"At a time when LGBTQ+ communities around the world face persecution, this Trump decision is a blatant attack on LGBTI rights," said Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts. News of Pompeo's orders, first reported last week by NBC News, provoked outrage among advocates of gay rights. The previous administration of president Barack Obama, an advocate of gay rights equality, let US embassies fly the pride flag without no questions asked and even lit up the White House in the rainbow colors when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015. But some did not mention Trump's statement at all, an absence made more glaring by the juxtaposition with statements by ambassadors and secretaries of states left over from previous years."Pride month, that we're in right now, was celebrated around the world by many State Department employees," she said. In Brasilia, for example, the statement is topped by a photo of two hands holding six Play-Doh letters in rainbow colours: LGBTQ. Some embassies got playful with the display of Trump's statement.
The initiative was the idea of Richard Grenell, the US ambassador to Germany, who is gay. Some embassies that have flown the flag in previous years opted this year to commemorate the month by posting on their websites US President Donald Trump's statement affirming LGBT rights and inviting nations to join a global campaign to decriminalise homosexuality. It brought thousands of people to the streets of Warsaw at a time when the LGBT rights movement in Poland is targeted by hate speecheds and a government campaign depicting it as a threat to families and society.įoreign Service officers have complained on a private Facebook page that nobody should have asked for permission anyway. Poland's Equality Parade is the largest gay pride parade in central and Eastern Europe. But he has downplayed some symbols of LGBT rights, while introducing several new panels and envoys specialising in religious freedom issues.
An evangelical Christian who believes marriage should be defined as between a man and woman, Pompeo has said gay employees will be respected and treated like everyone else. That process changed last year, after Mike Pompeo became secretary of state. By 2016, approvals were left up to each ambassador or chief of mission. The Obama administration's Pride Month guidelines included rules for flying rainbow flags from poles outside embassies - they had to be smaller than the American flag and fly beneath it. In 2011, the Obama administration directed agencies involved with foreign policy to promote LGBT rights, a striking policy for an agency that, up to the early 1990s, considered homosexuality a security risk and cause for termination. The flap over the flags started when the State Department did not send out an official cable this year with guidelines for marking Pride Month, as it has in years past. But this year, as first reported by NBC News, all requests were nixed.
US diplomats in Jerusalem joined a March for Pride and Tolerance, and several ambassadors have tweeted photos of themselves in local Pride parades or standing outside the embassies surrounded by employees holding up letters spelling PRIDE.Ī group from the US Embassy in Denmark participated in Copenhagen Pride Week's grand parade in 2018.Ī practice routinely approved for most of the decade at many embassies now requires top-level approval from the State Department. The Vienna Embassy's website features a photo of a rainbow flag flying below Old Glory on a mast jutting from the building, a statement by Diplomats for Equality and a story about a professor lecturing on the visibility and growth of LGBT rights. The website for the embassy in Santiago, Chile, shows a video of the chief diplomat raising a rainbow flag last month for the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. The facades of the US missions in Seoul and Chennai, India, are partially hidden behind large rainbow flags, while the embassy in New Delhi is aglow in rainbow coloured lights. Since the US State Department began rejecting all embassy requests to hoist rainbow flags outside the mission buildings during Gay Pride Month this year, some US diplomats have been finding ways to defy, or at least get around, the new policy.