UN. Panel on 'Decriminalizing Homosexuality' Worldwide Includes Anti-LGBTQ Pastor

A Dec. 18 United Nations side event titled "Decriminalizing Homosexuality in Solidarity with LGBTQ People" featured out U.S. Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell, the Harvey Milk Foundation's director, Stuart Milk, and several others... including, strangely enough, Johnnie Moore, an anti-LGBTQ pastor who heads up the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom and, closer to home, has attacked equality for sexual minorities.

A statement from the United States Mission to the United Nations called back to an address by Donald Trump last fall in which the president said:

"As we defend American values, we affirm the right of all people to live in dignity. For this reason, my administration is working with other nations to stop criminalizing of homosexuality, and we stand in solidarity with LGBTQ people who live in countries that punish, jail, or execute individuals based upon sexual orientation."

Critics of the president have taken note of his administration's efforts to deny full legal equality to LGBTQ Americans, despite his rhetoric around "dignity" and "solidarity" with non-heterosexuals who are persecuted around the world. Seventy nations currently have laws on the books making it a crime to be gay, and a handful of those punish sexual minorities with the death penalty.

Grenell's presence was hardly out of place; the out ambassador spoke out against the nations that criminalize gays, listing off 69 of them. (A 70th country, the African nation Gabon, was recently reported on in the media as having criminalized same-sex relationships last summer – news that was slow in reaching the outside world.)

But Moore's participation was hard to fathom, given his lengthy and vituperative record of attacking LGBTQ Americans. As LGBTQ Nation reported:

In 2008, Moore wrote a column for the far-right site OneNewsNow with the title "Hey, Let's Make Middle School Lesbians!" where he decried the Katy Perry song "I Kissed A Girl," arguing that the song was a sign that "media moguls" were trying to "alter the healthy development of our nation's kids."

"We are facing the rise of the most homosexually friendly generation in history," Moore wrote. "Homosexual experimentation is also an epidemic. This is the fruit of years of marketing that has literally altered the worldviews of our nation's 80 million millennials."

Moore is also known to have opposed marriage equality.

LGBTQ Nation also noted that the commission Moore heads up is also home to other fringe-right anti-LGBTQ figures, including Tony Perkins of the Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group Family Research Council, and Nadine Maenza, who heads up the PAC for anti-LGBTQ political figure Rick Santorum.