The Imported Grammar of Hate
How American culture-war machinery helps turn queer lives into policy targets far from home
There is a particular kind of lie that powerful people like to tell when they are preparing to make life smaller for other people.
They call it tradition.
They call it morality.
They call it the defense of family, the protection of children, the preservation of culture, the sovereign right of a nation to define itself against foreign corruption.
And then, very often, the script turns out to be imported.
That is one of the ugliest truths emerging from Senegal’s latest anti-LGBT crackdown. The country’s National Assembly has passed a new law that deepens the criminalization of same-sex life, raising penalties and broadening the machinery of punishment. To many outside observers, this may look like a local expression of conservatism, an internal matter born of domestic religious and political pressures. But recent reporting suggests something more transnational and more familiar: the fingerprints of American culture-war operatives helping shape the language, tactics, and momentum of repression.
This matters because it exposes the false innocence at the heart of so much anti-LGBT politics. These campaigns are constantly sold as resistance to foreign influence. Yet they are often strengthened by highly organized foreign influence of their own. Not the influence of liberation, but the influence of discipline. Not the language of human dignity, but the language of moral panic, exported, adapted, and redeployed.
In Senegal, queer people are once again being told that they are the foreign intrusion. But the ideological infrastructure closing around them is itself part of a global network.
That network has become increasingly legible in recent years. It thrives on conferences, religious alliances, legal templates, advocacy manuals, donor circuits, viral propaganda, and the circulation of emotionally loaded phrases that can be dropped into almost any national context. “Family values.” “LGBT ideology.” “Promotion.” “Recruitment.” “Public health threat.” The vocabulary shifts slightly from country to country, but the underlying grammar remains the same. First, invent a menace. Then make visibility itself suspicious. Then criminalize not only conduct but association, speech, and defense. Finally, insist that this is all being done in the name of order.
What Reuters has now illuminated is that Senegal’s latest turn did not emerge from a sealed national chamber. A U.S.-based anti-LGBT group, MassResistance, reportedly worked with Senegalese activists as the push for harsher legislation accelerated. That collaboration matters not because Senegal lacks its own reactionary forces. It clearly has them. It matters because it shows how contemporary repression works: through partnership, encouragement, tactical exchange, and the steady laundering of extremism into public respectability.
The old colonial arrogance has not vanished. It has simply changed costumes.
Once, outside powers arrived claiming they would civilize. Now they arrive claiming they will defend civilization. Once, they exported empire with missionaries and merchants. Now they export grievance with think tanks, lobbyists, activists, and media ecosystems. The posture is different, but the conceit is hauntingly similar: that people elsewhere should be organized according to a moral design conceived by others, funded by others, and cheered on by others who will never have to live under the consequences.
And the consequences, as always, are borne by the most vulnerable first.
When anti-LGBT laws tighten, the damage does not begin in the courtroom. It begins in the body. It begins in the breath that shortens when someone hears boots on stairs or voices outside a door. It begins in the instant calculation of whether to answer a text, meet a friend, seek medical help, go to work, leave town, tell the truth, or stay silent. It begins in the knowledge that the state has decided your existence is not merely disfavored, but prosecutable.
This is why such laws are never only symbolic, even when defenders describe them as moral statements. Symbolism backed by police power is not symbolism. It is social engineering through fear.
The reporting from Senegal has already shown the climate worsening around queer people there. Arrests, threats, and the contraction of safe space do not occur in isolation from legislation; they are invited by it. When a parliament sharpens the law, it also sharpens public permission. It tells neighbors what to suspect, families what to condemn, mobs what to excuse, and authorities what to pursue. It transforms prejudice into procedure.
There is another layer to this that deserves more attention, because it reveals the cruelty of the project with almost mathematical clarity. Public health workers and advocates have warned that deeper criminalization can push people further underground, including those who need access to HIV prevention and care. In other words, the same political actors who claim to be protecting society may be making society less safe in every practical sense. But that is the nature of moral panic: it prefers punishment to health, spectacle to reality, and ideological victory to human survival.
A politics organized around disgust is rarely interested in outcomes. It is interested in obedience.
For American readers, there should be no comfort in treating this as something happening elsewhere. The machinery at work in Senegal is not alien to the United States. It is partly ours. We have spent years watching the consolidation of a domestic movement that frames queer existence as contamination, education as indoctrination, and visibility as aggression. We have seen the rise of groups that package themselves as defenders of children while targeting adults, teachers, books, healthcare, public events, and the very right to appear without apology. We have watched legislation spread from state to state through replication and message discipline. Why should anyone be surprised that the same ecosystem would look abroad?
It is one of the more grotesque American exports of the present era: not jazz, not film, not literature, not constitutional ideals, but a professionalized resentment industry capable of crossing borders faster than solidarity often can.
This should also force a reckoning with the language of “traditional values,” which is invoked so often in these debates that many people stop hearing its evasions. Tradition is not a sacred object suspended above history. It is a contested human arrangement, revised constantly, interpreted strategically, and often manipulated by those who want power without appearing to want it. When politicians and activists claim to be defending tradition, what they frequently mean is that they are defending hierarchy. They are choosing who may be visible, who may be grievable, who may be protected by law, and who may be cast outside the circle of acceptable life.
In that sense, anti-LGBT legislation is never only about sexuality. It is about governance itself. It teaches a state how to classify threat. It teaches a public how to participate in stigmatization. It teaches institutions that rights can be narrowed by recoding a minority as danger. Once learned, those lessons do not remain confined to one target.
That is why the struggle over queer life in Senegal belongs to a much larger story. It is a story about transnational reaction. About the circulation of authoritarian tactics under the cover of moral language. About how religious rhetoric, nationalist posturing, and imported culture-war strategy can fuse into a politics that feels homegrown while drawing strength from a global network of repression.
And it is also a story about naming things clearly.
What is happening in Senegal is not simply a defense of values. It is a crackdown.
What groups like MassResistance are doing is not simply advocacy. It is ideological export.
What queer people in Senegal are facing is not merely disagreement. It is state-enabled precarity.
The temptation, especially for institutions and commentators far away, is to speak in softened phrases. To say this is “controversial.” To say there are “competing views.” To note a “cultural divide.” But there are moments when soft language becomes a kind of laundering. A government either expands the conditions under which people can live freely, or it expands the terms under which they may be punished. A movement either widens the public for human dignity, or it narrows it. There is not always a noble middle.
Brushstrokes & Faultlines has long been interested in the places where culture, belief, politics, and identity crash into one another hard enough to leave visible damage. Senegal is one of those places now, not because it is uniquely cruel, but because it reveals so much at once: the vulnerability of queer people under majoritarian pressure, the elasticity of imported hate, the strategic use of religion and sovereignty, and the dark efficiency with which one country’s culture war can become another country’s law.
The old excuse will be that this is how nations protect themselves.
But a nation does not protect itself by teaching people to disappear.
It diminishes itself that way.
And every time a political class learns to turn a minority into a warning, the rest of society should understand that it is watching a rehearsal, not a finale.
-By Noble Osborn