The following comes from a Feb. 25 posting on Mercator.net by Robert Reilly, author of Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything, published by Ignatius Press.

On Monday, February 23, Secretary of State John Kerry proclaimed, “I could not be more proud to announce Randy Berry as the first-ever Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBT Persons.” Come again? I have served in the US State Department and do not recall such a position being listed in its table of organization. Where did the creation of this position come from?

It turns out that Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Alan Lowenthal, D-Calif., had introduced legislation in the last Congress to create such a position, but the bill died. The bill was reintroduced in the new Congress, with zero chances of passage.  As we know, the Obama administration is not deterred by Congress’ failure to act or outright opposition, so it is simply created the position by executive fiat. This has the added advantage of not requiring Congressional confirmation of the openly-gay Mr. Berry in the new position. It simply becomes an executive branch appointment.

But what exactly is Mr. Berry supposed to do “for the Human Rights of LGBT Persons” in foreign countries? Well, it turns out, according to Secretary Kerry that, “Too often, in too many countries, LGBT persons are threatened, jailed, and prosecuted because of who they are or who they love….

“Defending and promoting the human rights of LGBT persons is at the core of our commitment to advancing human rights globally — the heart and conscience of our diplomacy. That’s why we’re working to overturn laws that criminalize consensual same-sex conduct in countries around the world.”

This is very striking language – that the promotion of the moral normativity of sodomy stands at “the heart and conscience of our diplomacy. (my emphasis)” In other words, it is not only wrong to criminalize sodomy, but sodomy must be morally right….

We are in the phase of its domestic enforcement now, and Secretary Kerry is preparing for its global enforcement in our foreign-policy, as proudly announced by the LGBT flags flying on the masts of our embassies overseas last June, just under the American flag. The State Department has become the instrument for the global universalization of the rationalization for sodomy.

The problem with this should be self-evident. The promotion of “gay” rights must come at the expense of the promotion of human rights because the two are immiscible. One is founded on the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and the other on moral relativism, which eviscerates the very idea of natural rights and the natural law on which they are based. If you have one, you cannot have the other. You have your rights by virtue of being a human being, and not by anything else – not ethnicity, not religion, not race, not tribe, not sexual orientation….