The New Sexual World Order is taking shape, thanks to the Peace Gorps, the United Nations, and the U.S. Congress. In late September, Dr. J. Ricker Polsdorfer, the Peace Corps’ director of medical services in Africa, was fired for promoting abstinence as a method of preventing AIDS. Dr. Polsdorfer’s crimes, according to the Peace Corps director in Zimbabwe, were that he “pushed this stance to the point that you promote only abstention, disapprove of the use of condoms and have openly expressed the belief that sexual relations with host country nationals should be against Peace Corps policy.”

From teaching English, distributing food, and digging irrigation ditches to installing “confidence in condoms” and encouraging sexual liaisons with the overseas hosts—how the Peace Corps has changed in 35 years. When started by President Kennedy in 1961, the Peace Gorps focused exclusively on fighting poverty, hunger, and illiteracy in the Third World; its volunteers waged the Cold War on the humanitarian front, battling Soviet influence in these countries with shovels, schoolbooks, and by the sweat of their brow. But with the Cold War over and Western consumerism and egalitarianism the official future of mankind, Americans can now move on from feeding the hungry to satisfying equally basic needs. The recent U.N. Convention on Women’s Rights, where the sterilization of the Third World was planned as a humanitarian gesture, was a preview of coming attractions, and the condemnation last summer of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe by the U.S. Congress showed how dissidents in the new order will be pressured to conform.

At the opening of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair in August, President Mugabe called homosexuals “perverts” who didn’t deserve civil rights and then denied a gay rights group representation at the fair. In support of their president, some 500 members of Mugabe’s Zanu Party celebrated in the streets of downtown Harare; even the Zimbabwe Council of Churches, comprising Lutheran, Methodist, Anglican, and Catholic leaders, supported Mugabe’s actions.

Seventy outraged members of the U.S. Congress immediately sent a letter of protest to Mugabe, denouncing his “anti-homosexual campaign.” Concerned for the well-being of its gay delegates, the World Council of Churches chimed in and threatened to cancel its Eighth Assembly, scheduled to meet in Harare in 1998. None of this fazed Mugabe in the least. “Let the Americans keep their sodomy, bestiality, stupid and foolish ways to themselves,” he said. “Let the gays be gays in the United States and Europe, but they shall be sad people here.” Homosexuality should be treated “as a criminal offense, like theft,” he concluded. Since many Third World countries punish thieves by cutting off the offending member, Mugabe’s analogy makes homosexuals uncomfortable.

“I have no idea what he thinks he is doing,” said an unnamed American diplomat to the Deutsche Presse Agentur. That Mugabe might be governing his country the way his people want it to be governed, this was irrelevant. “Zimbabwe has very severe economic and political problems that need desperate attention,” said the diplomat, so “why is he [Mugabe] going on about gays?” The more obvious question is why American leaders are “going on about gays” in an inconsequential country some 7,000 miles away.