Thor Halvorssen of the Human Rights Foundation - under the heading 'United Nations: It's Okay to Kill the Gay' - notes that many governments will save you the bother, promising to head, hang or otherwise dispose of you for the wrong object choice.
Last week, the Third Committee of the United Nations General Assembly voted on a special resolution addressing extrajudicial, arbitrary and summary executions. The resolution affirms the duties of member countries to protect the right to life of all people with a special emphasis on a call to investigate killings based on discriminatory grounds. The resolution highlights particular groups historically subject to executions including street children, human rights defenders, members of ethnic, religious, and linguistic minority communities, and, for the past 10 years, the resolution has included sexual orientation as a basis on which some individuals are targeted for death.Halvorssen notes that -
The tiny West African nation of Benin (on behalf of the UN's African Group) proposed an amendment to strike sexual minorities from the resolution. The amendment was adopted with 79 votes in favor, 70 against, 17 abstentions and 26 absent.
A collection of notorious human rights violators voted for the amendment including Afghanistan, Algeria, China, Congo, Cuba, Eritrea, North Korea, Iran (didn't Ahmadinejad tell the world there were no gays in Iran?), Egypt, Malaysia, Pakistan, Russia, Sudan, Uganda, Vietnam, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.With just a dash of hyperbole he comments that -
Add to this Bahamas, Belize (where you get 10 years for being gay), Jamaica (10 years of hard labor), Grenada (10 years), Guyana (life sentence), Saint Kitts and Nevis (10 years), Saint Lucia (10 years), Saint Vincent (10 years), South Africa (Apartheid? What apartheid?), and Morocco (ruled by a gay monarch!). They are all on the list of nations that do not think execution of gays and lesbians is worthy of condemnation or investigation. ...
Those against the amendment include every European nation present, all Scandinavian countries, India, Korea, most of Latin America, all of North America, and only one Middle Eastern nation: Israel. In most countries in the Middle East, it is a crime to be gay - in some, like Saudi Arabia, it is punishable by beheading and in others, like Iran, by hanging.
The UN has a remarkable track record of doing virtually nothing when presented with mass killings or genocide. "Never again!" was the cry after the holocaust. Since then, the world has witnessed a dozen more never agains with strong condemnation from the UN coming after the corpses pile up. A resolution of the sort that was voted on in the General Assembly is significant for its clarity of message: "It's okay to kill the gays."Papua New Guinea, the failed state in our neighbourhood, abstained. Halvorsen notes that -
Not a single African nation voted against the amendment. This is not surprising. Homosexuality is illegal in most of Africa. So acceptable is the notion of extra-judicial killings of gay men and women for their consensual private conduct that one of these countries, Uganda, is considering legislation making homosexuality (not the behavior, just being gay) punishable with death. The proposer of the bill, David Bahati, and the Ugandan "Minister for Ethics and Integrity," Nsaba Buturo, have vowed the bill will pass before parliament dissolves on May 12, 2011.I am consoling myself by reading Stuart Biegel's lucid The Right To Be Out: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in America's Public Schools (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2010).
The US Defense Department has - oh shock and horror - meanwhile acknowledged in a 267 page report [PDF] on DADT that allowing gay men and women to serve openly in the nation's armed forces presents a low risk to the military's effectiveness (including in times of war) and that 69% of surveyed service members (out of a survey of 115,052 responses, supplemented by a mere 44,266 responses to a spouse survey) believe that the impact on their units would be positive, mixed or of no consequence.
Concerns about openly gay service members were driven by misperceptions and stereotypes: "exaggerated and not consistent with the reported experiences of many service members" absent 'moral' and religious objections to homosexuality. The DOD has perhaps learned from experience with racially segregated facilities, indicating thar it is not planning to construct separate bathrooms (one for hets, one for non-hets) - described as "a logistical nightmare, expensive and impossible to administer".
The report noted that -
The reality is that there are gay men and lesbians already serving in today’s U.S. military, and most Service members recognize this. As stated before, 69% of the force recognizes that they have at some point served in a unit with a co-worker they believed to be gay or lesbian. Of those who have actually had this experience in their career, 92% stated that the unit's “ability to work together” was "very good", "good", or "neither good nor poor", while only 8% stated it was "poor" or "very poor". Anecdotally, we also heard a number of Service members tell us about a leader, co-worker, or fellow Service member they greatly liked, trusted, or admired, who they later learned was gay; and how once that person’s sexual orientation was revealed to them, it made little or no difference to the relationship. Both the survey results and our own engagement of the force convinced us that when Service members had the actual experience of serving with someone they believe to be gay, in general unit performance was not affected negatively by this added dimension.The report also states that -
Yet, a frequent response among Service members at information exchange forums, when asked about the widespread recognition that gay men and lesbians are already in the military, were words to the effect of: "yes, but I don’t know they are gay". Put another way, the concern with repeal among many is with "open" service.
In the course of our assessment, it became apparent to us that, aside from the moral and religious objections to homosexuality, much of the concern about “open” service is driven by misperceptions and stereotypes about what it would mean if gay Service members were allowed to be “open” about their sexual orientation. Repeatedly, we heard Service members express the view that "open" homosexuality would lead to widespread and overt displays of effeminacy among men, homosexual promiscuity, harassment and unwelcome advances within units, invasions of personal privacy, and an overall erosion of standards of conduct, unit cohesion, and morality. Based on our review, however, we conclude that these concerns about gay and lesbian Service members who are permitted to be “open” about their sexual orientation are exaggerated, and not consistent with the reported experiences of many Service members. In today's civilian society, where there is no law that requires gay men and lesbians to conceal their sexual orientation in order to keep their job, most gay men and lesbians still tend to be discrete about their personal lives, and guarded about the people with whom they share information about their sexual orientation. ...
As one gay Service member stated:I don't think it's going to be such a big, huge, horrible thing that DoD is telling everyone it's going to be. If it is repealed, everyone will look around their spaces to see if anyone speaks up. They'll hear crickets for a while. A few flamboyant guys and tough girls will join to rock the boat and make a scene. Their actions and bad choices will probably get them kicked out. After a little time has gone by, then a few of us will speak up. And instead of a deluge of panic and violence ... there'll be ripple on the water's surface that dissipates quicker than you can watch.In communications with gay and lesbian current and former Service members, we repeatedly heard a patriotic desire to serve and defend the Nation, subject to the same rules as everyone else. In the words of one gay Service member, repeal would simply"take a knife out of my back ... You have no idea what it is like to have to serve in silence". Most said they did not desire special treatment, to use the military for social experimentation, or to advance a social agenda. Some of those separated under Don't Ask, Don't Tell would welcome the opportunity to rejoin the military if permitted. From them, we heard expressed many of the same values that we heard over and over again from Service members at large — love of country, honor, respect, integrity, and service over self. We simply cannot square the reality of these people with the perceptions about "open" service.
We support the pre-existing proposals to repeal Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and remove private consensual sodomy between adults as a criminal offense. This change in law is warranted irrespective of whether Don't Ask, Don't Tell is repealed, to resolve any constitutional concerns about the provision in light of Lawrence v. Texas and United States v. Marcum. We also support revising offenses involving sexual conduct or inappropriate relationships to ensure sexual orientation neutral application, consistent with the recommendations of this report
