The Pillars We Leave Standing
Family, Faith, Community, Power, and What Happens When the World Stops Waiting for Washington
A child is born.
Before that child knows the name of a president, understands a border, chooses a religion, recognizes a political party, or has words for sexuality, gender, disability, democracy, nationalism, conservatism, liberalism, or any of the other labels adults eventually place around human existence, that child already belongs to something.
A family.
And that family belongs to something larger.
A community.
And communities, together, become the societies we build.
Someone holds that child. Someone gives them a name. Someone imagines who they might become. Maybe that child will grow up LGBTQIA+. Maybe they will live with a disability visible from birth. Maybe disability will enter their life later through illness, injury, age, genetics, war, or circumstances nobody could have predicted. Maybe they will be LGBTQIA+ and disabled. Maybe they will become a refugee. Maybe they will become deeply religious. Maybe they will become several of those things at different points in the same life.
None of those possibilities removes that child from the family.
None removes them from the community.
None removes them from society.
Around that child already exists an invisible architecture of grandparents and cousins, neighbors and teachers, doctors and religious leaders, schools and places of worship, laws and traditions, expectations and possibilities. Long before that child understands society, society has already begun shaping the world they will inherit.
That is where I want to begin because somewhere along the way we allowed the phrase “family values” to become so politically loaded that we stopped asking the most basic question.
Whose family are we talking about?
Every lesbian was born into a family. Every gay man was born into a family. Every bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, heterosexual, and disabled person entered this world through the human structure we call family. So did every Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jew, Buddhist, Sikh, atheist, believer, and nonbeliever.
Some of us eventually create families of our own. Some marry. Some raise children. Some become the aunt who keeps everybody connected, the uncle everyone calls when something goes wrong, the sibling who comes home when a parent becomes sick, the grandparent holding three generations together, or the caregiver sitting quietly beside a hospital bed when everyone else has gone home.
Some of us will eventually become the person in that hospital bed.
Some of us will need a wheelchair, a cane, accessible transportation, an interpreter, medication, assistance reading information, additional time to complete something, or simply a community designed with enough imagination to understand that independence does not mean never needing another human being.
LGBTQIA+ people are not standing outside the family asking to be admitted.
People with disabilities are not standing outside the community asking to be accommodated as an afterthought.
Refugees are not people without families simply because a border separates them.
We were already there.
And that matters now because something much larger is happening around us.
Across countries and continents, governments are reconsidering foreign assistance, migration, healthcare, gender, sexuality, disability inclusion, national identity, religion, sovereignty, security, and what political leaders increasingly describe as traditional or family values. Religious organizations are financing humanitarian missions and developing local leadership. Governments are changing foreign-policy priorities. LGBTQIA+ organizations are fighting to remain open. Refugees are searching for safety. Health systems are being restructured. People with disabilities continue navigating systems that were often never designed around their participation.
Money is moving.
Power is moving.
Political language is moving with it.
And communities are absorbing the consequences.
Here in the United States, another congressional election approaches.
It would be easy to make this story about November.
But November is not the whole story.
The larger question is what happens in December, next year, five years from now, and twenty years from now if the rest of the world begins organizing its future around a new assumption:
American policy may not last.
That may be one of the most important geopolitical questions we are not talking about.
Family: The First Pillar
If we are going to talk seriously about family values, then we should be willing to talk about the entire family.
Not the politically convenient family.
Not the physically perfect family.
Not the family represented in a campaign advertisement.
The actual family.
The family sitting around the dinner table.
That includes the LGBTQIA+ child whose life develops differently from what their parents imagined. It includes the child born with a disability. It includes the parent who becomes disabled later in life. It includes the grandparent whose mobility changes. It includes the veteran returning home with a disability. It includes the person whose disability cannot be seen and whose needs are therefore constantly questioned.
There is nothing radical about saying families should care for their own.
The contradiction begins when we define family so narrowly that actual members of families disappear from the definition.
A government can say it is protecting the family while an LGBTQIA+ child becomes afraid to tell their parents who they are. A religious organization can say it is strengthening families while a mother is encouraged to believe that accepting her gay son threatens hers. A society can praise independence while designing transportation, housing, education, technology, workplaces, and public spaces that prevent disabled people from participating independently.
Sometimes the question is not what is wrong with the person.
Sometimes the question is what we built around them.
A staircase becomes a barrier when nobody provides another way inside.
Information becomes a barrier when nobody makes it accessible.
Transportation becomes a barrier when mobility was never considered.
A workplace becomes a barrier when accommodation is treated as inconvenience.
And a community becomes disabling when belonging is designed around only one kind of human body.
Family values should mean love, responsibility, protection, accountability, care for children, care for elders, commitment, honesty, safety, belonging, and remaining present when life becomes complicated.
Those values do not belong to a political party.
They belong to families.
Strong families help build strong communities.
Strong communities help hold societies together.
Faith: The Pillar That Can Outlive Governments
Religion is one of humanity's oldest organizing forces.
Long before modern governments created welfare systems, religious communities fed people, educated children, cared for the sick, buried the dead, sheltered travelers, and organized communities.
They still do.
In many places, particularly where government institutions are weak or distant, the church, mosque, temple, synagogue, gurdwara, or another religious institution may be among the strongest institutions people encounter.
That contribution deserves recognition.
But influence deserves examination too.
Religion can become political infrastructure.
Money does not have to arrive labeled anti-LGBTQIA+ to create influence. It can build relationships. It can organize conferences. It can train leaders. It can connect religious figures with lawmakers. It can support schools. It can strengthen institutions. It can create networks that continue operating long after an election has ended.
In June 2026, lawmakers from more than twenty African countries attended the African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values and Sovereignty in Accra, Ghana. Reuters reported that participants supported stronger restrictions on LGBTQ rights and adopted an “African Charter on Family, Sovereignty and Values.” Reuters also documented participation and connections involving conservative activists from outside Africa.
That does not mean African political leaders or communities are puppets of Americans or Europeans.
African politicians, religious leaders, families, voters, and communities have their own beliefs, histories, political interests, and disagreements. Treating every conservative African movement as something manufactured overseas would erase African agency.
But pretending foreign influence does not exist would ignore another part of the story.
Local movements can exist.
Foreign networks can strengthen them.
And that principle works in every direction.
Foreign governments and foundations can fund LGBTQIA+ organizations.
Religious networks can support organizations defending traditional understandings of family.
Governments can finance humanitarian organizations.
Private philanthropy can support disability organizations.
International institutions can support refugee services.
The question should not be whether we investigate only the money we dislike.
The question should be whether we are willing to investigate all of it consistently.
Follow the money.
Follow the relationships.
Follow the leadership development.
Follow the conferences.
Follow the organizations.
Follow the legislation.
Then go one step further.
Follow what remains inside the community after the foreign organization goes home.
Community: Where Power Becomes Real
Governments operate from capitals.
Life happens somewhere else.
It happens in neighborhoods and villages, churches and mosques, schools and clinics, community centers and kitchens, dinner tables and WhatsApp groups.
It happens on sidewalks.
Train platforms.
Buses.
Websites.
Bathrooms.
Doorways.
Hospitals.
Housing.
This is where geopolitics eventually becomes personal.
A president may serve four years.
A pastor may lead a congregation for thirty.
A parliament can change political control.
A school can educate generations.
A community elder can influence hundreds of families without ever holding elected office.
A disability organization can spend decades teaching a city what accessibility actually means.
An LGBTQIA+ community center can become the place where a frightened teenager first discovers they are not alone.
A local organization becomes trusted because it remained present through governments, wars, epidemics, economic crises, and elections.
That difference matters.
Imagine one network spending twenty years developing relationships with pastors, teachers, lawmakers, families, schools, and local leaders.
Now imagine another organization depending substantially upon foreign-government funding that can change when political leadership changes thousands of miles away.
One has continuity.
The other has vulnerability.
When funding disappears, we talk about money.
But money is only the first thing that disappears.
Employees leave.
Offices close.
Doctors move.
Community workers find other jobs.
Institutional knowledge disappears.
Relationships weaken.
People stop believing promises.
Another government can restore the funding.
But restoring money is not the same thing as restoring an institution.
A building can reopen.
A grant can restart.
Trust does not operate on a federal appropriations calendar.
Communities remember who remained.
Disability: The Test We Build Into Everything
Disability belongs throughout this conversation because disability is not a separate society.
People with disabilities are already inside every pillar.
Inside families.
Inside religious communities.
Inside LGBTQIA+ communities.
Inside refugee populations.
Inside schools.
Inside governments.
Inside workplaces.
Inside humanitarian crises.
Inside elections.
And inside geopolitics.
More than one billion people worldwide live with disabilities, according to the United Nations, yet people with disabilities continue to encounter barriers in education, employment, public services, transportation, information, communications, healthcare, and political participation.
That tells us something.
Accessibility is not a side program.
Accessibility is infrastructure.
And disability inclusion offers one of the clearest tests of whether our language about community actually means what we say it means.
It is easy to say everyone belongs.
The harder question is whether everyone can enter the building.
Receive the information.
Use the transportation.
Access the ballot.
Reach the shelter.
Understand the emergency warning.
Receive healthcare.
Escape a war.
Participate in the meeting where decisions about their lives are being made.
A society reveals its values not simply by whom it says it includes, but by whom it actually designed its institutions to include.
Health: Where Politics Reaches the Body
Eventually every ideological argument meets a human body.
Someone needs medication.
Someone needs an HIV test.
Someone needs PrEP.
Someone needs cancer treatment.
Someone needs rehabilitation.
Someone needs a wheelchair.
Someone needs mental-health support.
Someone needs an interpreter.
Someone simply needs a doctor.
This is where the categories governments like to separate begin colliding inside one human being.
An LGBTQIA+ refugee may also have a disability.
A transgender person may require accessible housing.
A person living with HIV may develop disabilities associated with illness or aging.
A disabled person may need reproductive healthcare.
A disabled LGBTQIA+ teenager may encounter rejection because of both disability and identity.
Government programs may place those individuals into separate administrative boxes.
Human beings do not live in boxes.
We carry every part of ourselves into the same room.
The United States' PEPFAR program demonstrates what sustained public policy can accomplish on an enormous scale. But the American foreign-assistance system has also undergone major disruption since 2025, including a foreign-aid review, funding interruptions, widespread cancellation of awards, the dismantling of USAID as it had operated, and transfer of remaining global-health responsibilities to the State Department.
Those are Washington decisions.
But a person living with HIV somewhere else does not experience foreign policy as an executive order.
They experience it at the clinic.
Is the medication there?
Is the nurse still working there?
Can they safely enter the building?
Can an LGBTQIA+ person seek care without fearing exposure?
Can the disabled person physically reach the clinic?
Can a refugee receive treatment without documents they cannot obtain?
Health may become political in Washington.
Illness does not wait for Washington to settle its politics.
Education: The Pillar That Builds the Next Generation
Before children become voters, societies teach them what to believe about themselves and everyone around them.
What do we teach them about their country?
Religion?
Women?
Masculinity?
Homosexuality?
Transgender people?
Disability?
Colonialism?
Citizenship?
People who are different?
And who is doing the teaching?
A parent?
A school?
A pastor?
A government?
A community elder?
TikTok?
YouTube?
An algorithm?
Increasingly, all of them.
Ideas no longer respect borders.
Funding travels.
Campaign strategies travel.
Religious messages travel.
Human-rights strategies travel.
Disinformation travels.
Fear travels exceptionally well.
But knowledge travels too.
An LGBTQIA+ teenager without a visible LGBTQIA+ community can discover that they are not alone.
A mother struggling to understand her child can find another mother thousands of miles away.
A disabled person can discover technology developed by another disabled community.
A religious leader can encounter a theological interpretation they had never considered.
One community can learn how another confronted the same challenge.
Information does more than inform societies.
Sometimes it changes them.
Government: The Pillar We Mistake for the Whole Building
Now we arrive back in Washington.
The 2026 congressional election matters because elections determine who exercises important governmental powers.
Congress controls appropriations and exercises significant authority through legislation and oversight. The executive branch retains substantial authority over diplomacy and implementation of foreign policy.
That means changing Congress can matter without functioning as a global reset button.
A Congress with different priorities can change appropriations, write legislation, conduct investigations and hearings, demand information, and exercise oversight.
What it cannot do is travel backward through time.
It cannot instantly reopen every organization that closed.
It cannot automatically bring back every doctor who left.
It cannot reconstruct every refugee network that dissolved.
It cannot restore every community relationship.
It cannot order people in another country to trust America again.
That may be one of the most important things we are not talking about when Americans discuss elections.
Policy can change faster than trust.
And that works in every political direction.
The question is not whether Americans should have elections that change government policy. Of course elections can change policy in a democracy.
The geopolitical question is what happens when everybody outside the United States begins planning around that reality.
What Happens When the World Stops Waiting for Washington?
This may be the question underneath the geopolitical story of our time.
What happens when communities and countries stop organizing their futures around the assumption that American policy will remain consistent?
We can already see versions of this question emerging in international security. European governments are debating greater strategic independence and diversifying parts of their defense planning as uncertainty grows over future American commitments.
Now take that same question outside military alliances.
What happens in healthcare?
Human rights?
LGBTQIA+ advocacy?
Disability inclusion?
Refugee protection?
Development?
Climate adaptation?
Education?
Religious engagement?
Suppose you run a community health organization in Africa and an American program finances part of your work.
Do you build your next ten years around that funding?
Suppose you lead an LGBTQIA+ organization and one American administration encourages your work while another changes the rules governing foreign assistance.
Do you build your institution around Washington?
Suppose you are a religious organization receiving American humanitarian assistance while also maintaining theological positions that differ sharply from another American administration's human-rights priorities.
What happens when Washington changes again?
Suppose you are a government.
Do you assume the agreement you negotiate with one American administration represents American policy?
Or the policy of that administration?
Those are profoundly different assumptions.
If countries begin believing the second, they will adapt.
They may diversify funding.
They may deepen relationships with Europe.
They may strengthen regional institutions.
They may look toward China, Gulf states, private philanthropy, religious networks, development banks, diaspora communities, or other partners.
They may build domestic capacity.
Some may become more independent.
Others may become dependent upon a different external power.
And some communities may simply be left without anyone filling the gap.
That is why this conversation cannot become a simple argument that the world needs more America or less America.
The more important question is:
What kind of institutions can survive when America changes?
The New Competition Is Also About Reliability
For decades we have talked about geopolitics through military power, territory, trade, oil, alliances, nuclear weapons, and increasingly technology.
But there is another form of power.
Reliability.
A country exercises power when another country believes its commitments.
An institution exercises power when communities believe it will still exist tomorrow.
A religious network exercises power when it spends decades building relationships.
A community organization exercises power when people know its doors will still be open after an election.
That means consistency itself becomes geopolitical capital.
When partners begin questioning consistency, they hedge.
They diversify.
They build alternatives.
That does not necessarily mean they become hostile to the United States.
It means they stop building systems that assume the United States will always be there in the same way.
That distinction matters.
And it brings us directly back to the 2026 election.
The election can change Congress.
Congress can change policy.
A future presidential election can change the executive branch.
But every change also sends information to the rest of the world about how American democracy produces foreign policy.
Other countries are watching.
So are activists.
So are religious movements.
So are investors.
So are refugees.
So are people whose medications depend upon international health systems.
And they are not simply asking what America believes today.
Increasingly, they may be asking:
How long will America believe it?
So What Should We Build?
This is where observation should become recommendation.
Not a recommendation about which political party Americans should choose.
A recommendation about institutional design.
Build Local Capacity Before Dependency
Foreign assistance should strengthen institutions capable of continuing meaningful work locally rather than creating organizations that collapse the moment an outside grant disappears.
The strongest measure of assistance may not be how long a community needs the donor.
It may be how well the community can continue when the donor leaves.
Diversify Support
A community hospital, disability organization, refugee program, LGBTQIA+ organization, school, or humanitarian institution becomes extraordinarily vulnerable when one government, foundation, donor, corporation, or religious network can determine whether it survives.
Diversification is not simply a financial strategy.
It can become a form of institutional protection.
Follow All Foreign Influence Consistently
If we investigate foreign funding supporting LGBTQIA+ advocacy, investigate foreign funding supporting anti-LGBTQIA+ advocacy too.
If religious organizations receive public humanitarian funding, understand where those dollars go.
If governments fund civil society abroad, make the relationships transparent.
If foundations fund political or cultural movements, examine those relationships too.
Transparency should not depend upon ideology.
Protect Essential Human Infrastructure From Political Whiplash
Medication, disability services, emergency assistance, food, basic healthcare, accessibility, and other life-sustaining systems should be designed with continuity in mind whenever possible.
Political priorities will change.
Human bodies will continue needing care.
Put Affected People at the Table
Do not design disability policy without people with disabilities.
Do not design LGBTQIA+ programs without LGBTQIA+ people.
Do not design refugee systems without listening to refugees.
Do not design community programs entirely from Washington, Brussels, Beijing, London, or any other capital without understanding the community expected to live with the result.
The people closest to a problem should not always be the last people invited into the room.
Measure What Remains
Do not ask only how much money was spent.
Ask what remains.
What institution exists five years later?
What local leadership was developed?
What knowledge stayed in the community?
What relationships survived?
What happens when the grant ends?
What happens when the administration changes?
What happens when the international organization leaves?
That may be one of the most important measurements of all.
Human Dignity: The Pillar Beneath Everything
Then there is Türkiye.
In September 2026, coordinated police raids targeted seven organizations defending LGBTQ rights, two organizations supporting people living with HIV, and businesses across several Turkish cities. Human Rights Watch reported at least 112 arrests, with 82 people detained under court order at the time of its September 18 report. Turkish authorities said 162 people were under investigation in an operation called “My Family Is Safe.”
Stop there.
Read those words again.
My Family Is Safe.
Whose family?
Because the activist belongs to somebody's family.
The person living with HIV belongs to somebody's family.
The gay man belongs to somebody's family.
The lesbian woman belongs to somebody's family.
The transgender person belongs to somebody's family.
The disabled person belongs to somebody's family.
The refugee belongs to somebody's family.
And sometimes they are the same person.
That last sentence matters.
Political systems separate people into categories that real life constantly combines.
LGBTQIA+.
Disabled.
Refugee.
Woman.
Religious minority.
Older person.
Poor.
Citizen.
Migrant.
Governments may need categories to administer programs.
Human beings do not experience themselves one category at a time.
They wake up as themselves.
One human being.
One member of a family.
One member of a community.
One part of society.
Where Does Hope Live?
This is where I find hope, but not the kind that fits neatly onto a campaign sign.
I do not place that hope in the assumption that one American election can repair everything another government changed.
I place it somewhere older.
People build communities.
Communities build institutions.
Institutions help hold societies together.
And people can rebuild them.
Congress can exercise its constitutional powers.
Courts can examine whether governments followed the law.
Journalists can follow money and power.
Religious people can challenge their own institutions.
Parents can refuse to abandon their children.
Doctors can keep treating patients.
People with disabilities can help design the systems intended to include them.
LGBTQIA+ people can build institutions that do not depend entirely upon Washington.
Refugees can be included in conversations about the systems supposedly designed for them.
Communities can organize.
Countries can cooperate regionally.
Religious institutions can decide that protecting the family means protecting every person sitting around its table.
And America can decide, administration after administration and Congress after Congress, what kind of international partner it wants to be.
Other countries and communities will make decisions too.
That is geopolitics.
It does not happen only between presidents.
It happens between institutions.
Between communities.
Between expectations.
Between promises.
And increasingly, between different ideas about who will still be standing when the politics change.
Back to the Beginning
A child is born.
Into a family.
Into a community.
Into a society.
We do not know who that child will become.
We do not know whom they will love.
We do not know how they will identify.
We do not know what they will believe.
We do not know what their body will be capable of at twenty, forty, sixty, or eighty.
We do not know what government will be in power when they become an adult.
We do not know which country will be considered the world's dominant power.
We do not know which institutions will survive.
And maybe that is exactly why we should stop building societies around the assumption that we do.
One day that child may stand before their family and say:
I'm gay.
I'm transgender.
I need help.
I can't walk the way I used to.
I can't see.
I can't hear.
My mind works differently.
I had to leave my country.
I need you.
Underneath every one of those statements is essentially the same question:
Do I still belong?
The answer that family gives affects the person.
The answer the community gives affects the family.
And when enough communities answer that question the same way, they tell us what kind of society we have built.
Family is not protected by making members of it disappear.
Community is not strengthened by deciding some neighbors do not belong.
Accessibility is not charity.
Accommodation is not special treatment.
Faith does not become stronger through fear.
Healthcare does not become stronger when people cannot reach the clinic.
Education does not become stronger by pretending certain human beings do not exist.
Government does not become stronger when human dignity changes with political leadership.
And international leadership does not rest only upon the power to make promises.
It also rests upon whether people believe those promises will survive political change.
These pillars do not belong to the left.
They do not belong to the right.
They do not belong to America.
They do not belong to the able-bodied.
They do not belong to LGBTQIA+ people.
They do not belong to Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, or any single faith.
They belong to families.
They belong to communities.
They belong to societies.
They belong to humanity.
Every generation eventually inherits the same responsibility:
Decide which pillars we will strengthen, which we will weaken, and which we will leave standing for the people who come after us.
Because governments will change.
Political movements will rise and fall.
Global powers will compete.
Money will move.
Policies will be rewritten.
But every person living through those changes will still be somebody's family.
Every one will belong to a community.
Every one will depend, at some point, upon another human being.
And together, they will become the society the next generation inherits.
The real test may not be whether our institutions survive the next election. The real test is what we leave standing for the people who must live through everything that comes after it.