A MAGA congressman and Donald Trump’s undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department spent a good part of a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing last week rehashing the Biden administration’s “woke ideology.”

At the hearing titled “Advancing National Security Through Public Diplomacy,” committee chairman Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) questioned the State Department’s Sarah Rogers about Biden-era grants, while also noting that doing so was “embarrassing.”

Related

Watch as Republicans embarrassingly realize their anti-pronoun policy is a confusing waste of time

“Can you tell me, what is ‘queering the map’?” Mast asked, according to Fox News.

Rogers, a former white-shoe law firm partner handling cases involving the National Rifle Association, Big Tobacco manufacturers, and the online “censorship” of Charlie Kirk, claimed that Biden’s State Department was proactively making U.S. foreign policy “more gay.”

Insights for the LGBTQ+ community

Subscribe to our briefing for insights into how politics impacts the LGBTQ+ community and more.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

“So I think we were trying to make the maps more gay,” she told Mast.

“Literally? How do you make a map more gay? Or gay at all?” Mast asked.

“I don’t know,” Rogers admitted. “Since the age of cartography, we’ve had pretty good maps, but maybe they weren’t gay enough. I also took critical theory in college, and I think sometimes people use ‘queer’ as a verb. I do understand that the maps we were trying to make gay were, I think, of Czechia and Slovakia. So maybe those countries asked for it. I doubt it, but I don’t know.”

Rogers didn’t seem to know a lot, but that didn’t stop her from talking about it.

For his part, the five-term Florida rep was prepared with a warmed-over list of MAGA anti-DEI greatest hits, which he savored sharing after advising his colleagues and the American public that lawmakers have “real things” to work on in Congress, like the “imminent threat of Iran.” Mast is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and a double amputee.

The Biden administration funded a grant for “non-binary and transfranophone linguistic attitudes and ideologies toward inclusive French in Montreal, Canada,” he said. 

“Other grants were for a DEI flash mob in Kyrgyzstan, a diversity roadshow in India, diversity and inclusion programs in Luxembourg, Spain, New Zealand, Canada, and Malaysia; teaching trans and intersex leaders in India,” Mast recited.

“We would absolutely love to know the individuals specifically who were busy writing these grants, because they have no business receiving another paycheck from the people of the United States of America,” he added. 

A Trump ally since endorsing him “wholeheartedly” in 2016, Mast was under consideration for Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs in Trump’s first term.

In 2020, Mast was forced to apologize for what he then called “disgusting and inappropriate jokes” made to his future campaign manager on Facebook in 2009 and 2011 about sex with 15-year-old girls in South Africa and “end-of-the-world” jokes involving rape and murder. He defeated his female opponent in the conservative Florida district by 15 points.

Mast featured prominently in another House hearing sideshow in September, when Republicans went after the use of gender pronouns on business cards, email signatures, and other professional identity elements by State Department employees, contractors, and other officials.

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.