Category: LGBT Politics

The Rainbow flag in our garden flies at half mast today.

Remember

And here’s a message from Owen Jones that says what I want to say more eloquently than I am able to do.

I know, it sounds almost like an old joke, but I thought something quite interesting happened a few days ago.

Scene: The UN International Centre in Vienna

Dramatis personæ: The Secretary-General of the United Nations: Ban Ki-Moon, and the Diva: Conchita Wurst.

Watch it and wonder. I really think the UN gets what human equality and respect for diversity means – unlike the Catholic Church.

…you finally made it. At midnight on Saturday 29 March 2014, same-sex couples in England and Wales will be able to legally tie the knot. It’s been a long, hard battle for them to get equality, but the day has finally come. England and Wales join the other fifteen countries that recognise same-sex marriage.

It’s also refreshing to see that the Church of England has thrown in the towel, and that the current Archbishop of Canterbury has publicly signalled the end of the Church of England’s resistance to same-sex marriage. Mind you, the global Anglican Church still has plenty of spleen and venom to vent on the issue, so now the fight moves elsewhere.

In the meantime, congratulations to those who are preparing to get married. Sandi Toksvig has an excellent article on what it means to her.

Reading President Museveni’s speech at his signing of Uganda’s Anti-homosexuality bill is depressing. Not so much because of his clear bigotry, ignorance, and politicking – that’s only to be expected – but because of my realisation of what this means for gay people – and people who have gay brothers, sisters, parents, relations and friends – in Uganda. They have just been thrown to the wolves. And it hasn’t taken long for the wolves to start howling. A Ugandan newspaper has published a list of what it called “the country’s 200 top homosexuals”, outing some who previously had not identified themselves as gay.

I was heartened, but not surprised, by Desmond Tutu’s condemnation of the new law. I fear, however, that his voice will be drowned by a new wave of witchhunts in Uganda.

That was the tweet from Dr. Frank Mugisha today at the news that the Ugandan Parliament has passed the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. The bill apparently:

• bans the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ with a maximum of 7 years imprisonment.
• punishes same-sex marriage with life imprisonment

It’s not clear what the final wording and provisions of the bill are, the original bill contained some wide-ranging powers to drive the LGBT community underground, both literally and figuratively, as well as have consequences for human rights defenders active in the LGBT field.

I cannot imagine what it must be like for LGBT people in Uganda at the moment.  One thing is for certain, if Martin and I were living in Uganda instead of here, we would both be looking at life imprisonment.

Stephen Fry has collaborated with film-maker Fergus O’Brien to make a two-part documentary Out There. In it, Fry reflects just how much, and how little, things have changed in his lifetime for gay people around the world.

Martin and I watched the first part last night. Yes, we know that we are incredibly lucky to be able to live where we do, but to see the reality of the extent of homophobia elsewhere, much of it State-sponsored, is very depressing. Uganda featured prominently in last-night’s programme. Fry was shown participating in a Ugandan radio phone-in programme with Pastor Solomon Male, who seems obsessed with homosexual sex to a quite unhealthy degree. Fry also had an interview with the Ugandan State Minister for Integrity and Ethics, who amply demonstrated a complete absence of both of these qualities. Fry found the latter interview in particular quite stressful, in part I suspect because the Minister at one point was shouting that he would arrest Fry.

But never underestimate the smugness of TV reviewers. Rupert Hawksley, in the Telegraph, wrote that:

As a homosexual man himself, it was entirely understandable that Fry took the poisonous opinions he encountered in Uganda and Los Angeles as personal attacks. Nonetheless, I was surprised at how quickly he allowed himself to be drawn into a slanging match, his gravitas deserting him minutes into a debate with Ugandan pastor Solomon Male. It was all much too shouty and felt like the opportunity for instructive discussion had been lost. Later, in an invective-filled session with the Ugandan State Minister for Integrity and Ethics, Fry resorted to childish taunts: “Homosexuality is fantastic. You should try it, it’s really good fun.” This, surely, was not the best way to counter deep-rooted prejudice.

Easy for you to say Mr. Hawksley, but then I doubt that you’ve been much at the receiving end of institutionalised homophobia. If I were in Fry’s place, I’d probably have lost my temper much sooner with the odious human being that is the Ugandan Minister. “Instructive discussion” with people such as Male and the minister is an oxymoron, as I know from experience.

The second part of the documentary will be shown tonight, in which Fry visits Russia, and gets to meet Deputy Milanov of St. Petersburg. Somehow, I think Mr. Hawksley will once again have to suffer a sense of disappointment that there is no “instructive discussion”. As Stephen Fry writes:

I have visited Russia, stood up to the political deputy who introduced the first of these laws, in his city of St Petersburg. I looked into the face of the man and, on camera, tried to reason with him, counter him, make him understand what he was doing. All I saw reflected back at me was what Hannah Arendt called, so memorably, “the banality of evil.” A stupid man, but like so many tyrants, one with an instinct of how to exploit a disaffected people by finding scapegoats. Putin may not be quite as oafish and stupid as Deputy Milonov but his instincts are the same.

The struggle continues.

Since 2004, May 17 has been marked as the International Day Against Homophobia. The Dutch Government is hosting a three day international conference in The Hague on the subject of homophobia at the moment.

Today, the EU Fundamental Rights Agency published a report on the experience of LGBT people across the EU and in Croatia. It doesn’t make for very comfortable reading. The survey (of 93,000 people) found:

• Some 26% of respondents (and 35% of transgender respondents) said they had been attacked or threatened with violence in the past five years
• Most of the hate attacks reported took place in public and were perpetrated by more than one person, with the attackers predominantly being male
• More than half of those who said they had been attacked did not report the incident to the authorities, believing no action would be taken
• Half of respondents said they had felt personally discriminated against in the year before the survey, although 90% did not report the discrimination
• Some 20% of gay or bisexual respondents and 29% of transgender respondents said they had suffered discrimination at work or when looking for a job
• Two-thirds of respondents said they had tried to hide or disguise their sexuality at school.

Full details of the report and its findings are here.

Yesterday, the Netherlands Institute for Social Research published its own report on the situation of LGBT people in the Netherlands. It makes slightly more comfortable reading than the EU report, but we are also likely to be the target of homophobia from the usual suspects within Dutch society.

I see that my birthplace, the Isle of Man, is still home to some old and ugly prejudice. Kira Izzard and Laura Cull have been refused a tenancy application because they are a lesbian couple. Their landlord, Keith Price, who is a Methodist Minister, stated:

“We understood that they were not a family so we said we couldn’t proceed [with the rental agreement].

“We believe that God has a plan for our lives within the context of marriage, the scripture is quite clear in its teaching on this.”

In the UK, such a refusal would be illegal; unfortunately, the Isle of Man is a Crown Dependency, and not part of the UK, so it makes its own laws.

Ms Izzard has started a petition to ask the Manx Parliament to support the UK Equality Act 2010 in the Isle of Man. Naturally, I’ve signed it.

I see that the European Court of Human Rights has delivered its judgments in the cases of four Christians who claimed that their religious rights were being infringed by their employers.

And I think that the ECHR got it right. They supported the claim of Nadia Eweida, and dismissed the other three claimant’s cases.

Frankly, I didn’t think British Airways had a leg to stand on when (1) they refused to allow Eweida to wear a crucifix visibly while (2) they allowed the wearing of turbans and hijabs, and (3) they subsequently changed the rules so that the wearing of crucifixes was permissible.

In the other three cases, the ECHR quite rightly pointed out that Christian rights do not trump human rights. However, Andrea Williams of the Christian Legal Centre wants to reframe these as cases where gay rights is apparently winning over human rights:

In the cases of Ladele and McFarlane, she added, sexual rights had been given priority over religious liberty: “[The judges said] that if an employer has an equalities policy and says there should be no discrimination in any way on the grounds of sexual orientation no matter what your Christian belief is that the sexual orientation rights win.”

Nonsense. As Joshua Rozenberg writes:

Take the case of Lilian Ladele, the registrar of births, deaths and marriages who lost her job when she refused to conduct civil partnership ceremonies. By a majority of five votes to two, the Strasbourg judges dismissed her claim that she had suffered discrimination in comparison to a registrar with no religious objection to same-sex unions.

That was because the local authority for which she worked also had a legitimate duty to protect the rights of same-sex couples. The human rights court generally allows member states a wide discretion — what it calls a “margin of appreciation” — when it comes to striking a balance between competing rights. According to the five judges in the majority, the decision to sack her was within that discretion.

But what am I to make of the language used by the two dissenting judges (out of the seven on the panel)?

In a dissenting judgment, two ECHR judges, Nebojsa Vucinic and Vincent de Gaetano, said Ladele’s right to freedom of conscience had been infringed. They explained: “We are of the view that once a genuine and serious case of conscientious objection is established, the state is obliged to respect the individual’s freedom of conscience.”

They also launched a fierce verbal attack on the culture prevalent in her local authority: “In the third applicant’s case, however, a combination of backstabbing by her colleagues and the blinkered political correctness of the borough of Islington (which clearly favoured ‘gay rights’ over fundamental human rights) eventually led to her dismissal.”

That is quite extraordinary language from judges who sit on the ECHR. However, as Rozenberg points out:

Minority judgments are written by the judges themselves, unlike the majority ruling which is compiled by officials. The court itself would never have said that gay rights were not human rights.

I note that the two judges hail from Montenegro and Malta. Clearly, based on these two individuals, who, one would assume, represent the highest flowering of moral and judicial sensibility, the moral zeitgeist has not moved forward in those countries at the same rate as elsewhere.

I confess to a fondness for schadenfreude. Never more so when an organisation, which expects power and recognition in the society in which it exists, resolutely opens its mouth only to change feet.

And so it is with the Anglican Church and same-sex marriage.

Having earnestly entreated the UK government to forbid the possibility of same-sex marriage, for a number of dubious reasons, it is now horrified when the UK government has responded by effectively saying: OK, you don’t want to have same-sex marriage, then we’ll bring in a law to make it forbidden for you to conduct same-sex marriage ceremonies within your premises.

Look, gentlemen (and, of course, it is men) you can’t have your cake and eat it. If you don’t want to conduct same-sex marriages, then don’t bleat when you are told that you can’t conduct same-sex marriages.

The Anglican Church: a cross between Marie Antoinette and Stan Laurel.