[ad_1]
A U.S. Embassy tweet of a rainbow-flag-festooned message by President Joe Biden in assist of Pleasure Month has drawn a face-to-face diplomatic protest from Kuwait and sparked a uncommon Twitter combat between the 2 shut allies.
On Friday, U.S. diplomats had been doubling down with rainbow flag postings and statements in assist of LGBTQ rights on social media. The messages appeared in response to the Kuwaiti authorities’s official objection the day earlier than to what Kuwait’s state information company known as the “pro-gay rights submit” of the U.S. Embassy there.
“The USA stands with the LGBTQI+ group in all places around the globe,” State Division spokesman Ned Worth mentioned in a pointed retweet Friday of the embassy’s unique offending Pleasure Month message.
The dispute started after the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait posted a tweet Thursday that known as Biden a champion of LGBTQI rights. “All human beings must be handled with respect and dignity and may have the ability to stay with out concern regardless of who they’re or whom they love,” it mentioned.
Late that evening, in keeping with the account on Kuwait’s state information company, Kuwait’s International Ministry summoned appearing embassy cost d’affaires James Holtsnider to “specific its rejection of the submit.”
A International Ministry official, Nawaf al Ahmad, handed Holtsnider a written objection “in addition to stressing necessity for the embassy to respect the nation’s legal guidelines and laws,” in keeping with the Kuwaiti information company.
Kuwaiti regulation punishes consensual same-sex relations between males by as much as seven years in jail, in keeping with Human Rights Watch. A court docket ruling this yr threw out one other regulation that made “imitating the other intercourse” against the law punishable by jail.
Some conservative Kuwaitis spoke out in assist of their authorities’s motion. The U.S. Embassy was “trying to impose modes of irregular conduct rejected by the Muslim Kuwaiti society,” tweeted one, Hamad al Matar.
Requested for remark, the State Division mentioned in a press release Friday, “The USA proudly advances efforts across the globe to guard all people.”
On Friday, the Kuwait U.S. Embassy’s Twitter account featured the unique tweet, in Arabic and English, that drew the objection, in addition to a photograph of a rippling rainbow flag in opposition to a blue sky set because the account’s profile photograph.
The U.S. and Kuwait, certain by strategic pursuits together with regional safety, have a protracted historical past of largely regular good relations. That features the U.S. main a 1991 worldwide military to liberate Kuwait from invading forces of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
[ad_2]
Source link