The State Department is reportedly considering withholding assistance for Zambians with HIV unless the country’s government allows the U.S. to access more of its minerals.

The New York Times on Monday reported Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a memo to State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs staffers wrote the U.S. “will only secure our priorities by demonstrating willingness to publicly take support away from Zambia on a massive scale.” The newspaper said it obtained a copy of the letter.

Zambia is a country in southern Africa that borders Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Times notes upwards of 1.3 million Zambians receive daily HIV medications through PEPFAR. The newspaper reported Rubio in his memo said the Trump-Vance administration could “significantly cut assistance” as soon as May.

“Reports of (the) State Department withholding lifesaving HIV treatment in return for mining concessions in Zambia does not make us safer, stronger, or more prosperous,” said U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Tuesday. “Monetizing innocent people’s lives further undermines U.S. global leadership and is just plain wrong.”

The Washington Blade has reached out to the State Department for comment.

Zambia received breakthrough HIV prevention drug through PEPFAR

Rubio on Jan. 28, 2025, issued a waiver that allowed PEPFAR and other “life-saving humanitarian assistance” programs to continue to operate during a freeze on nearly all U.S. foreign aid spending. HIV/AIDS service providers around the world with whom the Blade has spoken say PEPFAR cuts and the loss of funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, which officially closed on July 1, 2025, has severely impacted their work.

The State Department last September announced PEPFAR will distribute lenacapavir in countries with high prevalence rates. Zambia two months later received the first doses of the breakthrough HIV prevention drug.

Kenya and Uganda are among the African countries have signed health agreements with the U.S. since the Trump-Vance administration took office.

The Times notes the countries that signed these agreements pledged to increase health spending. The Blade last month reported LGBTQ rights groups have questioned whether these agreements will lead to further exclusion and government-sanctioned discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Botswana was in a whole frenzy as religious and traditional fundamentalists kept mixing religion and constitutional law as if it were harmless. It is not. One is a private matter of belief between you and God, while the other is the framework that protects and governs us all. When these two systems get fused, the result is rarely justice. It results in discrimination. 

The ongoing case brought by Bonolo Selelo and Tsholofelo Kumile challenging provisions of the Botswana Marriage Act has reignited a familiar debate in Botswana. Some commentators insist that marriage equality violates religious values and therefore should not be recognized by law. It is a predictable argument. It is also fundamentally incompatible with constitutional governance.

Botswana is not a Christian state. It is a constitutional democracy governed by the Constitution of Botswana. That distinction matters. In a constitutional democracy, laws are interpreted in accordance with constitutional principles such as equality, dignity, protection, inclusion and the rule of law, rather than the doctrinal beliefs of any particular religion.

Religion has no place in constitutional law and democracy

The central problem with religious arguments in constitutional disputes is simple in that they divide, they other, they contest equality and they are personal. Constitutional law by contrast, must apply equally to everyone.

Botswana’s Constitution guarantees fundamental rights and freedoms under Sections 3 and 15, including protection from discrimination and the right to equal protection of the law. These provisions are not conditional on religious approval. They exist precisely to protect minorities from the preferences or prejudices of the majority.

Legal experts, such as Anneke Meerkotter, in her policy brief in Defense of Constitutional Morality, point out that constitutional rights function as a safeguard against majoritarian morality. If rights depended on whether the majority approved of a minority’s identity or relationships, they would not be rights at all. They would merely be privileges.

This principle has already been affirmed in Botswana’s jurisprudence. In the landmark decision of Letsweletse Motshidiemang v Attorney General, the High Court held that criminalizing consensual same-sex relations violated constitutional protections of liberty, dignity, privacy, and equality. This judgment noted that constitutional interpretation must evolve with society and must be guided by human dignity and equality. The court emphasized that the Constitution protects all citizens, including those whose identities, expressions or relationships may be unpopular. That ruling was later upheld by the Court of Appeal of Botswana in 2021, reinforcing the principle that constitutional rights cannot be restricted on grounds of moral disapproval alone. These decisions were not theological pronouncements. They were legal determinations grounded in constitutional principles.

The danger of religious majoritarianism

When religion is used to justify legal restrictions, the result is what constitutional scholars call “majoritarian moralism.” It allows the dominant religious interpretation in society to dictate the rights of everyone else. That approach is fundamentally incompatible with constitutional democracy. Botswana is religiously diverse. While Christianity is the majority faith, there are also Muslims, Hindus, traditional spiritual communities, Sikh and people who practice no religion at all. If the law were to follow the doctrines of one religious group, which interpretation would it adopt? Christianity alone contains dozens of denominations with different views on love, equality, marriage, sexuality, and gender. The moment the state begins to legislate on the basis of religious doctrine, it implicitly privileges one belief system over others. That undermines both religious freedom and constitutional equality. Ironically, keeping religion separate from constitutional law is what protects religious freedom in the first place.

Judicial independence is the cornerstone of Botswana’s governance system

The current case involving Bonolo Selelo and Tsholofelo Kumile is before the judiciary, where it belongs. Courts exist to interpret the Constitution and determine whether legislation complies with constitutional rights. Political and religious lobbying, as well as public outrage, must not influence that process.

Judicial independence is the cornerstone of Botswana’s governance system. According to the International Commission of Jurists, judicial independence ensures that courts can make decisions based on law and evidence rather than political or social pressure.

When governments, political, religious, or traditional actors attempt to interfere in constitutional litigation, they weaken the rule of law. Botswana has historically prided itself on having one of the most stable constitutional systems in Africa. The judiciary has played a critical role in safeguarding rights and maintaining legal certainty. The decriminalization case demonstrated this. Despite strong public debate and political sensitivity, the courts assessed the law according to constitutional principles rather than moral panic. The same standard must apply in the current marriage equality case.

This article was first published in the Botswana Gazette, Midweek Sun, and Botswana Guardian newspapers and has been edited for the Washington Blade. 

Bradley Fortuin is a consultant at the Southern Africa Litigation Center and a social justice activist.

The idea that Western colonialism spread queerphobia around the globe is not something new for American millennials and Gen Z. It is well known among them that the British Empire brought “anti-sodomy” laws to some African countries, such as Uganda and Nigeria, as well as to South Asia. 

But very few modern American and British people know the history of Russian colonialism, and the way Russian neocolonial politics is ruining the lives of queer people right now, in real time. It’s happening all across Eastern Europe, the Northern Caucasus, and Central Asia. Throughout these regions, the Kremlin promotes imperialistic values that include direct discrimination against queer people.

Let’s start with the most obvious example and move toward the less known ones.

In modern-day Ukraine, LGBTQ rights have become more visible and widely discussed than before the Revolution of Dignity. Even during the war, Ukraine has taken some steps forward in recognizing LGBTQ rights. For example, in 2025 the Desnianskyi District Court of Kyiv for the first time recognized a same-sex couple married abroad as legally married, and in 2026 the Supreme Court made a similar decision. LGBTQ people openly serve in the Ukrainian military. 

But the situation with LGBTQ rights in Russian-occupied Crimea and Donbas is completely different. 

Ukrainian LGBTQ citizens are persecuted by Russian military forces. Materials with positive LGBTQ representation are banned because of Russia’s “anti-propaganda” laws. Transgender people cannot access gender-affirming therapy. According to people currently living in occupied Donbas, LGBTQ teenagers have been subjected to conversion therapy after being taken from supportive families and sent to Russia.

Russia is not shy about this policy. The war against LGBTQ people — and Ukraine’s growing openness toward LGBTQ rights — has been used as one of the official justifications for Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Russian politicians have repeated this narrative, and so has the leader of the largest Russian Christian church closely connected to the government. In 2022 the head of the Russian Orthodox Church openly claimed that the war in Ukraine was happening because people in Donbas did not want gay pride parades. The claim is absurd. First and foremost, people in Donbas do not want to be bombed — and I say this as someone who was born there.

This blatant Russian attempt to destroy LGBTQ rights on foreign land did not start in Ukraine, just as Russian colonialism itself did not start there. The Soviet Union was famous for criminalizing homosexuality. 

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Soviet republics gained independence, including the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. Chechen people had many grievances against the Kremlin, including the genocide committed against Chechen and Ingush people by Joseph Stalin in 1944. There was also resentment over the Soviet attempt to erase Chechen identity. Despite Chechens having a completely different culture, language group, and traditions from Slavic Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, the Soviet government tried to assimilate them and make them more “Slavic.”

In the new Russia that emerged after the Soviet collapse, Chechens struggled to rent apartments in Moscow and were frequently ridiculed for being Muslim. Racial slurs like “black-assed” were commonly used against Chechen students in Russia. In 1994, Russia decided to “civilize” independent Chechnya and launched an unprovoked attack, only to lose the war to this small Muslim nation of fewer than one million people in 1997. When Vladimir Putin came to power, he built his popularity partly by launching the Second Chechen War and occupying Chechnya.

Today Chechnya is ruled by Ramzan Kadyrov, an extremely unpopular leader imposed on the region through pressure and blackmail from the Russian military. It was under Kadyrov that the infamous purge of gay people — described in David France’s HBO documentary “Welcome to Chechnya” — began. But the documentary failed to explain the broader context. As many Chechen activists and ordinary people told me — people who refused to give their names to a foreign LGBT outlet because of the risks to themselves and their relatives — Chechen society has never been explicitly queerphobic. Chechens are proud of having traditions of democracy dating back to the Middle Ages and of respecting individual freedom and family rights.

This is exactly where discussions about sexuality traditionally belong in Chechen social norms: inside the family. Family is almost sacred to Chechens. Every Chechen knows seven generations of their paternal ancestors and stays in contact with uncles, aunts, and cousins. Later, Russia weaponized these family structures by blackmailing and torturing even distant relatives of activists.

For generations, matters of sex were considered private family affairs that the state — an independent Chechen state — should never interfere with. This does not mean Chechnya was especially LGBTQ-friendly. Parents and siblings may be queerphobic — or may not — and society would not question it. But police, commenting on private sexual relationships? This is an abomination!

This is exactly what the Russian occupational authorities introduced. They turned the private into the public, kidnapping and torturing queer people as part of a wider colonial campaign of repression. It was never just about gay people. The authorities also targeted people who subscribed to opposition channels online, spoke against the Kremlin, wore the “wrong” clothes or the “wrong” kind of beard, or listened to prohibited music.

It was never just about gay people. In occupied Chechnya, it has always been about colonial control. Moreover, as my Chechen respondents pointed out, “Welcome to Chechnya” tells the story largely from the perspective of Russian LGBTQ activists. Some of them also have colonial ways of viewing the Northern Caucasus. This is why the film “forgets” to mention that many gay people who were rescued by activists left Chechnya with the active help of their own parents and siblings.

Another example of Russian interference in predominantly Muslim nations can be seen in Kazakhstan, one of the largest countries in Central Asia. In the West, it is not widely known that Kazakh people living in Slavic regions of Russia face everyday discrimination. They are often targets of anti-immigrant hatred similar to the way Mexicans are treated in the United States. In everyday life they are frequently called “churkas,” an extremely derogatory racist slur roughly comparable to the English N-word. When I lived in Russia, almost everyone I knew — even progressive people — used this word from time to time against Kazakh immigrants.

Despite all of that, the Kazakh government has aligned itself closely with the Kremlin. Late last year, the Kazakh parliament adopted an anti-LGBTQ law similar to the Russian one. The law followed earlier bans in Kyrgyzstan in 2023 and Georgia in 2024 and prohibits the dissemination of information about “non-traditional sexual orientation,” affecting culture, education, advertising, media, and cinema.

Critics called these laws a “copycat” of Russian policy and part of Moscow’s colonial influence.

“Are we an independent and sovereign republic, or are we a colony of the Russian Federation?” prominent Kazakh LGBTQ activist and feminist Zhanar Sekerbayeva asked during a press conference.

“As an educated and intelligent woman … I cannot understand why lawmakers allow themselves to violate the fundamental law of the constitution,” she said.

It was therefore not surprising that in February 2026 a criminal case was opened against Sekerbayeva for allegedly “promoting LGBT” during a peaceful gathering at the “French Café.” The real reason, however, is more likely not just her LGBTQ activism but her opposition to pro-Russian politicians.

In Georgia, pro-Russian political movements similarly weaponized anti-LGBTQ conspiracies to mobilize opposition against the European Union. These movements falsely claim that Brussels demands “LGBT propaganda” and threatens “traditional family values.”

This conspiracy narrative has even been supported by Belarus’s dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who said he is “scared for Georgia” because Europe allegedly promotes LGBTQ rights there. Of course, Belarus itself has no meaningful legal protections for LGBTQ people — and it is unlikely to develop them while its leadership is protected by the Kremlin. 

The list could continue. In Moldova, another post-Soviet country, the last widely promoted study of schooling has shown that LGBTQ teenagers are among the most vulnerable students in schools, facing bullying from peers, parents, and even teachers. Once again, pro-Russian politicians in Moldova actively use anti-LGBTQ rhetoric that contributes to this hostile environment.

Of course, Russia is not the single reason for queerphobia in post-Soviet countries. There are many other factors, from everyday stereotypes to the influence of American fundamentalist groups on local conservative movements. But Russia remains the main force preventing these countries from developing independent LGBTQ policies. Local queerphobia is a target audience for Russia, and anti-LGBTQ narratives have become an inseparable part of Russian neo-colonial politics.