the press any minute now. The culture war at VA under Collins will run in direct parallel with Hegseth at DoD. And it’s all just getting started.”

Rieckhoff has been sounding the alarm bells about Trump’s apparent takeover of the military.

“He’s daring the world to stop him, just like he has his entire life, and they’re not stopping him,” Rieckhoff said Friday night about Trump in a panel discussion on MSNBC.

He also talked about Trump’s “radical extreme agenda of taking over the government and snatching the levers of power,” and warned: “we should be really watching when he says, ‘I’m going for the military.'”

“He went with Hegseth first, he’s going for the Pentagon first because when you break into a house and take it over, you go for the gun closet first,” Rieckhoff remarked. “He knows the military is the most powerful, he knows it’s the most influential. It’s the biggest biggest employer. It’s got the biggest budget, and it’s got the guns, so that’s where he’s going first and he’s leading his entire strategy with and at the Pentagon.”

Before the 2024 election, the liberal political action committee VoteVets, posted video (below) showing how Trump, using the Project 2025 playbook, could take over the U.S. Military and turn it “into his own MAGA military.”

Almost all the suggestions have begun to be implemented.

Watch that video below or at this link.

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Image via Reuters

 

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The 27 Words the NSA Is Scrubbing From Its Websites: Report

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The National Security Agency (NSA), a largely clandestine global intelligence-gathering and counterintelligence organization that “prevents and eradicates threats to U.S. national security systems,” is reportedly undergoing a massive “purge” on its public and private websites and internal network, eliminating any site that contains any of a list of 27 words — despite possibly including mission-related work. The operation is an effort to comply with President Donald Trump’s order to eliminate any so-called “DEI” programs or language.

Trump has called DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — “illegal,” and in his January 21 executive order alleged that DEI “policies not only violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws, they also undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system. Hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American Dream should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex.”

According to Popular Information, on Monday the NSA, which is under the U.S. Department of Defense, “is planning a ‘Big Delete’ of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including ‘privilege,’ ‘bias,’ and ‘inclusion.’ The ‘Big Delete,’ according to an NSA source and internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information, is creating unintended consequences.

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Popular Information’s Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby report that “the dragnet is taking down ‘mission-related’ work. According to the NSA source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, the process is ‘very chaotic,’ but is plowing ahead anyway.”

A memo announcing the 27 banned words “acknowledges that the list includes many terms that are used by the NSA in contexts that have nothing to do with DEI. For example, the term ‘privilege is used by the NSA in the context of ‘privilege escalation.’ In the intelligence world, privilege escalation refers to ‘techniques that adversaries use to gain higher-level permissions on a system or network.'”

Efforts to comply with Trump’s anti-DEI orders are not limited to the NSA.

“Since Trump took office, thousands of web pages across various federal agencies have been altered or removed entirely. Federal agencies have taken down or edited resources about HIV, contraceptives, LGBTQ+ health, abortion, and climate change. Some web pages have later come back online ‘without clarity on what had been changed or removed.” Popular Information also reported.

“An analysis by the Washington Post of 8,000 federal web pages ‘found 662 examples of deletions and additions’ since Trump took office. The analysis found that words like diversity, equity, and inclusion were removed at least 231 times from the websites of federal agencies, including the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Transportation.”

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A quick search of the NSA’s public website for the word “transgender” came up with only one hit, a page titled, “50 Years of Pride: Celebrating NSA’s Committment {sic] to Promoting Respect, Individuality, Diversity, and Equality.” That link led to an error page that stated: “The page you are looking for might have been moved, renamed, or may be temporarily unavailable.”

But a search for pages with the words “Diversity,” “Privilege,” and “Pronouns” resulted in numerous positive hits.

Legum posted the list of 27 banned words to social media. They include, Anti-Racism, Racism, Allyship, Bias, DEI, Diversity, Confirmation Bias, Equity, Feminism, Gender, Gender Identity Inclusion, Inclusive, and All-Inclusive, among others.

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Image via Reuters

 

 

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‘Stomach Turning’: Trump Defends His J6 Pardons as ‘Great for Humanity’

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President Donald Trump aboard Air Force One on Sunday announced that the nearly 1600 people he pardoned after they had been convicted of January 6-related crimes did not assault anyone but had been assaulted by the U.S. government, and his granting those pardons on his first day back in office was “a great thing for humanity.”

Trump was sitting next to a large map of what he announced is now the “Gulf of America,” and had signed an executive order requiring that new designation as the plane flew over what has, for hundreds of years, been called the Gulf of Mexico. Some observers have noted that Trump is also attempting to reshape the narrative of the January 6 insurrection and attack on the U.S. Capitol by claiming that those convicted of crimes were actually victims.

Reminded by a reporter that he had planned to honor first responders at the Super Bowl, President Trump was asked why he would pardon people who had assaulted first responders.

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“I pardoned people that were assaulted themselves. They were assaulted by our government,” Trump insisted, despite countless hours of footage of people he pardoned attacking the U.S. Capitol, and some of them attacking law enforcement officers.

“I pardoned J6 people who were assaulted by our government. That’s who assaulted — and they were treated unfairly, there’s never been a group of people in this country outside of maybe one instance that I can think of, but I won’t get into it, that were treated more horribly than the people of J6,” Trump insisted.

“I didn’t assault, they didn’t assault. They were assaulted, and what I did was a great thing for humanity.”

Just days after Trump handed down the pardons, The New York Times reported that even some of his close allies “opposed granting clemency to those rioters found guilty of violent crimes, especially the more than 600 who were convicted of assaulting or resisting police officers. Of those defendants, nearly 175 used a dangerous or deadly weapon, prosecutors say.”

On January 20, via a presidential proclamation, Trump announced he was commuting the sentences of 14 of some of the worst January 6 offenders, and granting “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

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Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, called the pardons “an attempt to rewrite history and erase an attack on the Constitution and the country.”

Critics are blasting President Trump’s remarks on Sunday, including his claim the people he pardoned had been assaulted by “our government.”

“This administration & the GOP are completely rewriting the events of January 6. The president is doing it here. They pretend all the evidence, footage, confessions, & documents just don’t exist, that we didn’t see it happen. It’s an authoritarian move, & it should terrify us all,” observed T. Kenny Fountain, an associate professor whose bio says he researches extremism, conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and disinformation.

Noted political scientist and professor of politics Larry Sabato called Trump’s remarks “Absolutely stomach-turning.”

Journalist Jim Acosta wrote simply, “Disgraceful.”

Award-winning investigative reporter Phil Williams posted video from January 6 and wrote, “These people were all pardoned.”

Watch the video above or at this link.

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Image via Reuters

 

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