During a recent House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing titled “Advancing National Security Through Public Diplomacy,” Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., questioned Sarah Rogers, the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy, about Biden-era grants for DEI programs worldwide. Rogers claimed that the former President Joe Biden’s administration was focused on “making the maps more gay.”
Mast, who chairs the committee, asked Rogers, “Can you tell me what is queering the map?” Rogers responded, “So I think we were trying to make the maps more gay,” referring to the administration's initiatives.
Mast pressed further, asking how one makes a map “more gay.” Rogers admitted, “I don’t know. Since the age of cartography, we’ve had pretty good maps, but maybe they weren’t gay enough. I also took critical theory in college, and I think sometimes people use ‘queer’ as a verb. I do understand that the maps we were trying to make gay were, I think, of Czechia and Slovakia. So maybe those countries asked for it. I doubt it, but I don’t know.”
Mast expressed his frustration, pointing out that Congress has more pressing matters like the “imminent threat of Iran,” rather than discussing grants for projects such as “non-binary and transfrancophones, linguistic attitudes and ideologies toward inclusive French in Montreal, Canada.”
Rogers mentioned other grants for various programs worldwide, including a DEI flash mob in Kyrgyzstan, a diversity roadshow in India, and diversity and inclusion programs in Luxembourg, Spain, New Zealand, Canada, and Malaysia, as well as teaching trans and intersex leaders in India.
Mast criticized the grants, stating, “We would absolutely love to know the individuals specifically who were busy writing these grants because they have no business receiving another paycheck from the people of the United States of America.”
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