In a presidential memorandum on Feb 4, the new United States administration announced its commitment to "promote and protect the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons everywhere". Yes, everywhere.
The memorandum further stated that the US will "combat the criminalisation by foreign governments of LGBTQI+ status or conduct". There are at least two major problems with this stated policy which should concern all of us.
Firstly, "everywhere" is not a jurisdiction legally assigned to any nation; not even the US. The Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention and Interference in the Domestic Affairs of States has been a fundamental principle of international law since its adoption by the United Nations General Assembly in 1965, and it has not become obsolete.
Secondly, sexual orientation and gender identity are not included as protected categories in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). A unilateral reinterpretation of the UDHR to recognise these categories cannot be imposed upon its signatories ex post-facto.
When US President Joe Biden commented on this memorandum, he stated that the US "cannot afford to be absent any longer on the world stage", but it appears he sees America as the director, not as an ensemble player on that stage, and this is unacceptable not only to Malaysia, but to every other nation.
Furthermore, this should be unacceptable to any people who believe in national sovereignty, regardless of their position on the LGBTQI+ issue. It is not the right of the US, or any other country, to oversee, dictate, or influence the laws of sovereign states; nor should the citizens of one country redress their domestic grievances to a foreign government.
The US is openly positioning itself as a neocolonial power claiming global suzerainty, and no one should be fooled into believing that the Biden memorandum is anything more than a cynical attempt to use the LGBTQI+ issue as an instrument for justifying American dominance and undermining the independence of non-Western nations.
When the Trump Administration made a similar declaration in 2019 "to end the criminalisation of homosexuality in dozens of nations", LGBTQI+ advocates worldwide rightly condemned the project as neocolonialist.
Now, as then, the Biden Administration is re-formulating the old colonialist rationale of "white men saving brown women from brown men" into "white men saving brown LGBTQI+ people from brown straight men", as explained by Matthew Rodriguez in Out Magazine two years ago.
Meaning, of course, that LGBTQI+ rights are not the genuine interest behind the policy, but rather the re-assertion of paternalistic Western control.
The modern history of human rights is correlated to the history of colonialism, as Western powers sought to insert themselves into the Global South as overseers "for the betterment" of minority groups in countries they wished to rule. The current attempt to re-interpret the UDHR to include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected categories represents a continuation of that strategy; expanding the basis for the interventionist rationale.
The promotion of identity politics is a discrete sabotage of the concept of citizenship in which people belong to their nation first and foremost, and all other distinctions are tertiary. When citizenship is diluted, nationhood is diluted, and sovereignty can be dismantled.
Malaysians of every identity grouping must firmly resolve to be Malaysians first and reject foreign interference in our domestic affairs, even if one group or another feels that such interference will benefit their own personal interests.
The various aspirations across Malaysia's diverse society must always and only be pursued under the auspices of our own government through the process of dialogue and democratic consensus; not by foreign coercion or collaboration with neocolonial agendas.
No one cares about the Malaysian people more than the Malaysian people themselves, their elected officials and their institutions. We do not need, and we do not accept external intrusion, oversight, or direction in the management of our domestic affairs any more than the US would accept foreign coercion.
We do not seek to export our values to the West, nor insist that they modify their laws to our liking; we expect, deserve, and are legally entitled to have our independent sovereignty respected in the same manner.
The writer is founder, Centre for Human Rights Research and Advocacy
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times