President of the Philippines calls US ambassador a ‘gay son of a whore’
The US has responded angrily after the President of the Philippines called their ambassador a “gay son of a whore”.
The country’s newly-elected and frequently-outspoken President Rodrigo Duterte made the shocking comments in a TV interview on Friday.
In the interview, he referred to US Ambassador Philip Goldberg using crude homophobic slur ‘bakla’.
Speaking about the US, he said that although Secretary of State John Kerry is “okay… I had an argument with their gay ambassador, the son of a whore. He pissed me off”.
The pair have clashed repeatedly in the past, most notably when Duterte was a Presidential candidate and Goldberg took issue with a number of sexist jokes.
Duterte said: “He meddled during the elections, giving statements here and there. He was not supposed to do that.”
Back in Washington, the incident is being taken so seriously that the Filipino Charge D’affaires, Patrick Chuasoto, was summoned to the State Department for an apparent rebuke.
A spokesperson confirmed: “We had that conversation… I think what we were seeking is perhaps a better understanding of why that statement was made.
A spokesperson for the country’s embassy confirmed they had been “invited to the State Department to discuss the entire breadth of Philippines-US relations”, adding that “Philippine-US relations remain strong”.
The Philippines is one of the most LGBT friendly in Asia, with a 2014 poll finding that 73 percent of Filipinos believe homosexuality should be accepted.
However, there is little in the way of progress in the country.
There are no national LGBT anti-discrimination laws, no recognition of same-sex marriage, and the Family Code of the Philippines defines marriage as “a special contract of permanent union between a man and a woman”.
