World Bank Goes Queer

The World Bank is a United Nations international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programs.

Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the World Bank’s official goal is the reduction of poverty. According to its Articles of Agreement, all its decisions must be guided by a commitment to the promotion of foreign investment and international trade and to the facilitation of capital investment.

So why is the World Bank promoting the “rights” of homosexuals and the fictive condition called transgenderism? What does either have to do with the “reduction of poverty,” “promotion of foreign investment and international trade,” and “the facilitation of capital investment”?

From The Economist, April 12, 2014:

Jim Kim, the president of the World Bank, wants it to promote gay rights. He has declared the “fight to eliminate all institutionalised discrimination” to be an “urgent task”. He recently put on hold a $90m loan to Uganda’s health sector after its government introduced one of Africa’s most draconian anti-gay laws. He has ordered an overhaul of the bank’s lending policies to make sure that no loan assists discrimination. At this week’s Spring Meetings in Washington, DC, he is convening discussions with gay activists on how best to do so.

As an early proponent of gay marriage, this newspaper shares Mr Kim’s sentiments. Bigotry is abhorrent and laws that entrench it should be condemned. Uganda’s new law, which allows a maximum sentence of life imprisonment for anyone convicted of homosexuality and requires citizens to report anyone suspected of being gay, is particularly awful. Nonetheless, Mr Kim’s initiative is misguided. The World Bank is a technocratic development organisation, not a place for political advocacy. Setting up gay rights as a test of its lending decisions is likely to make the bank less effective at what Mr Kim himself has emphasised is its core job: tackling extreme poverty.

The bank’s technocratic approach is a big part of its DNA. Its founding documents prohibit “political activity”, however unpleasant a regime might be. Only “economic considerations” should be relevant to lending decisions. That does not, by itself, preclude it from opposing nasty laws. You can draw a link from fighting bigotry to alleviating poverty. Unfair treatment of groups of people, whether on the basis of gender, race or sexuality, leads to their social exclusion, which in turn is likely to harm economic growth and make it harder to alleviate poverty. By this logic the bank has, rightly, long been pushing for the education of girls. The fight against other forms of discrimination can be justified on the same economic grounds.

But even if it can be justified in principle, Mr Kim’s focus on gay rights is likely to be counterproductive in practice, for three reasons. First, it seems capricious. Uganda is hardly the only country with anti-gay laws on the books; nor is it the only one to have recently toughened its anti-gay stance. Almost 80 of the bank’s member countries, including most in Africa, have legislation that discriminates against gays. In many places the laws are ignored, but several places, notably Ethiopia and Nigeria, have recently introduced stiffer anti-gay statutes. Uganda’s behavior is odious. But it is not alone.

Second, the stress on gay rights itself seems arbitrary. Of the many forms of bigotry the bank could battle, it is not clear that anti-gay laws are the most harmful to the poor. The bank lends to plenty of places that discriminate against women under Islamic law. It also lends to countries with laws that discriminate against minorities. The economic impact of these forms of bigotry is far bigger. But if Mr Kim tries to tackle all institutionalised discrimination by withholding lending, he will soon have no customers left.

Third, his approach is likely to backfire. In the short term, it weakens the campaign to lessen poverty. Uganda’s loan, designed to support maternal-care clinics, was the equivalent of 20% of its health budget. And it still has a high child-mortality rate. Politically, the pressure from Mr Kim, though winning plaudits in Washington, is having perverse results, where it matters most. Uganda’s government declares itself to be standing up against the arrogant imposition of “Western values”. The more the World Bank adds such conditions to its lending, the more African countries will be inclined to seek money elsewhere, not least from the no-questions-asked Chinese.

The uncomfortable truth is that an economic institution like the bank has to pick its battles. There is a limit to how many conditions outsiders can attach to their aid. Its aim is to encourage economic development. Most of the evidence is that the bank is most effective when client countries see it as an economic partner, rather than a boss imposing a Western agenda.

Did you catch the phrase “the pressure from Mr Kim, though winning plaudits in Washington”?

That suggests the Obama administration is behind the World Bank’s push for “gay rights” and its concomitant punishment against countries that outlaw homosexual acts.

Indeed, it was Obama who in March 2012 nominated the Korean-American physician and anthropologist Dr. Jim Yong Kim to be the 12th President of the World Bank Group.

But the World Bank isn’t just aggressively pushing a homosexual agenda. It may be promoting transgenderism as well.

The World Bank partners with an outfit called Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), which develops policy guidelines for the bank which include policies on entirely non-economic issues. In its Guidelines for Environmental and Social Assessment, the MCC declares:

Gender is defined as the social roles, behaviors, and responsibilities assigned to women and men in any society. Unlike biology, gender is mutable, and women’s and men’s roles, behaviors, and responsibilities change over time and are different in different societies. MCC’s Gender Policy provides overall guidance to country partners with their responsibilities for the integration of gender in all stages of Compact development and implementation. Additional gender-specific guidance is also incorporated into other existing MCC country guidance materials such as the Guidance on Consultative Process and Guidelines for Monitoring and Evaluation Plans, for example. Countries should review the Gender Policy as they plan their consultative process and review the Environmental Guidelines as they start to identify potential priorities and should integrate relevant organizations and government ministries or agencies in the Compact development process.

Note that I supplied the red color in the paragraph above, but the bold emphasis is supplied by MCC. (See page 3 of the 19-page Guidelines for Environmental and Social Assessment.)

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) is a U.S. foreign aid agency established by President George W. Bush in 2004 with bipartisan Congressional support. It is an independent agency separate from the State Department and USAID.

MCC’s current CEO is Dana Hyde. The MCC Board is made up of representatives, including the MCC’s CEO, the U.S. Secretary of State who is the chair, the Secretary of Treasury who is the vice chair, the administrator of USAID, the U.S. Trade Representative and other private-sector or development-related officials.

Here’s an exercise in logical deduction for you:

The World Bank is aggressively pushing homosexual “rights” across the world, which violates its own founding principle prohibiting “political activity” or a political agenda.
Among the members of the World Bank, the United States ranks first in voting power.
The Millennium Challenge Corporation makes policies for the World Bank, including the declaration that gender is “mutable”: If you “think” you’re a woman, then you are one, irrespective of the fact that your sex chromosomes are XY. And if you “think” you’re a man, then you are one, irrespective of the fact that your sex chromosomes are XX. The time will soon come when if you “think” you are a cockroach, then you are a cockroach, even though your DNA says you’re a human.
The Millennium Challenge Corporation is a U.S. federal government agency.
The Obama administration constitutes the executive branch of the U.S. government.

Draw your own conclusions.

H/t Donald Hank of Renew America.