With Pride Month nearing its end and Middle Easterners marking one of the most important dates on the Islamic calendar, Eid al Adha, followers of an Iraqi Shiite sect have decided to burn the rainbow flag in front of the Swedish embassy at Baghdad.  

The leader of the Sadr group, Muqtada al Sadr, called on his followers to burn the LGBTQ banner in retaliation to a Koran burning in front of a Stockholm mosque on Wednesday. His supporters chanted, “No to Israel, no to America, yes to Islam,” as they set ablaze a makeshift rainbow flag. 

Using the LGBTQ banner to symbolize Western ideology, seeking to compare it to the Koran’s centrality in Islam, is far from unique to the firebrand Mr. Sadr. In Arab and Muslim countries, openly gay people are often shunned, imprisoned, or condemned to death. Political opponents are often accused of homosexuality as a smear. Indeed, some even accuse Mr. Sadr of being secretly gay.  

With tolerance to sexual liberties far on the horizon in Arab lands, Washington’s attempt at promoting LGBTQ rights there is backfiring. At times, it hurts those who try to promote other liberal causes and, even more crucially, it damages major American interests.    

“We are against the LGBT,” President Erdogan of Turkey often said on the campaign trail this spring, before winning a national election. 

Political opponents highlighted Mr. Erdogan’s mishandling of the economy and his attacks on the courts, the press, and other democratic institutions. Protection of gay rights was low on the opposition’s agenda. When raised, the president’s supporters used ugly gay slurs to discredit the entire anti-Erdogan platform — and the Turkish president’s case is no exception. 

“The Biden Administration’s push for gay rights in the Mideast inadvertently empowers Islamist extremists and Shia militia proxies of Iran,” an Iraqi American activist, Entifadh Qanbar, tells the Sun, following a weeklong tour of several countries in the region. Such groups, he adds, “use gay rights as a pretext to target liberals and those who support democratic and Western values of freedom and democracy.”

President Biden has attempted to pacify pro-Iranian militia leaders in Iraq in the hope of ending attacks against American troops based in the country. While a tense lull in such attacks is maintained, the leader of the Tehran-backed Special Groups in Iraq, Qais al Khazaali, went on the offensive in a Wednesday speech.

His conspiracy-laced anti-American diatribe included claims that the U.S. embassy at Baghdad is “spreading homosexuality” and “funding homosexuality.” 

In one of his first decisions as president, Mr. Biden reversed his predecessor’s rule that the only flag raised atop American embassies around the world is the Stars and Stripes. President Trump’s decision was itself a reversal of President Obama’s efforts to promote the rainbow flag as well. 

“For the first time, @StateDept and @glifaa raise the progress flag, a symbol of the diversity and intersectionality of LGBTQI+ persons and communities around the world, at our headquarters in DC for #PrideMonth,” Secretary Blinken tweeted in June 2021. “I’m truly honored to serve as Secretary during this historic moment.”  

The American Embassy in the United Arab Emirates heeded the cue, quickly joining its British counterpart in raising the rainbow flag atop the embassy at Abu Dhabi. “On the anniversary of Stonewall, a milestone in the American civil rights movement, the U.S. Mission shows its support for the dignity and equality of all people,” the embassy tweeted.  

The UAE is widely considered the Gulf’s most liberal country. Yet, reaction to LGBTQ advocacy was harsh. “Very disrespectful from the British Embassy to the UAE & it’s people,” a former Dubai finance department director, Nasser al Sheikh, tweeted in reaction to London’s raising of the rainbow flag. “Looks like someone there is still living the long gone UK imperial days.”

Negative reactions to America’s pro-gay right campaign similarly came from Kuwaiti politicians, and were widely echoed across the Mideast and North Africa, at times raising tensions between these countries and Washington. 

Mr. Biden is desperately attempting to repair relations with Saudi Arabia and blunt its warm-up to Communist China, not to mention leaning on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to keep oil prices low. Yet, how does the conservative Riyadh establishment view the promotion of gay rights?

This is “not something that necessarily sits well with the Bible Belt in America, let alone the Koran belt in the Middle East,” a senior vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Jonathan Schanzer, tells the Sun. “This issue is clearly a priority at the White House, but of all of the issues they are trying to handle, all the fires they are trying to put out around the world, is this the hill they are willing to die on?”  

Early on, Mr. Biden vowed to base his foreign policy on human rights. Now, he is slowly learning that pushing abroad an agenda that is yet to be fully accepted at home may harm his own goals.