John Baird gave a foreign policy speech in London, England, on Monday, and people from across the political spectrum are swooning over how vigorously he’s defending things like gay rights abroad. And that’s great; we should be encouraging this kind of talk.

That said, Baird’s speech is full of all kinds of omissions that colour the message he’s delivering. For starters, whether he’s just gripped by Iron Lady fever, or just indulging his preexisting fascination with Baroness Margaret Thatcher (he did famously name his cat after her, after all), Baird kept bringing her up in his speech. When it comes to the topic of women leaders, Baird brings up Thatcher, and the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada (Beverley McLachlin, for the record, whom he did not actually name). Which is odd, because while she’s a fine chief justice, she’s not a political leader like, say, Kim Campbell, as a Canadian example.

Kim Campbell, as minister of justice before she became prime minister, eliminated the prohibitions on gays and lesbians serving in the Canadian Forces back in 1992 – 20 years ago. Thatcher, on the other hand, passed Section 28 – legislation that made it a criminal offence to “promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretend family relationship.” This made it impossible for schoolteachers to address the rampant homophobic bullying in Britain’s public schools and scarred a generation of UK queers. It is a trauma on the population that still echoes to this day, and even in last month’s Attitude magazine, Thatcher is referred to as a “gay-hating, community-destroying Satan.” If Baird is going to make equality and gay rights a cornerstone of his foreign policy initiatives, then perhaps he shouldn’t be bringing up Thatcher. Just saying.

After breezing through girls going to school in Afghanistan, the mission in Libya and the Arab Spring, Baird arrives at the topic of the Commonwealth reforms and the need to work on decriminalizing homosexuality in the dozens of countries that still have those laws on the books. 

Throughout most of the Commonwealth Caribbean, colonial-era laws remain on the books that could impose draconian punishments on gay people simply for being gay. This contributes to social stigma and violence against gay people. Nowhere is the plight of gays and lesbians more evident than in Uganda, and no other story illustrates this plight better than the life and death of Ugandan gay rights activist David Kato.

While Baird rightly calls out the old colonial laws, he is silent on the role that modern evangelical churches play in countries like Uganda. While Baird goes on about Kato’s life and death, nowhere does he mention that it is the influence of rightwing evangelical churches that are driving these new laws, no matter that their influence is well documented. It is a very curious omission, which brings us to our next point. 

Our prime minister, Stephen Harper, and I have said time and time again, that Canada will no longer "go along just to get along." We will speak out on the issues that matter to Canadians – whether it is the role and treatment of women around the world, or the persecution of gays, lesbians, bisexual or transgendered persons, or the cowardly and targeted attacks on those who pray in sanctity of churches, temples, mosques or synagogues.

And this is where Baird goes into the new Office of Religious Freedom. He details all kinds of horrible examples of religious persecution that is taking place, but there seems to be no awareness on Baird’s part of the connection between religion and the persecution of queers. Not with how it related to old colonial-era laws and the imperative to convert the colonized to Christianity, nor with the evangelicals today in places like Uganda, or the sharia justification in places like Iran. Baird calls out complacency in defence of human rights but does not put together the pieces when he tries to placate two very different groups in his foreign policy goals.

Our common cause must be a universal respect for freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. We don’t make this our cause to appease our constituencies. We make this our cause because we have seen the goodness of humankind. And the prosperity of its people. We know it can exist. For all people. That is what we strive for. That is what we aim to achieve. That is Canada’s foreign policy. And we pledge to be a willing partner and a leader by example.

Great words, indeed, but undermined by the use of optics in place of substantive measures, the approach of calling out homophobic laws while doing nothing to promote the equality of queers abroad. It remains a good start, but that’s all it is – a start. It is not leading by example when we omit truths that don’t fit the narrative or paper over the deeper issues that need to be explored if we want to make lasting and meaningful change for human rights and equality abroad.