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UN Vote Allowing Gays To Be Executed Result Of Political, Religious Fundamentalism

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Tens of thousands of readers of The New Civil Rights Movement over the weekend read, “UN General Assembly Votes To Allow Gays To Be Executed Without Cause,” the shocking news about the United Nations General Assembly’s Third Committee on Social, Humanitarian and Cultural issues vote last week that approved 79 to 70 (17 abstentions and 26 absent) removing “sexual orientation” from a resolution protecting persons from extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. This UN vote reinforced an already very difficult and challenging environment for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people and their defenders, who live in continual fear of violent attacks and experience blatant discrimination throughout most countries on the African continent.

But who is behind this vote? And just what is generating this animus toward gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in Africa?

Since the 1980s, massive numbers of Christian fundamentalist missionaries, many if not most from the United States, have flooded the African continent in search of new converts to their retrogressive and narrow beliefs. The Roman Catholic Church, decidedly anti-gay, and the Mormons, known as the Latter Days Saints, who condemn  homosexuality, both proselytize throughout Africa. Africa is also a Muslim continent. During a period of rising fundamentalism within many Muslim sects throughout the world, Islam shapes the cultural and religious life of people who live in Northern, Western, Eastern and some Central African countries. Of 53 African countries, 26 countries are members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIS).

The most blatantly destructive policy outcomes of pervasive Christian fundamentalist proselytizing in Africa has been in Uganda, where “The Family,” also known as “The Fellowship,” a Christian and political organization based in the United States, played a key role in advising its parliament to adopt legislation last year that called for the death penalty of known homosexuals.

(MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has covered the exploits of “The Family” in depth, including relentlessly profiling its role in what became Uganda’s “Kill The Gays” bill. Ugandan MP David Bahati, chief sponsor of the bill, has said, “Homosexuality it is not a human right. It is not in-born.”)

The Family’s key role in advising members of Parliament caused an international uproar against the Ugandan government’s actions by member states of the European Union, as well as from the United States. It also exposed “The Family” to unprecedented public scrutiny, which had managed to avoid the public limelight, despite their continual presence in Washington, D.C. since 1935, hosting the annual National Prayer Breakfast which has been attended by every President since Eisenhower.

Human Rights Watch published Together Apart, Organizing Around Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in 2009, which points out the deep influence of culture and religion upon LGBT persons’ lives throughout the world, and manifestly speaks to the African experience.

Sexuality has become a cultural and religious battleground.  The danger comes from the weight, political importance, and emotion increasingly attached to issues of gender and sexuality. “Fundamentalism”—the impulse toward a forcible return to what are postulated as religious or cultural fundamentals—is a modern term with many definitions. One common characteristic of so-called “fundamentalisms,” proposed by Human Rights Watch elsewhere, is a “drive to seize the state, turn its spotlight on private life, and make it the agent of a newly codified tradition.”

Cultural norms they believe families and communities can no longer uphold. Some governments and politicians try to use fundamentalists in their turn, to prop up their own authority.  Fundamentalisms weave together elements from religion, nationalism, and other ideologies and traditions to invent a “cultural authenticity” that is fixed, unalterable, and monolithic—but threatened by the supposedly corrosive influences of human rights. Sexuality and the body are increasingly its chosen battlegrounds. The argument from culture devastatingly undertakes to paint LGBT people as beings who do not belong, cannot be accommodated, and—because they are intrinsically alien—cannot even be listened to or understood.

From Egypt to The Gambia, from Cameroon to Uganda, from Zimbabwe to Mozambique, the LGBT community on the African continent faces immense discrimination, physical violence, imprisonment, jailings, arrests, deportations and are many times referred to as “lower than dogs,” attitudes and values internalized from colonization, especially Anglo-Saxon laws emanating from the former British Empire.

At the end of the day, despite objections by Sweden, Switzerland and Finland, Mali, Morocco, on behalf of the OIS and Benin’s language, removing “sexual orientation” from the resolution carried the day. From the African Activist blog,

Mali and Morocco are listed as main sponsors for the amendment. A UN press release includes Benin as a main sponsor. Based on the amendment’s footnote, these nations were representing larger blocks of States:

On behalf of the States Members of the United Nations that are members of the Group of African States. On behalf of the States Members of the United Nations that are members of the Group of Arab States and those that are members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

Morocco provided the following reasons for passing the amendment removing sexual orientation:

The representative of Morocco, on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, said the Group was seriously concerned by controversial and undefined notions that had no foundation in international human rights instruments. Intolerance and discrimination existed in cases of colour, race, gender and religion, to mention only a few. Selectivity intended to accommodate certain interests over others had to be avoided by the international community.  Such selectivity would set a precedent that would change the human rights paradigm in order to suit the interests of particular groups. An attempt to create new rights was a matter of concern for the Group.  All Member States were urged to continue to devote special attention to the protection of the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society.

Morocco stated that sexual orientation has “no foundation in international human rights instruments.” Readers, you can be assured that Morocco, the Holy See (The Vatican) and the Organization of the Islamic Conference will band together in unity to oppose the inclusion of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” into any international treaty that protects human rights.  My next blog will explain the international system of human rights laws and the Yogyakarta Principles–the application of  international human rights principles to the sexual orientation and gender identity.

Tanya L. Domi is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, who teaches about human rights in Eurasia and is a Harriman Institute affiliated faculty member. Prior to teaching at Columbia, Domi worked internationally for more than a decade on issues related to democratic transitional development, including political and media development, human rights, gender issues, sex trafficking, and media freedom.

Image: Christian flag used by several South Sudan militias


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News

Election Denialism Embraced by ‘Large Proportion’ of Trump’s Followers: Report

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May 2, 2024

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Since at least 2012 Donald Trump has been engaging in election denialism. Now, a tenet of the Republican Party, the refusal to accept official election results they don’t like is ingrained in a large number of his followers.

“I think that the powers that be on the Democratic side have figured out a way to circumvent democracy,” Darlene Anastas, 69, of Middleborough, Massachusetts, told NBC News. The network “spoke to more than 50 Trump supporters, most of whom said they don’t believe Biden can win legitimately in November.”

“Poll after poll,” NBC also reported, “has found that a large proportion of the Republican electorate believes the only reasons Joe Biden is president are voter fraud and Democratic dirty tricks, buying into former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.”

NBC spoke with 72-year old George Crosby, from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, who said, Democrats “cheat like crazy” (video below).

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“I think they cheated before, and I think they’re going to try to do it again, because they’re a bunch of communists,” Fitzwilliam added.

38-year old James Russon of Eagle Mountain, Utah told NBC, “There’s no way Biden could legally … win without unfair means.”

“He added that the only way Biden could prevail would be through ‘cheating’ or ‘a lot of deceased people voting.'”

62-year old Randall Minicola of Las Vegas said it would be “impossible” for Biden to win. “I don’t think he’s got a following. I mean, you look who’s behind him — the only thing he’s got is ghosts behind him. That’s what I believe. Where’s the supporters then? Are they in the basement with him? I don’t think so.”

NBC News did not report on where these particular GOP voters got their information or how they came to believe these claims, but it did note the “possibility of another election in which large numbers of Republicans refuse to accept a Biden victory has also been stoked by influential conservatives.”

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Trump’s election denialism is so strong that in 2020 CNN published “A list of the times Trump has said he won’t accept the election results or leave office if he loses.”

Election denialism continues to be spread throughout the right.

“A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in March, NBC noted. Carlson, a purveyor of conspiracy theories, has spoken very positively about Russia and its authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, and against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Numerous studies and fact checks have found mail-in voting to be safe and secure, with little opportunity for fraud, yet just last week Carlson, like Trump, was claiming massive election fraud. Undermining Americans’ faith in democracy was a main goal of Russian President Putin’s 2016 attack on the U.S. elections, according to a 2017 report issued by a group of U.S. Intelligence agencies.

But just last week Carlson claimed, “About one in five mail-in ballots in the last election was fraudulent, handing Biden the presidency. We know this because the people who committed the fraud have admitted it in a new poll.”

A portion of NBC’s report from Thursday also appears in this January 2024 NBC News video.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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News

Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results if He Doesn’t Win State He Falsely Claims He Won

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17 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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Falsely claiming he won the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump is now refusing to commit to accepting the 2024 results for the Badger State this November.

In an interview with Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Trump appeared to dance around the issue, declaring he would only accept the official results “if everything’s honest.”

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the paper’s Alison Dirr and Molly Beck in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.

The Journal Sentinel reports Trump “offered similar conditions when asked the same question by news outlets in 2016 and 2020.”

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“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” he said.

In that interview Trump once again falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020, a state President Joe Biden actually won by more than 20,000 votes.

“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump told the newspaper. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”

Trump’s “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, along with his support for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, have been central to his 2024 campaign.

“Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the last presidential election in Wisconsin and his new comments placing conditions on when he would accept the results of the next election come as Republicans are seeking to persuade GOP voters to restore their trust in the state’s system of elections and embrace absentee voting,” the Journal Sentinel reported. “There’s no evidence to support that Wisconsin’s election was tainted by cheating or fraud in 2020. The results have been confirmed by recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by the conservative legal firm Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, among other analyses.”

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In October of 2016, weeks before Election Day, during the final presidential debate, Trump was asked if he would make the commitment “that you will absolutely accept the results of this election?”

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time.”

He then went on to sow doubt about the credibility of the election.

Trump’s refusal to accept election results stretches back more than a decade, even before he ran for president.

After he refused to accept his loss in 2020, ABC News reported “Trump has longstanding history of calling elections ‘rigged’ if he doesn’t like the results.”

“On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a ‘total sham’ and a ‘travesty,’ while also making the claim that the United States is ‘not a democracy’ after Obama secured his victory.

“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” Trump wrote on Twitter

One month later, in December of 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Ironically, four years later he became president after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but winning the Electoral College.

Watch the video above or at this link.

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‘No Place for Antisemitism’: Biden Denounces Violent Campus Protests, Hate Speech and Racism

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20 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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President Joe Biden made rare, unscheduled remarks from the White House Thursday morning, denouncing the recent violent protests on college campuses, and telling Americans there is “no place” for antisemitism anywhere across the nation. He also denounced “hate speech” and “racism,” while declaring his support for the right to peacefully protest.

“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” President Biden declared. “There is no place for hate speech, or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There’s no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”

“Violent protest is not protected,” Biden said strongly. “Peaceful protest is.”

Stressing “the right to free speech,” and the people’s right “to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard,” President Biden also declared the importance of “the rule of law.”

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“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” the President also said, praising the ideal of peaceful protests, which he said are in the “best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.”

“But,” he added, “neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society and order must prevail.”

America is a “big, diverse, free thinking and freedom-loving nation,” Biden said, denouncing those “who rush in to score political points.”

“This isn’t a moment for politics, it’s a moment for clarity.”

“It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest,” he warned. “Threatening people, intimidating people. instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to democracy but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish a semester and their college education.”

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“Look. It’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”

“I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions in America. We respect the right and protect the right for them to express that. But it doesn’t mean anything goes. It needs to be done without violence. Without destruction, without hate, and within the law. And I’ll make no mistake. As President, I will always defend free speech. And I will always be just as strong standing up for the rule of law. That’s my responsibility to you the American people. My obligation to the Constitution.”

The President also responded to reporters’ questions, including saying he saw no need to call up the National Guard.

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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