Hillary Clinton: Religious objections to homosexuality like supporting honor killings, widow burning
WASHINGTON, D.C. December 8, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a speech designed to convince the world that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said religious objections to homosexuality should not stand in the way of vigorous United Nations action to promote the homosexual rights agenda.
On Tuesday, Clinton said promoting the global acceptance of “gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people” is “one of the remaining human rights challenges of our time,” likening the effort to ending racial, sexual, or religious discrimination.
She noted that perh
Image via Wikipediaaps the “most challenging issue arises when people cite religious or cultural values as a reason to violate or not to protect the human rights of LGBT citizens.” These objections, she said, are “not unlike the justification offered for violent practices towards women like honor killings, widow burning, or female genital mutilation.”
Image via Wikipediaaps the “most challenging issue arises when people cite religious or cultural values as a reason to violate or not to protect the human rights of LGBT citizens.” These objections, she said, are “not unlike the justification offered for violent practices towards women like honor killings, widow burning, or female genital mutilation.”She stated worldwide “opinions are still evolving” on homosexuality as they did with slavery, and “what was once justified as sanctioned by God is now properly reviled as an unconscionable violation of human rights.”
“In each of these cases, we came to learn that no [religious] practice or tradition trumps the human rights that belong to all of us,” she said.
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She insisted the UN must oppose all forms of human rights violations against homosexuals and “transgender” people, from execution and banishment to criminalizing LGBT “status or behavior,” denying them free access to “public spaces,” or the “bullying and exclusion” that takes place in the United States. “I speak about this subject knowing that my own country’s record on human rights for gay people is far from perfect,” Clinton said.
Clinton said that that notions that “gay people are pedophiles, that homosexuality is a disease that can be caught or cured, or that gays recruit others to become gay” are “simply not true.”
The secretary of state added that nations must pass LGBT civil rights laws, even when they offend the majority of a nation’s citizens. “Leadership, by definition, means being out in front of your people when it is called for,” Clinton said. “[W]e are each free to believe whatever we choose…But progress comes from changes in laws.”
The address made a five-fold argument that LGBT rights are not distinct from human rights, that homosexuality is not uniquely Western, that religion is not a valid defense, that no serious argument exists against public homosexual behavior, and that all humans must do their part to advance LGBT rights.
Clinton’s speech, delivered in Geneva on Tuesday to celebrate International Human Rights Day, underscored the fact that the Obama administration has made the worldwide acceptance of homosexuality a pillar of its foreign policy at the UN and around the world. Her address came the same day President Obama announced a plan to reshape American foreign policy to promote global acceptance of homosexuality. The plan instructs all foreign officers to “combat discrimination, homophobia, and intolerance on the basis of LGBT status or conduct” and establishes a $3 million “Global Equality Fund” to finance homosexual activists around the world.
The new initiative is only the latest in a series of steps the Obama administration has taken to push gay rights abroad. In the first-ever report on U.S. human rights to the UN Human Rights Council last year, the Obama administration noted, “Debate continues over equal rights to marriage for LGBT Americans at the federal and state levels.”
U.S. delegates advanced a measure opposing the criminalization of homosexuality in the UN Human Rights Council in March that won the support of 85 nations. In July 2010, the Obama administration helped the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) gain NGO status at the UN without the approval of that body’s NGO Committee and over a “no action” vote supported by a majority of members including Russia, China, and Egypt.
Buster Wilson, host of the American Family Radio Network program “AFA Today,” said, “Hillary Clinton is now…taking the fight on behalf of LGBT people on behalf of the Obama administration to the front lines.” He said her notion that “deeply held religious beliefs are standing in the way of human rights for LGBT people” was simply “unbelievable.”
Wilson cited her comments as one of several examples that has convinced some observers the Obama administration is waging a “war on religion.”
