WASHINGTON, DC — A former diplomat to the European Union described the “LGBT ideology” as “inherently totalitarian” at Hillsdale College’s Constitution Day celebration on Thursday. He contrasted “democratic sovereignty” (the idea behind the United States Constitution) with “global governance,” which uses a post-modern interpretation of human rights to replace the traditional view of human nature and limited government.
“I think the LGBT ideology is implicitly totalitarian — implicitly — it is going to destroy freedom implicitly,” Todd Huizinga, a U.S. diplomat for 20 years who now serves as director of international outreach at the Acton Institute and recently authored the book The New Totalitarian Temptation: Global Governance and the Crisis of Democracy in Europe, told PJ Media in an interview. He argued that any ideology which denies obvious empirical facts has to quash dissent in order to maintain its political influence.
Huizinga emphasized the issues of gay marriage and transgenderism.
“Marriage is — just plain is — an institution between a man and a woman, it’s not against anybody, for anybody, it’s just objectively that,” the former diplomat declared. “It’s objectively the way that we in the West have figured out to have families that bring up children in a stable environment, with two different models [a father and a mother] that they need in order to grow into full human beings. Now that’s been redefined, and you’re a bigot if you refuse to accept that new definition.”
Huizinga argued that the transgender movement also denies reality. “I understand that there are people who have psychological situations in which they feel uncomfortable with their physical gender, but that doesn’t mean that someone who is a man or who is a woman can suddenly become the other,” he told PJ Media. Even if a transgender person undergoes the full surgical “treatment,” doctors cannot alter the DNA in each cell, which will still be male or female. “That, to me, really reveals the deep denial of truth that’s behind the gender identity movement.”
How does this denial of truth link to totalitarianism? “There’s been a kind of totalitarian way of engaging the public square,” Huizinga argued. The LGBT activists who resort to demonizing those who disagree as “bigots” or “homophobes” end up demonstrating “that when you fly in the face of reality, you are implicitly totalitarian, because if it’s obviously not connected with reality, you have to force those who are arguing for reality onto the sidelines.”
“If the emperor has no clothes, you can’t allow anyone to say he has no clothes,” the former diplomat quipped.
Huizinga added an important caveat, however. Just because LGBT ideology is “implicitly totalitarian” doesn’t mean that it will necessary result in real totalitarian government. “Sometimes there’s a coexistence between inherently anti-freedom ideologies, and freedom in practice,” he admitted.
“I’m not saying that it will happen, but I’m saying the logic of it would lead to freedom being basically destroyed or weakened so badly that we wouldn’t notice that we have any freedom,” the former diplomat explained.
Next Page: What does this mean for postmodern Europe and for American Judeo-Christian sovereignty?
Huizinga made these remarks after a speech about the American Constitution, the European Union (EU), and the connection between postmodernism and global governance. He drew a large distinction between “supranationalism” and “democratic sovereignty.”
In the American system, “sovereignty resides in the citizens, not in the U.S. government,” the former diplomat explained. “Democratic sovereignty is the sovereignty of a self-governing people,” and it leads to limited government and limited ambitions for government. This populist and limited view of government requires a nation state to retain its sovereignty, so no foreign group of individuals can exercise control over them.
Supranationalism, however, denies national sovereignty and the limited government which goes along with it. When joining the EU, countries start “pooling and thus relinquishing significant aspects of their national sovereignty,” surrendering control over political issues such as immigration to the joint leadership of an international body.
“The EU’s heart and soul is this supranationalism,” Huizinga explained. In his 20 years of diplomatic service, he worked at the U.S. embassy in Luxembourg, at the U.S. mission to the EU in Brussels, at the EU desk in the State Department, and in various U.S. consulates in Europe, such as in Hamburg, Munich, Dublin, and Frankfurt. He applied this experience to explain the ideas and goals behind the EU’s mission.
“The EU’s supranationalism is all about global governance,” and it is the “only functioning model of how such governance could work.” He explained that global governance is about establishing a worldwide rule of law, not by a “one-world government,” but through an expanding union of national governments.
The EU blends this mission with a dangerous post-modern relativism. As a result, leaders view justice in limited human terms, but still aim to create effectively a heaven on earth. Since this world is all there is, human government must achieve justice. But the “suspicion that truth is not really truth but simply the tool of political power” means that “reality itself is nothing more than what each individual or group feels it to be.”
So when the EU advocates for the expansion of human rights, those rights do not have objective meaning. Rather than the right to choose your own representatives and have a hand in the creation of laws, or the right to private property, these new human rights mean different things to different groups, and fundamentally that each human being can create their own reality in the way that transgender people claim they do.
This means “liberating individuals from their traditional limits to communities and nation states,” and even from the most basic social bonds like the family, the former diplomat argued. Because this view of human rights is so fluid and autonomous, “no one ever knows what this global rule of law will look like at the end.”
This system must logically result in tyranny, however. “In a world without objective truth, only those who have political power can decide what human rights are,” Huizinga declared. The fundamental right to decide your own reality frees the government to dictate what actually constitutes your rights.
The former diplomat argued that even though Britain voted to leave the EU this year, global governance is still in vogue, and winning the ideological battle across the West. It’s even a threat in the United States.
Next Page: America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and limited government under threat.
The US, by contrast, is “the most developed Judeo-Christian nation in the world,” and it has “a sober view of human government.” The former diplomat argued that the Federalist Papers are “deeply indebted” to Christianity, especially in the view that human beings are capable of both great good and great harm. Also, the idea of a world beyond this one gives people hope of future justice without the necessity of forcing a perfect society on earth.
Nevertheless, this American system is also under assault by the very same threats at work in Europe, Huizinga warned. Political correctness brings Europe’s post-modernism to American politics, pushing the idea that there is no objective truth, only political narratives. An aggrieved interest group — like the LGBT movement, Black Lives Matter, or abortion advocates — can use its “tribal truth” to gain political power.
At the same time, national sovereignty is under assault by globalism. The former diplomat pointed to Supreme Court justices who cite foreign rulings in their decisions about U.S. law.
“We who are engaged in self-government are engaged in a battle that goes far beyond political issues,” Huizinga declared. “We can no longer safely appeal to objective truth” and “this battle of worldviews is a fight that we cannot avoid.”
Despite the urgency of defending truth and these dire threats to freedom, the speaker also urged a Christian humility in approaching people on the other side of the worldview battle. “There is no reason for any of us to think that we are any better than LGBT people or intersex people or Democrats,” he insisted.
“The only way to make process to saving real human rights” is to be “consistently charitable to everyone, including those who oppose us,” Huizinga argued. Christians and defenders of American limited government are not homophobes or xenophobes or Islamophobes, but we cannot surrender on these fundamental issues either. There is no reason why our message of liberty and limited government cannot be a winsome one.
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