A group of anti-LGBT activists from around the world, led by National Organization for Marriage President Brian Brown, used International Human Rights Day this weekend to launch a new global anti-LGBT group, the International Organization for the Family (IOF). Brown, whose own anti-gay activism has taken him around the world, has been planning to take NOMs work global for a while now, as BuzzFeeds Lester Feder reported in 2014 and 2015.
IOF says it unites and equips leaders worldwide to promote the natural family. Its first public project is a new global anti-LGBT manifesto dubbed the Cape Town Declaration, which the right-wing site Breitbart described as throwing down the gauntlet to the LGBT lobby. IOF is hoping to gather two million signatures in the coming year. Manifesto signers pledge to resist the rising cultural imperialism of Western powers whose governments seek nothing less than the ideological colonization of the family. It is certainly no coincidence that the manifesto includes ideological colonization, a phrase repeatedly employed by Pope Francis.
The declaration and its concluding vow Bowing to no earthly power, using every just measure, we shall not falter or flag until the truth about marriage is embraced in our laws and honored in our lands feels a lot like a global version of the 2009 Manhattan Declaration, in which conservative evangelicals and Catholics pledged civil disobedience and vowed never to bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.
