Opinions
Kamala Harris is not perfect, but far better than Donald Trump
Republican ticket has voiced support for Vladimir Putin
As a Ukrainian child, I’ve been obsessed with American politics.
I was 13 when I was following my first American presidential election, avidly reading Russian Newsweek and watching the discussion about the debates between Barack Obama and John McCain on Savik Shuster’s political talk show on Ukrainian television.
Obama and Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, were the only Democrat politicians I liked in my “Republican” teenage years. And while I respected Brzezinski for his anti-Soviet views, my sympathy toward Barack Obama was personal.
At 13, I didn’t have words to describe myself as an autistic or trans* person, but I had a feeling that there is something deeply unusual about me. I was cruelly bullied among peers for being “weird.” I knew the history of the American Civil Rights Movement much better than any stories about Eastern European activism, and the idea that a Black man could become the president of the United States while millions of Americans still remember segregation gave me some hope about the possibility of social change.
Now with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on the ballot this year, I have a particular feeling of deja vu.
If Kamala wins, she will definitely become a role model — not just for girls all around the world but also because she is a Black woman — for people from other minorities, including folks who are living on the intersection of discrimination. Moreover, because she is an outstanding supporter for LGBT+ rights, her victory could be crucial for the LGBT+ community globally, because of American cultural and financial influence.
It is not just her role as an inspirational model that is interesting to me in the context of the coming election, but also the way the election and its outcome is affecting the situation in Eastern Europe and beyond.
The role of American culture
It is not particularly unusual that a Ukrainian child like me was deeply into American politics.
My classmates were less politicized than me, but some of my peers in school liked politics, and teachers often commented on the news. As weird as it could sound for an ordinary American citizen, the 2008 U.S. presidential election was no less popular in Donetsk, Ukraine, than the Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004-2005.
That’s right, ordinary Ukranians cared about the American situation no less than their own, maybe even more. American culture is extremely prominent globally — my Ukrainian and Russian peers who weren’t into politics were into American stuff like Kardashian shows and Hollywood blockbusters.
I think the average American should think a little bit more about the level of influence that American culture and political situation has in this world.
When I was an LGBT+ activist in Russia, I didn’t hear much about the Soviets who were put into prisons for being gay, or the Russian Empire’s history of queerness. On queer events we mostly spoke about the Stonewall riots, the HIV epidemic in the U.S., and San Francisco’s LGBT+ community during the Harvey Milk era.
When activists in St. Petersburg and Kyiv were talking about racism, they spoke about Dr. Martin Luther King and the Black Lives Matter movement, not about Russia’s persecutions of Chechens and Crimean Tatars. In “feminist schools,” the new generation of girls learned about intersectionality from Kimberly Krenshow’s speeches about PoC Americans.
Of course, it partly happened because post-Soviet activists lack the ability to think about their own political situation — Soviet people for years didn’t have any opportunity to participate in politics. Soviet dissidents looked to the West for inspiration, and Soviet officials for finding something that they could criticize to better fit in the party.
But this obsession with the U.S. is not limited to Eastern Europe.
In the Middle East, for example, terrorist groups like the so-called Islamic State even based a significant part of their propaganda on Western memes; making Hollywood-style videos, using American mass-culture references, and deliberately hiring Western supporters — “muhajirin” or immigrants — for media work.
American political and social culture is simply creating cultural trends.
This is why Kamala Harris could really change the perspective of a girl from a PoC background, and bring inspiration to marginalized people. Also, in the age when pro-Donald Trump’s QAnons conspiracy went global, a Trump victory would make far-right ideas much more mainstream.
Russian-Ukrainian war: Beyond the queer context
The situation is actually more complex than it may seem from the first glance.
If we are speaking about the Russian-Ukrainian war, we need to understand that right from the beginning of this war, Russia used anti-LGBT+ bigotry to justify its military aggression.
For example, the Russian Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the biggest and most prominent Christian church in Russia, was saying that the war in Ukraine happened because “people in Donbas do not want to have gay Pride.” We need to remember that at the same time Russia brutally bombed civilians in Donbas region, destroying schools and maternity wards.
The situation with schools is particularly “interesting.”
The governor of St. Petersburg’s region, Alexander Beglov, was saying that the Russian soldiers knew what they were fighting for after they saw gender-neutral toilets in Ukrainian schools.
So for the Kremlin, it is much better to kill children than to let them be queers, and Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, is known not just for his outstanding homophobic and transphobic views, but also for his support of Vladimir Putin. Despite all the pompousness of this statement, Trump and his administration de facto support genocide of queer people.
Kamala Harris has had her own problems with Eastern Europe.
For example, in my opinion, her relationship with Russia is too-centered around the Russian opposition, some of whom are Russian-supremacist, and she lacks understanding of intersectionality and colonial history of Eastern Europe and Northern Caucasus. That was obvious during prisoner exchange this past summer when the U.S. and Germany released Russian killer Vadim Krasikov, who was serving a life sentence in a German prison for killing Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Chechen refugee who fought against Russian aggression in his homeland. The family of the victim wasn’t informed and Zelimkhan’s wife didn’t have an opportunity to react to the situation or participate in negotiations. German authorities and the Biden administration during the exchange didn’t ask Russia to release any Chechen political prisoners from Russian prisons.
The Khangoshvili case was extremely prominent for the Chechen community and could be compared to the George Floyd murder for Black Americans. So Krasikov’s release made Chechen communities in the U.S. and Europe believe in Kamala’s xenophobic tendencies. It is especially true after the long history of ignoring of Russia kidnapping and torture of Chechen civilians, and the fact that prominent Democrats, including Joe Biden, spoke about Chechnya only or mostly in a context of persecution of LGBT+ people.
When I spoke with Chechen activists about it, some of them started to believe a kind of a “gay lobby” conspiracy because of this situation, while others like to point out that it was under Russian authorities when gay people began to disappear in Chechnya. Before Russia’s occupation of Chechnya in 2000, private sexual lives was just a taboo topic, and any idea of “spying” on someone because the person could be gay, or reading private messages was considered an abomination. Western officials at the same time mostly believed Russian activists who are quite xenophobic, and made it all look like a problem of Chechen culture, not a direct result of Russian politics in Chechnya where people could be kidnapped and tortured literally for anything, from listening to a prohibited music to making a political joke on social media. Chechen Americans became alienated from Republicans because of their Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiments, and they are also alienated from Democrats. And the situation has worsened because Russian authorities often kidnap Chechen refugee-activists’ relatives in Chechnya, forcing Chechen in the West, including American Chechens to be quiet, and nobody in American politics is addressing the problem.
This is not just a Chechen issue.
American Democrats for years were collaborating mostly with civil society activists from the Russian opposition, ignoring Crimea Tatars, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Georgians, and other people from post-Soviet states. They, while not deliberately, supported Russian propaganda that said the entire Eastern Bloc is one big “Mother Russia,” so they have a lot to work with.
Even though Democrats had their own issues, Republicans were making the same mistakes, and showing their open bigotry.
The stakes are now higher than before. Donald Trump is not just xenophobic and homophobic but also known for his collaborations with Vladimir Putin’s regime that committed horrendous war crimes in Chechnya, Syria, Libya, Mali, and, finally, Ukraine.
Americans could choose a convicted sex predator who had ties with a genocidal regime in Russia, or they could choose the imperfect, but ready-to-learn first female American president who would make the world more acceptable in the eyes of those who live overseas.
Ayman Eckford is a freelance journalist, and an autistic ADHDer transgender person who understands that they are trans* since they were 3-years-old.
Africa
American Evangelical churches masquerade as connoisseurs of African family values
Anti-LGBTQ Family Watch International, partners held conference in Nairobi last month
On Friday, May 16, 2025, Family Watch International and its partners gathered in Nairobi, Kenya, for a week-long conference themed “the Pan-African Conference on Family Values.” Family Watch International is a U.S. Christian conservative organization led by the infamous Sharon Slater. This anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ+ organization lobbies in the United Nations and countries around the world to push their anti-rights and anti-gender agenda.
This wasn’t the first conference convened on East African soil; one such was held in Uganda, from May 9-11, 2025, where Family Watch International was also a part. East Africa seems to be the hub for conservative U.S. evangelists, and one wonders why. The conference is a series of conferences focusing on what they call traditional African family values. Again, one wonders what gives an American organization the authority to speak to Africans about African Family values. After the May gathering in Nairobi, the delegates released a press statement introducing and claiming to be adopting what they labelled “The Nairobi Declaration on Family Values.”
Funded misinformation
This article was thus born to review and address, particularly, the “African family” ideas purported in the declaration. The first inquiry is, who is funding the conference? This conference is heavily funded and guided by the ultraconservative far-right evangelical movements from America and Europe. The African hosts, the Kenya Christian Professionals Forum and the Kenyan Ministry of Labor and Social Protection and actors are merely tokens in this scheme aimed at taking over Africa by erasing its actual values and redefining them from a Western and Eurocentric religious lens. The colonial missionaries historically employed this very familiar move. Another blatant untruth in their declaration is the claim that they represent governments, civil society, academia, religious bodies, and “allied international partners.” There has been no evidence to prove this claim, except for the participants who are known conservatives, infamous for their hate and anti-rights rhetoric from countries such as Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa. This piece of misinformation and disinformation is one of the strategies they employ to make it seem like most, if not all, African governments and masses approve of their unscientific absurdity.
African Family values owned by foreign entities
According to the declaration, their engagements aim to “Promoting and Protecting Family Values in Challenging Times,” advocate for and protect the “natural family.” It is rather peculiar that American and European organizations would lead a conversation about African family values. These are modern imperialists; they intend to cement their Western-centric idea of a family. Their family structure comprises a mother, a father, and children, while the African family is beyond that. Although nuclear family units do exist within African society, it is the more nuanced family structures consisting of “children, parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, brothers, and sisters who may have their own children and other immediate relatives” that dominate the African family traditions. Often in rural areas, children are communally raised by their grandmothers, aunts, and siblings, as the parents go to the cities for economic opportunities and serve more as financial support for their young. It is therefore naïve for these modern imperialists to falsely claim a singular and rigid definition of family, especially as it concerns African people. Failure to acknowledge the diversities and complexities that exist within African family structures is both delusional and a clear indication of how there is nothing Pan-African about the conference itself.
Nothing Pan-African about it
Furthermore, how does a Pan-African family conference discuss African family values without African traditional leaders, elders, and spiritual leaders? Their exclusion of these figures demonstrates that they uphold the colonial and missionary legacy. It remains the view of the majority of Africans that those in traditional roles are the true custodians of the African culture, language, traditions, customs, and values, and these individuals clearly misalign with these modern imperialists’ agenda and mandate, thus illegitimizing claims of Pan-Africanism and protecting African family and values. The cognitive dissonance is evident in African actors who adopt those imported religious beliefs and regard them as superior to true African spirituality and culture, making these individuals modern imperialists.
Misleading the people
The intentional misuse of the term “Pan-African” not only misleads but can also entice those who believe what the term has historically meant, while in actual fact, the ideals they are spreading are far from Pan-Africanism. Meanwhile, African human rights organizations and those who can legitimately claim Pan-Africanism are concerned about colonial laws and the reform and eradication of colonial legacies. The modern imperialists, on the other hand, are reinforcing the colonial legacy by using confusing and dividing language aimed at causing moral panic among African communities.
Erasure
Activists in Kenya who have been following and monitoring the work of Family Watch International in Africa have argued that their agenda poses a grave threat to erasing Africa’s rich diversity of families. What the conference deems un-African are the same characteristics that the colonial missionaries historically labelled undesirable when they indoctrinated African societies in Christianity and its values, when Africans were made to believe that their own spiritualities are demonic.
The term “values” becomes redundant when it is solely tied to Christianity and disregards true African realities. They are causing confusion among African societies through the use of desirable and triggering language such as “Pan-Africa” and “African values.” When people are divided and busy fighting each other, important issues will fall through the cracks, go unnoticed, and there will be a lack of accountability. These modern imperialists use tactics to distract the African nation with these ideas that historically have never been a problem within African societies; meanwhile, the looting of the African land continues, and so does the exploitation of its minerals and resources. This article is part of the Southern Africa Litigation Center’s campaign around addressing hate speech, misinformation and disinformation. #StopTheHate #TruthMatters
Daniel Digashu is a consultant at the Southern Africa Litigation Center.
Opinions
LGBTQ people must stand with immigrants now
Their courage and care have made our communities stronger
Protests are erupting across the country in response to a surge in immigration enforcement: increased ICE raids, expanding surveillance networks, and political calls for mass deportations. Organizers are mobilizing to stop detentions, defend immigrant communities, and push back against the broader criminalization of migration.
LGBTQ+ people are not bystanders in this story. We are at its center.
There are 1.3 million LGBTQ+ adult immigrants who live in the U.S., and more than 289,000 who are undocumented. Many fled their countries because of anti-LGBTQ+ violence. When they arrive in the U.S., they face new threats: detention, denial of medical care, and the looming fear of deportation. Some are sent back to places where being LGBTQ+ is punishable by death. Others are locked away in U.S. facilities that claim to protect them but instead isolate and endanger them.
We know from available data that LGBTQ+ immigrants in ICE custody are 97 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than other detainees. Hormone therapy, HIV medication, and mental health care are frequently denied. Deaths in custody, like those of Roxana Hernández and Johana Medina Leon, are tragic outcomes of these structural conditions. But the harm does not end with detention. The constant threat of raids and deportation drives people away from clinics, silences abuse, and cuts off vital access to preventive care. These systems undermine health at every level: physical, emotional, communal, and political.
As a public health researcher who studies the consequences of public policy, I see this moment not just a legal or political crisis, but a public health emergency. The systems being protested are the same ones that make people sick. They fracture communities, expose vulnerable populations to trauma and medical neglect, and deepen the structural conditions that cause premature death.
This is what public health calls a syndemic: multiple forms of violence interacting to produce compounding harm. Immigration enforcement doesn’t just criminalize. It isolates. It separates people from care, severs support networks, and creates conditions of chronic fear. And that fear becomes its own form of illness.
What we are witnessing is not just an immigration issue. It’s about power. The expansion of enforcement, surveillance, and detention reflects a broader effort to consolidate control over who is allowed to exist safely in public space. And once those powers exist, they rarely stay confined to one community.
LGBTQ+ people have lived this before. From sodomy laws to the surveillance of gay bars, from HIV criminalization to today’s drag bans and curriculum restrictions, we know how governments weaponize control in the name of “public order.” When we ignore state violence against immigrants, we normalize the very tools – raids, profiling, incarceration – that have also been used against us.
The same political forces driving this crackdown on immigrants are fueling anti-LGBTQ+ legislation across the country. These are not parallel struggles. They are interlocking, coordinated, and mutually reinforcing. And that is why now is such a critical time for coalition building. And not just symbolic solidarity, but real, material alignment.
LGBTQ+ liberation has always depended on collective care. We have survived because we built networks to keep each other alive when institutions looked the other way. That same energy is needed now – at the border, in detention centers, and in our neighborhoods.
And we must be clear: this is about justice. Immigrants have long shaped the soul of LGBTQ+ life in the U.S. – as organizers, artists, caregivers, and political visionaries. And they haven’t just participated in our movement. They have led it. From ACT UP and HIV advocacy to today’s mutual aid networks and transgender liberation organizing, immigrant voices have been at the forefront. Their courage and care have made our communities stronger.
If we want to live in a world where no one is caged for who they are or where they’re from, we must act together to build it. That means supporting immigrant-led organizations like Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, the Black LGBTQ+ Migrant Project, and Trans Queer Pueblo. It means showing up for raids defense, calling out anti-immigrant policies, and refusing to let our movements be divided.
If Pride means anything, it must mean this: that our health, our safety, and our futures are bound together. And that we will fight – together – until we are all free.
Harry Barbee, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. They study LGBTQ+ health and public policy.
Opinions
The felon in the White House wants to foment violence
He’s creating the problems he claims to be solving
It is clear by all his actions, the felon in the White House would like to foment violence, so he can claim he is quelling it. It is what he is doing in Los Angeles, by federalizing the California National Guard, calling them up, and sending in the Marines.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said he will sue the Trump administration over its deployment of the guard, and that is now in the courts. He said, “the lawsuit would challenge Trump’s federalizing of the California National Guard without the state’s consent, a move with little precedent in U.S. history. Donald Trump has created the conditions you see on your TV tonight. He’s exacerbated the conditions. He’s, you know, lit the proverbial match. He’s putting fuel on this fire, ever since he announced he was taking over the National Guard — an illegal act, an immoral act, an unconstitutional act.”
This is all part of Trump’s alternate universe. He wants to be a king and a dictator. His idols are clearly the likes of Hitler and Putin. He recently had Department of Homeland Security agents tackle and handcuff California Democratic U.S. Senator Alex Padilla for attempting to ask DHS Secretary Kristi Noem questions at a public press conference in Los Angeles.
I believe in the Constitution, which allows us to demonstrate, speak out, and make our views known. I am not for violent protests. They simply play into Trump’s hands, allowing him to use the military to look like he is quelling the violence, even when they aren’t needed. In cities like Los Angeles, the local police are fully prepared to deal with the issue. And if they do need help, the governor can call up the guard.
Over my lifetime I participated in many demonstrations. The first was to protest the Vietnam War. In November 1969, I traveled from my home in New York City to Washington, D.C., for that one. My second time protesting the war was in front of the American embassy in London in 1970. Then there were the demonstrations for women’s equality during the years I worked for Bella Abzug (D-N.Y.). My first job in D.C. was for the Carter administration, directing the White House Conference on Handicapped Individuals/Implementation Unit. My first day in D.C. I was invited to support and participate in a demonstration in front of the White House. At that one, members of the disability community handcuffed themselves to the White House gate to make their points. Since that time, I participated in many marches for the LGBTQ community’s rights, my rights, one of which I helped organize. During Trump’s first term there were many protests I was a part of, the first being the massive women’s march the day after his inauguration. Then the demonstration against gun violence, and most recently in D.C. demonstrations against what Trump is doing today. In all those, only in the one against the Vietnam War in D.C. did I see any semblance of violence. I was tear-gassed in front of the Department of Justice. My tear-gassing seemed the result of what was being done by only a few people. Today, Trump would like TV screens to show violence, again, so he can claim he is doing something to stop it. In reality, he is creating it.
A big symbol of Trump’s wanting to be a King, or dictator, was the military parade in D.C. on his 79th birthday, (yes, he is a diminished old man). For the country, and the world, watching this, it looked more like something happening in Russia or North Korea. The felon, Commander in Chief, not only never served (it was those damn bone spurs), but who has shared views of people who did. Just remember what he said about a true hero, Senator John McCain. “He’s not a war hero, he’s a war hero because he was captured, I like people that weren’t captured.” A sick and disgusting comment, made by a sick and disgusting man, who we must always remember is a liar, felon, racist, homophobe, found liable for sexual assault.
So, I hope the protests will continue, and will grow. But while they do, I plead with those few who think violence is the way to go, and ask them to think first, and realize what they are doing plays directly into Trump’s hands, and then we all will suffer more. Let us take to the streets safely, and peacefully, and then at every opportunity, go to the ballot box, and vote for Democrats. Together, we can throw the MAGA Republicans out of office, and take back our country.
Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.
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