US meddling leads to bad foreign relations

President Bush recently visited Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, the top communist oligarchs of the Peoples Republic of China. During his visit, the president gently prodded his hosts toward allowing their subjects a greater measure of religious freedom and other civil liberties.

According to an AFP story on November 19, 2005, Mr. Bush attended a service at one of the official communist-regulated churches. Afterwards, he announced his "...hope that the government of China will not fear Christians who gather to worship openly."

Since such statements are not casually tossed off without review by the State Department, the president's precise wording is intriguing. First, he's being oh so diplomatic: hoping rather than demanding. More interesting are the words "who gather to worship openly." Of course, those who are most vigorously persecuted in the PRC are those who dare not worship openly, and instead hold services in their homes. Many of those people are in jail right now, being tortured along with those who dare to print Bibles.

The point of this column is not that I think our government should browbeat the PRC's rulers until they denounce tyranny and institute religious and other liberty. That approach wouldn't work in any case. Only a revolution among the Chinese people themselves, actually removing their oppressors, will ever win them their freedom. My reason for bringing this story up is to point out the contrast with the administration's behavior a week later in the United Arab Emirates.

BBC News reported on November 29, 2005 that UAE police had arrested 26 homosexual men preparing for a "gay" wedding in a hotel in Ghantut. Of the catch, four were foreign and would probably be deported. The other 22, citizens of the UAE, would be charged with homosexual activity, which is illegal in that country. UAE law provides for voluntary hormone and psychotherapy treatments in an attempt to reverse homosexual orientation, and some of the men may agree to be subjected to that treatment as part of a plea bargain.

Our government's reaction might be described as strident. According to the BBC article, "US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said his government condemned both the arrests and government-ordered hormone and psychological treatment. 'We call on the government of the United Arab Emirates to immediately stop any ordered hormone and psychological treatment and to comply with the standards of international law,' he said."

How's that for diplomatic? If our State Department wants to mend fences with the Islamic world, condemning their laws against sexual perversion is not the way to go about it. It's only been a few years since our activist Supreme Court struck down our own country's state laws against sodomy. In that short time we've apparently come all the way from criminalizing it ourselves to reacting with outrage when other countries do the same.

Of course, I don't support the idea of pressuring people to undergo medical or psychological treatments for this or any other reason. But reacting with official outrage is not calculated to advance this view. Invoking irrelevant "international law" against a nation's domestic practices is worse still, and guaranteed to alienate the UAE and other Islamic states.

We need to restore good will with the Muslim world. The State Department's tantrum did nothing but provide more evidence that we have no respect for the Islamic way of life. All the radical Islamists have to do is play this report repeatedly in their media to stir up more excitement among potential terrorists. Badly done, State Department.

Badly done indeed. But worse still when compared with the president's kid glove treatment of religious persecution in communist China. How do we look when we tiptoe softly around major institutional violations of human rights by a nuclear armed country with missiles targeting our cities, then immediately display a disproportionate reaction to a disagreement with a tiny defenseless country? We look like the classic schoolyard bully.

Most of our problems with terrorism and international relations stem from our incessant meddling in the affairs of other countries. Sometimes we do it directly; more often through the UN or other incipient world government institutions. To start solving those problems we need to attend to our own affairs -- and only our own.

We should take our motto for international relations from Richard Cobden, 19th century British statesman: "Peace will come to this earth when her peoples have as much as possible to do with each other; their governments the least possible."