BREAKING: Incredible news, via ThinkProgress:

Recognizing that America’s own record on LGBT equality is “far from perfect,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on nations around the world to recognize that “gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights,” during a speech in Geneva, Switzerland this afternoon. Clinton’s address builds on a memorandum President Obama issued earlier today directing all agencies to “promote and protect the human rights of LGBT persons.”

Clinton also announced that the administration is launching a $3 million global equality fund to support the work of civil society organizations working on these issues around the world. The fund will help human rights groups “record facts so they can target their advocacy, learn how to use the law as a tool, manage their budgets, train their staffs and forge partnerships with women’s organizations and other Human Rights groups,” Clinton said.

(A transcript of Secretary Clinton’s remarks can be found here.)

Wayne, Evan and I constantly write about the importance of electing LGBT people and allies to political office, and today’s historic speech should put an end to any skepticism about that point. After all, Secretary Clinton is articulating the official policy of the United States of America under a pro-equality administration. There’s absolutely no way she would have delivered a groundbreaking address to the United Nations, exclusively devoted to LGBT rights worldwide, had she not been specifically authorized to do so at the highest level of the executive branch.

Today’s speech should also serve to both galvanize the American LGBT community and throttle us out of any apathy anyone might feel about throwing our enthusiastic support, checkbooks, blood, sweat, and tears into electing pro-equality candidates.

Members of our nation’s LGBT community should make no mistake: apathy at the ballot box, or anything less than a full commitment to providing the maximum amount of support possible — of all kinds, on all fronts, and at all levels — to political leaders who explicitly support LGBT rights inadvertently helps to hand the country over to people who have specifically and repeatedly promised to do everything in their power to make sure advances like this are stopped for as long as possible, by any means possible, regardless of the consequences to millions of LGBT people around the world.

Casting itself as a defender of religious freedom, Focus on the Family warned on Friday that a federal commission for religious freedom faces dissolution.

But the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom is not an advocate for religious freedom at all.

The USCIRF was founded by U.S. evangelicals to shield the foreign activities of right-wing Christian missionaries, not religious minorities. The commission has advocated for military interventions, not to defend religious diversity and freedom of individual religious expression, but rather to advance Christian missionary objectives.

The Indian press have accused USCIRF of grossly mischaracterizing Hindu-Muslim conflicts and of doing little or nothing to defend the freedom of anyone other than Christian evangelicals.

In Egypt, Coptic Christians have accused USCIRF of antagonizing their Muslim neighbors in a politically motivated effort to smear Egypt.

And federal religious-freedom “ambassador” Robert Seiple criticized USCIRF’s emphasis on the punishment of (anti-Christian) religious persecution over the promotion of religious freedom.

Given USCIRF’s betrayal of non-evangelicals, its anticipated dissolution next month can’t come soon enough. Focus on the Family’s defense of special rights for evangelicals — at the expense of other Christians and the world’s non-Christian religious minorities — is another indication of that organization’s disingenuous selfishness.

Matt Barber, reacting to news that the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) is now an officially recognized NGO at the United Nations:

“This once again just highlights the fact that President Obama is fully in the tank of the radical homosexual activist lobby,” notes Matt Barber, attorney and head of cultural affairs at Liberty Counsel. “In keeping with his commitment to ram through his radical agenda, the president has once again circumvented the proper protocol and procedure in order to push a very unpopular policy.”

Barber thinks that flies in the face of efforts made by many countries to keep homosexual activists in the background at the U.N.

“[Obama] has thumbed his nose at all of the nations around the world that embrace sexual morality — and the president, in the name of the United States of America, has once again publicly embraced sexual immorality,” the Liberty Counsel attorney laments.

It must be confusing to be a wingnut. On the one hand, they are supposed to be constantly terrified of Islamic countries. They wax sanctimonious about how they are So Concerned about human rights violations in Iran and Afghanistan. But then, here you have Matt Barber “lamenting” that Obama is “thumb[ing] his nose at all of the nations around the world that embrace sexual morality.” He’s, of course, talking about Islamic theocracies and certain increasingly fundamentalist states in Africa, which hold similar “moral” stances to American wingnuts on the subject of LGBT people. Why is President Obama so mean to Iran? I mean, they believe in “traditional values,” just like Matt!

[h/t Mike Tidmus]

Scott Long of Human Rights Watch reported today that The Vatican said it opposes discriminatory penal legislation against gay people during a United Nations panel discussion on sexual orientation. Long says the people in attendance were “stunned”. According the Vatican’s statement, delivered by Father Philip Bene, legal attach?© to the Holy See’s UN mission:

“Thank you for convening this panel discussion and for providing the opportunity to hear some very serious concerns raised this afternoon. My comments are more in the form of a statement rather than a question.

As stated during the debate of the General Assembly last year, the Holy See continues to oppose all grave violations of human rights against homosexual persons, such as the use of the death penalty, torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. The Holy See also opposes all forms of violence and unjust discrimination against homosexual persons, including discriminatory penal legislation which undermines the inherent dignity of the human person.

As raised by some of the panelists today, the murder and abuse of homosexual persons are to be confronted on all levels, especially when such violence is perpetrated by the State. While the Holy See’s position on the concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity remains well known, we continue to call on all States and individuals to respect the rights of all persons and to work to promote their inherent dignity and worth.”

The Liberty Counsel — the lawsuit-friendly organization that helps Exodus International and other Christian Rightists sue defenders of religious freedom — is defending the new president of the United Nations General Assembly, former Libyan Foreign Minister Ali Abdussalam Treki, who on Sept. 15 disagreed with a 2008 General Assembly statement by 66 nations urging decriminalization of homosexuality.

According to PrideSource, Treki said: “As a Muslim, I am not in favor of that. I believe it is not accepted by the majority of countries (and) it is not really acceptable by our religion, our tradition.”

In an Oct. 24 statement to American Family Association’s OneNewsNow propaganda service, Matt Barber of the Liberty Counsel rose to defend Treki, who rose to his position at the U.N. through the sponsorship of Libya’s longtime terror mastermind Muammar al-Qaddafi. Barber said Treki’s views on criminalization were in tune with much of the world.

On that count, he may be right:

Private consensual homosexual behavior is punishable by imprisonment in 70 of 195 nations.

But Treki’s statement is contrary to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights Act.

Barber’s public support for imprisonment of gay people worldwide might be considered refreshing by cynics; his allies at Exodus continue to offer discreet support to vigilantism and imprisonment in Uganda and Barbados, and they refuse to offer an official public statement condemning imprisonment and vigilantism.

According to the AFA, Barber says that groups which voice disagreement with Treki and imprisonment…

“…are completely intolerant of other people’s belief systems [and] of other cultures,” says the Christian attorney. “We hear talk of cultural diversity — [but] there is no cultural diversity as far as the left is concerned and as far as homosexual activists are concerned. It’s either their way or the highway.”

Barber’s support for tolerance of terrorism, imprisonment, and vigilantism against LGBT people takes the Christian Right’s notion of “tolerance” to a whole new level.