President Obama has wrapped up his tour of Africa. It was notable, insofar as that word can be applied to the trip, for his somewhat condescending and neo-colonial lecture to his hosts on the need to ease up on the old homophobia.
Certainly, Africa is not terribly gay-friendly. But nor are other parts of the planet. In his ardent wooing of Iran, for example, he doesn’t seem to have been perturbed in the least by his new best friends’ executions of homosexuals, anymore than he is by the brutalization of gays elsewhere in the Muslim world. You might deduce in his highly selective criticism a certain cowardice. I’ll bet the mullahs do.
If you’ve read The [Un]documented Mark Steyn (and if you haven’t, you really should, especially when you can get it personally autographed to you at no extra charge), you’ll also know that Obama, in reprimanding Africa for its homophobia, is at odds with The Guardian, whose position is that black homophobia is all our fault. As I write in the book: