On “Unalienable” Human Rights

Screen capture, launch of the Commission on Unalienable Rights

On Monday, July 8th, the U.S. State Department announced the launch of a Commission on Unalienable Rights, which is intended to rethink and reshape how human rights laws are applied around the world. This Commission was deemed necessary to ensure that “human rights discourse not be corrupted or hijacked or used for dubious or malignant purposes,” though in that founding statement, the Department failed to explain how this was supposedly happening, or who was said to be hijacking said discourse.

Reporting about this development immediately raised concerns that the Commission’s mandate could negatively impact and specifically target LGBTQ+ human rights protections, but there could be dire ramifications for reproductive rights, sex-based rights, and the rights of migrants, as well. Although the wording of the announcement is vague to a degree, religious conservatives clearly expect the project “to address concerns about religious freedom [which they feel is violated by LGBTQ+ human rights accommodations] and abortion,” at the least.

In announcing the Commission, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rationalized that by delineating protected classes in human rights laws, “politicians and bureaucrats… blur the distinction between unalienable rights and ad hoc rights granted by governments. Unalienable rights are by nature universal. Not everything good, or everything granted by a government, can be a universal right….”

This is a common talking point among religious conservatives, who argue that human rights cannot be granted by “politicians and bureaucrats” (i.e. courts and human rights commissions), but by God alone. The given rationale for that thinking is that human rights should be subsumed under “natural law and nature’s god.” Certainly, when this Commission on Unalienable Rights was first announced at the end of May, the State Department lamented that human rights “discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights” – although this phrasing proved to be so transparent to media outlets that the word “natural” was absent from the Monday’s launch.

Of course, fixating on nature is a fallacious way of limiting rights to exclude the obvious intended targets. Same-sex coupling occurs in nature. Changing sexes occurs in nature. Reproductive limiting and parental choice occurs in nature (though the means can seem shocking and visceral). Polyamory occurs in nature. What doesn’t occur in nature is “one-man-and-one-woman marriage,” and life-long monogamous exclusivity is only practiced by 3 to 5 percent of mammals (including humans) – and even less so in other species.

But make no mistake: excluding classes of people from human rights law is clearly the intention. Any attempt to more narrowly define whose rights are “unalienable” and therefore legitimate is, by reflection, also an exercise in determining whose rights are illegitimate, and therefore… alienable (perhaps even in the truest meaning of that word). While the State Department denied that the Commission would address “policy questions” like abortion rights, they asserted that it would instead “attempt to ground human rights in the founding principles of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'” That said, the Commission’s mandate never appeared designed to address specific issues or classes, but rather to create a rationalized hierarchy or criteria through which the exclusion or trumping of disfavoured rights becomes logically inevitable – which is a bit of semantic sleight-of-hand.

When the Commission on Unalienable Rights was first announced, it was originally to be under the auspices of Princeton professor and co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage, Robert George, who reportedly drafted the original concept note and is described by peers as “revitalizing a strain of Catholic natural-law thinking that goes back to St. Thomas Aquinas.” Like the word “natural,” George is also absent from the launch, but the Commission’s roster is so overwhelmingly linked to him that its membership was almost certainly hand-picked by him.

 

The Commission is chaired by Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon, the former ambassador to the Vatican and an anti-abortion activist, who served on the US Commission on Religious Freedom (from 2012-2016, with George). She is a board member of the anti-LGBTQ+ funding group, Becket Fund, and is perhaps best known for fighting on behalf of the Holy See to prevent the inclusion of abortion rights at the 1995 U.N. World Conference on Women in Beijing. She has made many troubling statements, such as: publicly condemning the Boston Globe’s expose on abuse within the Catholic Church, in 1992; referring to marriage equality as a “radical social experiment” and “not a civil rights issue, but a movement for special preference;” complaining that religious freedom is “subordinated to a whole range of other rights, claims and interests;” and calling for a “flexible universalism” in which human rights are not standardized, but contextualized according to (she quotes from the 1993 Vienna Declaration) “national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds.” In her book, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law, she clearly sees abortion as an infringement on the rights of the foetus, and no-fault divorce as an infringement on the rights of children. Glendon is also not known for compromise, going as far as rejecting a medal from the University of Notre Dame because that institution also conferred then-President Barack Obama with an honorary degree, despite the fact that he supported abortion access.

For what it’s worth, she also a hired Pompeo as a research assistant, when Pompeo studied law at Harvard.

Joining Glendon is a smorgasbord of Robert George -linked and similarly-minded academics:

• Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute who responded to the overturning of sodomy laws by condemning Justice Kennedy for allegedly failing “to subject the Texas statute prohibiting homosexual sodomy to ‘rational scrutiny.'” Berkowitz calls for religious conscience to be “unhampered by government coercion,” and has written several other treatises opposed to LGBTQ+ human rights.
• Paolo Carozza, a Notre Dame law professor and long-time critic of human rights laws who, among other things, advocated for a Vatican-tinged flavour of “human dignity” as a determinate for legitimacy of human rights.
• Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson, an influential American-born convert to Islam and co-founder of Zaytuna College. Yusuf told religion writer Scott Korb that “I don’t want to see gay people bashed… But I also don’t want it normalized as a healthy thing for a society… I don’t want someone to say this is a normal, healthy lifestyle. It’s not. It’s pathogenic…'”
• Jacqueline Rivers, a Harvard sociology professor, and co-founder and former executive director of the Witherspoon-sponsored Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies. Rivers is an anti-abortion speaker, and GLAAD also noted that she once “insisted that marriage equality activists are undermining the Black Civil Rights movement [by demanding human rights protections], but comforted the applauding attendees by telling them ‘God will not be mocked…'”
• Rabbi Meir Yaakov Soloveichik, a spiritual leader of Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in the US. Soloveichik argued that the legalization of same-sex marriage would lead to the normalization of bestiality.
• Katrina Lantos Swett, president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice. She has been pointed to as a Democrat involved with the Commission (as though she makes the project bipartisan) – but Swett is still a “religious freedom” advocate with a Mormon-leaning multifaith background, who was also on the the US Commission on Religious Freedom, along with Mary Ann Glendon and Robert George – the latter of whom reassured religious conservatives that “She was the very opposite of a partisan or an ideologue… I did not have a different vision from Katrina, and she didn’t have a different vision from me. We were the same.”
• Christopher Tollefsen, a University of South Carolina professor, senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, prolific religious conservative writer, and co-author of the anti-abortion and anti- stem cell research book Embryo (with Robert George). Tollefsen is a devotee of Paul McHugh when it comes to trans issues, and has argued that it is not only not possible to change sex, but also “a mark of a heartless culture” to make surgeries and affirming, non-psychological treatments available to trans individuals.
• David Tse-Chien Pan (a professor at the University of California at Irvine) and Russell Berman (a Stanford University professor and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute) are less clear, but Pan is a critic of “liberalism” (libertarianism), and Berman (not to be confused with a writer at The Atlantic by the same name) appears to be a critic of Islam, “left-fascism” and “campus anti-Semitism,” which may refer to protests in support of Palestinians.
• Named in only some of the announcements are Kiron Skinner (State Department director of policy planning, who “ignited controversy in May for framing the contentious US-China relationship as ‘the first time that we will have a great-power competitor that is not Caucasian’”), and attorney F. Cartwright Weiland (Rapporteur), who was a Council for Life panelist, helped write amicus briefs supporting laws restricting abortion, and is a critic (in an article expounding on board chair Mary Ann Glendon’s 1991 writing about Rights Talk) of “identity politics” and LGBTQ+ inclusion in human rights.

It’s important to contextualize all of this within the current developments in the United States under the Trump administration. Catholic and Evangelical fundamentalists (who I feel are important to differentiate from other Christians, despite their sadly often successful habit of passing off their political causes as the “Christian” position) are already seeing legal successes in restricting abortion access, and expect an overturn of Roe v Wade (and perhaps even Obergefell v Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage) by a newly-stacked conservative Supreme Court, very soon – and have been looking for directions to refocus, in order to maintain their momentum, power and following. One of these directions has been to make abortion “unthinkable,” while another has been to formalize a means for religious freedom and religious conscience to override LGBTQ+ (and other) human rights protections. A deeply biblical rewriting of human rights law could not only create a license for anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, but also completely undermine reproductive rights and entrench vastly outdated ideas about gender roles, including theological notions like “complementarianism.” For example, ThinkProgress recently noted that if a case of the so-called “Billy Graham Rule” (of religious fundamentalist men refusing to meet with women without a chaperone) were to proceed to the rightward-shifting U.S. Supreme Court while using a “religious conscience” argument, it could very well provide the basis for a legalization of sex-based discrimination, at least under specific circumstances.

This Commission is also taking place during a severe, self-inflicted crisis of anti-immigrant policy in the U.S., which has seen detention camps with atrocious conditions rightly criticized and noted for their historical parallels (even if not necessarily identical matches to past atrocities). Religious conservatives have not simply turned a blind eye to these developments, but have actually often collaboratively helped to create rationalizations for these brutal policies (especially when it comes to Muslim migrants). In this context, and under the auspices of a government that has very clearly shown the will to dehumanize migrants and refugees and trample their rights, it is not inconceivable that this Commission is designed to provide a structure by which a lesser human status for migrants is potentially justifiable.

This Commission is also contemporary to Trump’s stated intent to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide. This inevitably brought some pushback from his religious base – but only a little, while other figures took the opportunity to try to appear diplomatic, seeking to realign the center of the LGBTQ+ rights versus religious freedom (false) dichotomy by “calling for an end to all forms of physical violence against homosexuals — but [also to] refrain from imposing the values of the sexual revolution on the rest of the world.” Although the administration’s decriminalization project appears to have been driven more by U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell than by Trump himself, it is also not irreconcilable with a mandate like the Commission’s: ending overt criminal prosecution is a far cry from supporting actual human rights protections, which are a far greater level of enfranchised citizenship, and facilitate the ability to participate in society as a whole. The Commission on Unalienable Rights doesn’t have to obliterate what it determines are “illegitimate” human rights classes entirely, in order to legalize discrimination against them – it only needs to create a hierarchy which elevates those rights that it determines are “unalienable.”

And finally, this comes at a time when religious fundamentalists have successfully engineered the illusion of several false dichotomies to create the impression that human rights create irreconcilable conflicts: of LGBTQ+ rights versus religious freedom; of personhood rights versus reproductive rights; of trans rights versus sex-based rights; of parents’ rights versus childrens’ rights (though this is often treated as though the latter are non-existent); of all human rights classes versus freedom of speech; and more. Of those, personhood rights are based on a faulty premise that an undeveloped foetus that cannot exist on its own is somehow a person, and (for the most part) the remaining dichotomies are only irreconcilable if the party that wishes to do harm to the other inflexibly insists that it cannot compromise under any circumstance whatsoever – and will do whatever is necessary to frame any particular pressure to do so as persecution.

What all of this points to is a project that appears designed to rethink human rights as a structure in which some humans can be lesser.  And this is concerning, if it becomes the template by which the U.S. proceeds to push human rights discussion on the world stage, in the coming years.

If the launch of the Commission on Unalienable Rights is any indication, terms like “natural law” may be stealthily replaced by language that is far more opaque, and carefully designed to appear as though it does not target any specific groups. But in all likelihood, it will nevertheless still prioritize things like religious conscience, “dignity” (redefined as a god-granted status that is infringed upon if we make certain life choices about sexuality, a popular theme in Catholic-based discourse on “natural law”), personhood (a dog whistle that frames the foetus as a person), and (though I have not touched on it here, but it can be seen in the battles over sex education) parents’ rights, among other characteristic themes that merit further exploration.

I am sure that we will find out soon enough.

(Crossposted to rabble.ca)

Indiana put the lie to “religious freedom.” But Canadian Evangelicals hope you didn’t notice.

Everyone’s familiar with the old adage, “be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.”

Which is why the Evangelical leaders who held a press conference on Parliament Hill calling for greater religious freedom laws and schmoozing with Conservative politicians last month might do well to remember Indiana.

“Unfortunately, Christians in this country find themselves under attack.  This is a violation, and we are calling on the Canadian government to stop this type of violation across this country…” — Charles McVety

Because almost to the day that the collection of Canadian religious leaders held a press conference at Parliament Hill, Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed a piece of legislation that was exactly the kind of thing they meant.  And it went over like plutonium-based paint.

For anyone who missed the ruckus it caused, the State of Indiana proposed a “religious freedom” law that was very similar to those existing in other U.S. states and federally — except that by the omission of a small phrase, it essentially made it illegal for any government body to intervene in cases of discrimination, provided said discrimination was motivated by a person’s religious freedom of conscience.  Put simply, it would legally sanction religiously-motivated discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans* (LGBT) people (and for that matter, just about anyone else), while making it illegal for any government body to intervene.  And the State of Indiana did so because of an outcry from religious groups struggling against marriage equality (with no shortage of drama) claiming that legally protecting LGBT people from discrimination is tyranny:

“This is tyranny, and it has not come to the United States from an invading nation with tanks and rockets.  It has come wrapped in a hijacked-rainbow flag, under the banner of “diversity” and “nondiscrimination.”  At this point, only the most uninformed and deceived among us cannot see that the radical homosexual movement—a movement based purely on lies and sin—has at its heart the wicked goal of tyranny over Christian freedom, expression and conscience.  Don’t doubt it.  While this particular case does not necessarily involve a Christian employer, ultimately Christians and Christianity are the true targets of this hell-born movement.  But, these activists will gladly target anyone who resists their dark agenda, as this company, Tower Loan, is sadly discovering.

“The culture in our nation today is steeped in immorality and moral relativism to the point that far too many people have no perception of the grotesque reality of homosexual behavior and how the activists and their supporters in this sexual anarchy movement are using sodomy and “transgenderism” as a foundation to create new “rights” for those who engage in these base behaviors.  These new “civil rights” for sodomites are for the purpose of destroying the rights of the majority of the American people…”

The State of Arizona had attempted a similar thing last year, until people started realizing that it might allow medical professionals who were Jehovah’s Witnesses to deny patients blood transfusions, and other unpredictable consequences.  Moreover, the clear intention had been to disenfranchise and target a specific group of people, which proved not a very popular idea with the commercial sector.  Boycotts were threatened and travel to the state was likely to become embargoed in places, while the law’s proponents demonstrated just how aggressively they intended to use the law (while still denying that it constituted a form of special rights).  Arizona backed off, and the Governor refused to sign the bill.

In Indiana, though, Governor Pence did so happily, with a smile, a flourish, and a special fringe group photo-op.

The backlash was instantaneous.  Several states and local governments banned the use of taxpayer money to fund city employees’ travel to the State.  Celebrities canceled shows and declared a boycott.  NASCAR, the NFL and other sporting figures put pressure on the State.  The Gap, Twitter, Apple, Angie’s List and several other companies spoke out with condemnation.  Ten religious groups decried the law, including the Disciples of Christ, which threatened to move its annual convention.  The Indianapolis Star published a front page with the top half black, and bearing the words, “Fix This Now.”  And the Indiana-based NCAA made it known that they were questioning whether to hold the long-awaited Final Four tournament in Indianapolis, if not make greater changes in the future.  Eventually, the State amended the law to remove the freedom to discriminate portion (although notably, Indiana still does not actually have state-wide LGBT human rights protections, so the issue is actually not over, even if the state government wants to sweep it under the rug).  Other states have had mixed reactions to the spectacle, however, and groups and individuals have taken a certain amount of inspiration from Indiana’s trial run:

“In an interview with WOOD-TV, Dieseltec owner Brian Klawiter said he is a Christian and that he doesn’t ask his customers if they are gay, but “If you want to come in here with your boyfriend and you want to openly display that, that’s just not going to be tolerated here. We don’t believe that here.”

“In the rant, posted on Tuesday, Klawiter lamented the discrimination white heterosexual Christians face everyday in the U.S. and said he is no longer going to take it…”

To be fair, the March 25th delegation of Evangelicals didn’t call upon Prime Minister Stephen Harper for an Indiana-style “religious freedom” law per-se.  By the time they got to the Hill, in fact, they’d figured out that all of their complaints were in jurisdictions outside federal control.  So they asked for a statement.

And they didn’t get it.  Instead, they came away with a lone MP who left the Conservative caucus and used the opportunity to give a weird rant in Parliament about scientists being “gagged over a false construct related to the theory of evolution.”  Not the wisest way to politically self-immolate, I suppose.

“There’s a whole generation of kids being taught that what they’re taught in Sunday School or in church is garbage, it’s wrong, it’s false, and it’s simply a form of bullying that’s no longer acceptable. It’s not scientifically tenable, it’s a disservice to science… it’s not freedom of religion if your views are put down by your peers.” — MP James Lunney

But it’s not the first time that ideological groups have called for religious-based special rights, and it’s certainly not going to be the last.  If anything, the effort seems poised to grow.  In the U.S., some states are pressing forward with new bills of the sort, while more than one Republican Presidential contender has vowed to make it a priority.  The view from the American side of the border, at least, is that LGBT acceptance and Christianity are simply incompatible:

“When two diametrically opposed and incompatible value systems (namely Christianity and hedonistic humanism) come together in the same place, there can be no peaceful coexistence.  One will necessarily dominate, while the other is necessarily subjugated.  We saw that quickly happen in Indiana last week.” — BarbWire commentator Bob Ellis

(It’s worth adding a reminder that I personally try not to use “Christian” to describe these folks, despite their rallying behind the term, because I consider it questionable whether they actually are… at least when it comes to “loving one another” by trying to disenfranchise, invalidate, and occasionally even still criminalize people whose existence they deny or object to… not to mention doing things like conflating entire groups with sexual predators as a political tactic.)

In Canada, Evangelicals and Fundamentalists are tiptoeing around Indiana while strategizing further… and recognizing that their fight is a little harder in a nation that has already had marriage equality for several years and somehow managed to cope.

“… The most significant part of the HMP [“Homosexual Ministry of Propaganda”] victory is that the word “Equality”, a word twisted by the HMP to squash dissent, has once more been reinforced in the minds of the public to mean that a male + male or a female + female = marriage…” — Peter Baklinski at the Canadian website, LifeSiteNews.

The old “special rights” argument, now with actual special rights added.

The “religious freedom” tactic isn’t really all that new: only the phrasing used to convey it.  For many years, religious groups complained that extending human rights protections to LGBT people would confer “special rights” upon them.  Lest readers doubt that there was some deliberate co-ordination to all of this, Media Matters provides an in-depth look:

“Alliance Defending Freedom is a legal organization that works with 2,400 allied attorneys nationally on a $39 million (as of 2013) annual budget. ADF was founded in 1994 by several of the country’s largest national evangelical Christian ministries to “press the case for religious liberty issues in the nation’s courts” and “fend-off growing efforts by groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which seek to immobilize Christians.” Today, it has become the country’s best-funded and most powerful right-wing Christian group working against what the organization calls the “myth of the so-called ‘separation of church and state.'” 

“… While the group prefers to talk about its “religious liberty” work when in the media spotlight, ADF also actively works internationally to promote and defend laws that criminalize gay sex. ADF’s formal support for anti-sodomy legislation dates to at least 2003, before the Supreme Court made its landmark decision in Lawrence v. Texas. ADF, which was at the time still known as the Alliance Defense Fund, filed an amicus brief in the case, defending state laws criminalizing gay sex. In its brief, ADF spent nearly 30 pages arguing that gay sex is unhealthy, harmful, and a public health risk…”

Of course, it then became awkward trying to explain the dangers that could ensue if the “special right” to be equal might trump the then- perfectly ordinary everyday right to deny someone employment, housing, medical care, enfranchisement, and/or goods and services.  Embarassed, anti-LGBT leaders began looking for new phrasing and the lowest-hanging fruit to justify their claims.  The shift to a “religious persecution” -based tactic started with adoption agencies that were “forced to close” because they refused to assist would-be parents in gay or lesbian relationships.  Except that they weren’t really forced to shut down:

“Catholic Charities in Illinois has served for more than 40 years as a major link in the state’s social service network for poor and neglected children. But now most of the Catholic Charities affiliates in Illinois are closing down rather than comply with a new requirement that says they can no longer receive state money if they turn away same-sex couples as potential foster care and adoptive parents…

That’s when the attention turned to wedding cakes and photographers.  To at least some of the public, it seems relatively trivial and nit-picky that LGBT people are expecting to be able to enjoy the same access to those services as anyone else.  Never mind that the same logic and law used to deny a wedding cake might also be used to deny housing, education, health care, security, or any other service where religious freedom of conscience might cause someone to take issue.

Canada illustrates this a bit more visibly, with religious conservatives fighting a conscience policy for medical professionals which would allow them to decline non-emergency as long as they still provide a referral to someone who will provide accurate information.  Shoulda’ went for the cakes.  Just saying.

I’ll admit that there’s a civil libertarian in me who wonders why someone would take it upon themselves to fret about anti-LGBT cake vendors, or even go looking for them for the sake of stirring up a controversy.  I just don’t see the point of wanting to give homophobes and transphobes a bunch of money.  But I get it: full enfranchisement hasn’t happened until a person can go about their business without having to worry about being blindsided by idiots trying to exclude them, just because of who they are.  And that’s why the trivial stuff matters.

But in the end, while the dust settles on Indiana’s religious freedom bill fiasco, and Canadian ideologues try to raise the issue to a national level, it’s important to look at the fallout.  Because as much as religious fundamentalists might try to pretend that they’re only interested in protecting their own freedoms and not harming others, the meltdowns that have occurred in the wake of the Indiana bill’s demise paint a different picture:

“It wasn’t broken and the alleged “fix” that the Indiana legislature, at your request, has proposed to the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), will destroy the law beyond all recognition. In fact, it will turn it into the “RFDA” – the “Religious Freedom Destruction Act.” No bill at all would have been better than this anti-Christian, sexual anarchist disaster.

“What was intended as a shield to every American’s First Amendment-guaranteed religious liberty, as proposed, will now become a sword used to destroy it. What was designed to defend people of faith against being discriminated against and bullied will, instead, codify anti-religious discrimination and bullying into law. It will unconstitutionally force people of faith, under penalty of law, to affirmatively violate their sincerely held religious conscience. It has been turned into a weapon that compels people of faith to disobey God or face government sanction.” — Matt Barber

Because the intent was clearly to discriminate.  And sometimes when anti-LGBT leaders think that only the faithful are listening, they’ll even candidly say so:

“Starting in the 1990s, the homosexual movement worked tirelessly, spending enormous funds, to get state and local governments to amend their anti-discrimination laws covering public accommodations, employment, housing, public education, etc., to include “sexual orientation.” In recent years there’s been a push to include “gender identity” (cross-dressing, transgenderism, transsexuality) also.

“There’s a big strategic reason for that. As Dr. Scott Lively has pointed out for years, these updated laws are the starting point for the whole, brutal legal jihad against Christians and others holding traditional values. Every outrage we’re now seeing — including the LGBT activism in the schools, targeting of businesses, men using women’s restrooms, sado-masochist/”swinger” conventions in hotels, etc. — emanates from these laws.

“But pro-family people have only recently started to wake up on this. They instinctively realize that citizens should be able to discriminate and refuse to promote or celebrate perversion and “gay”  marriage. But these anti-discrimination laws now make it a crime to do so…”

The fight for special rights to discriminate will continue — it’ll just change along the way.  It will persist because the will to discriminate persists:

“What should Christians and other believers do in the face of this heightening repression? They must go on the offensive—charitably but vigorously—and fight the battle on several levels… The lame discrimination complaints by homosexualist organizations against believers in human rights commissions and the pressuring of corporations to dump executives and employees who dissent at all from the homosexualist agenda should should be met consistently with lawsuits for abuse of process and defamation. That would put financial pressure on the well-heeled homosexualist organizations…” — Crisis Magazine & LifeSiteNews commentary.

So the strategizing continues.  In one American twist, anti-discrimination intervention is being said to be a violation of the separation of church and state.  In another, an organization that considers boycotts and letter-writing campaigns organized by LGBT groups to be “economic terrorism” is exercising its own boycotts and letter-writing campaigns against alleged “anti-Christian discrimination” — discrimination which apparently includes producing a TV show about the life of Dan Savage.  The hypocrisy is rampant, with the same groups that complain of being silenced having no qualms about censoring LGBT speakers or hounding them to leave their jobs with non-profit organizations.  In a moment of coinciding interest opportunism, American lobbyists and legislators are even hoping that religious freedom bills can be combined with the ruling in Hobby Lobby to grant companies the same sort of special rights:

“Georgia State Senator McKoon hopes that, if his bill passes next year, courts will find it covers companies as well as flesh-and-blood human beings, even if it doesn’t say so explicitly in the text. “I believe,” he says, “that the bill would be read as the federal bill was interpreted by the Hobby Lobby decision…”

It’s not going to drop off the Canadian radar anytime soon either, because the Supreme Court of Canada just ruled that reciting a denominational prayer at town council meetings infringes on the freedom of conscience and religion. The state, it determined, should neither favour nor hinder any particular belief, nor impose one on others.  Which, when viewed through the far-right lens means that the rival religion of secularism / atheism is persecuting Christians:

“In a sense, by prohibiting respectful, non-proselytizing, non-coercive prayer, the court is showing a clear preference to non-religious believers over religious believers, and gives an untenable status to secularism and atheism, which are themselves beliefs. So there is no balance and no reconciliation among various beliefs in this ruling but shows a preference for one belief – secularism – over all other beliefs,” Elia told LifeSiteNews.

“This is not an example of a true, authentic and robust pluralism,” Elia stressed. “In true pluralism, religious believers and non-believers can share the public square, but this decision means the public square can no longer be shared…” — LifeSiteNews.

So it becomes worth scrutinizing the recent events the Canadian delegation to Parliament pointed to as examples of attacks on religious freedoms in Canada:

• The decisions of a number of provincial bar associations not to accredit any potential law school graduate of Trinity Western University;
• The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario’s Professional Obligations and Human Rights policy, which ensures access to medical care for people seeking abortions, contraception or other accepted legal medical procedures; and
• A recent Statement of Support for Diversity and Inclusion signed by 72 major companies across Canada.

Because when we do so, we see that:

• The decision not to accredit Trinity Western University law school graduates was made because of TWU’s ban on sexual behaviour outside heterosexual marriage, which amounts to a creative way to shut out LGBT people;
• The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario’s policy in fact allows medical professionals to opt out of procedures and services that violate their religious beliefs, but they must still provide a referral to someone who will give accurate information about treatment or procedure options (which gets portrayed in far right media as forcing doctors to perform abortions); and
• Seriously, this is a statement that says “We value the range of perspectives, ideas and experiences that diversity provides, whether grounded in gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, cultural background, religion or age,” and says that the signatory businesses will “encourage greater diversity and inclusion.”

Underneath it all, the special right being sought is the right to create deliberate barriers for people whose sexuality they object to.  Even diversity policies are considered offensive:

“Gwen Landolt, a lawyer and national vice-president of Real Women of Canada, called BMO’s policy the “height of discrimination and intolerance.”

“Their position is shocking and appalling. They have applied political correctness to the absolute borderline of insanity,” she told LifeSiteNews…”

But don’t expect an equanimous approach to how “religious freedom” is interpreted.  At best, it is a selective thing:

Lunney’s defence of religious freedom does not extend to supporting the right of Muslim women to wear the niqab when being sworn in as citizens, however.

After initially avoiding the question, he eventually confirmed that he shares the views of his former party and the prime minister that those seeking to become Canadian citizens should show their faces.

“I’m not going to get tangled up in that argument,” he said.

In the end, of course, the “religious freedom” battle cry may end up amounting to nothing in the warmer social climate of Canada.  Hopefully, the general public will see it for what it is, without the benefit of a Mike Pence -like Premier to push the issue.

“Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall says the opening prayer at the province’s legislature will remain despite a recent Supreme Court ruling…”

But then again, who knows?

Sodom: Review of a Russian Anti-Gay Documentary

On Tuesday, October 28th, Peter LaBarbera re-entered Canada for an immigration hearing, then to speak at an anti-LGBT conference, and finally on Thursday to face charges for mischief (which stem from an arrest while distributing anti-LGBT leaflets at the University of Regina).

LaBarbera (nicknamed “Porno Pete” by bloggers because of his penchant for filming pride parades and gay BDSM events in the name of “research”) has returned to Canada at the invitation of Bill “Anal Warts” Whatcott (so nicknamed because of his fondness for distributing graphic depictions of anal cancers and other deliberate shock leaflets).LaBarbera was briefly detained, searched and questioned by Canada Border Services — or as American social conservatives call it, persecuted by “homofascists.” In the process, though, border services did seize a DVD copy of the Russian anti-LGBT documentary, Sodom.  As the film is available to view in English on YouTube, LaBarbera and Whatcott proceeded to show it at their conference, anyway.

Personally, I’m not a fan of censorship. I realize there has to be a limit to propriety, and not just when someone advocates for mass-murder.  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion didn’t actually call for Jews to be put to death, for example, but it created such an inflammatory environment that violence became inevitable.

But given that LGBT people are just as at risk of being silenced in the name of propriety (maybe even for giving people snarky nicknames), I’m still not keen on censorship. Part of the whole reason for LaBarbera’s visit is to strategize about how to bring about a Russian-style “gay propaganda” ban in Canada, after all.

So, I still prefer to let people speak freely, and once they’ve had enough rope, show people what they’ve done with it.  And in that vein, I bring you:

Sodom: The Review

And yes, it will be triggery.

Sodom first aired on Russia’s government-funded Rossiya-1 station in September.  It presents itself as a sensational expose* of the sinister gay rights plot to forcibly transform society into one that accepts any and all evil, while eradicating truth, freedom, religion and decency.

You might think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. Sodom was originally filmed and written for a Russian audience that had already been scared into an anti-LGBT frenzy resulting in incidents of violence noted worldwide.  This furor was accomplished by speakers like Scott Lively (who appears many times in the film), who conflated LGBT people with pedophiles, and claimed that the Nazi party started out as a gay plot.  Lively’s activism resulted in a ban on “gay propaganda,” which is essentially anything that can be seen as LGBT-positive (or perhaps even acknowledge their existence in a non-condemning way), in any environment where children might hear or see it.  In this context, Sodom is able to fearmonger unchallenged, and get away with all sorts of wild claims.  In Russia, the film received high ratings and was critically acclaimed.

But it’s a bit different for a Canadian audience: people who have coped with LGB(t) human rights for over a decade and lived with same-sex marriage since 2006 without descending into a stylish shock-troop cavalcade.  Canadians largely (with exceptions) didn’t mind having to coexist with LGBT people or do business with them in the past few years… although that’s starting to change now that Americans are framing it as a violation of principle that’s going to send them (and all society) to eternal damnation.

But belief is a powerful persuader, which can goad the faithful into ignoring all evidence and reason, in favour of conjectures, no matter how grand.  Although I refuse to dignify far right homophobia and transphobia as being a “Christian” perspective (because certainly not all Christians espouse it), it should be recognized that leaders like LaBarbera and Whatcott still manage to frame it as such, and that can have a strong influence on people who view it as their duty to believe.  Those people don’t have to question God if they don’t want to… but they should most certainly question the people who claim to be speaking for him.

I don’t speak Russian, so I can’t say how much of the English translation of Sodom was polished up for a Western audience.  I am under the impression that very little was changed, if anything.  Which is surprising, because if any film needed to sweep its extremes under the translation rug, it was this one.

Sodom’s producer, Arkady Mamontov, previously gained notice for implying that LGBT rights caused the Chelyabinsk meteorite explosion.  He hasn’t stopped seeing queer-caused calamities since then.  In Sodom, Mamontov makes several weird or inflammatory claims:

• LGBT people are repeatedly conflated with pedophiles within the film, and homosexuality is claimed to be inextricably interwoven with child molestation.  There is a suggestive undercurrent of this throughout the film, nudge-nudge-wink-wink, but at times, the narrator is also far more explicit.
• “Sodomites pay attention to mysticism and different symbols,” we are told.  With jump-cuts of historical artworks and occasional allusions to rites, the film tries to artfully connect LGBT people to devil worship without actually saying it out loud.  Because that is apparently seen by the filmmakers as the limit of believability.
• LGBT people are said to have conspired to rewrite the Bible, in order to make scripture accommodate them (rather than simply critically re-examining the clobber passages).  In the western world, apparently everyone who is lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans* (LGBT) owns a copy of the Queen James Bible.

Language is crucial in Sodom.  It’s quite clear that the film translators much prefer the term “sodomites” to describe LGBT people.  It ties into the title of the film, and is keyed to keep the focus on sex acts in the hope that doing so will make viewers uncomfortable or outraged.  Likewise, trans* people are referred to as “transvestites,” lesbians referred to as belonging “to a new sex tribe,” and when all else fails, “perverts” will suffice. The idea of “mama and mama” is made to seem puzzling, bizarre, disgusting and scandalous.

In the early scenes of the film, Scott Lively explains that Russia is at the first stage of gay activism: “Well, let me explain how this works.  There is a five-stage process of cultural conquest.  Five steps. It begins with a request for tolerance.  Once the gays have achieved tolerance — and tolerance is just the right to be left alone — then it’s a demand for acceptance, and acceptance means equal status.  Then comes celebration — that everyone must accept homosexuality and promote it as a good, valuable thing.  Then comes forced participation: everyone must participate in gay culture.  And then comes punishment of everyone who disagrees.”  LGBT people must not be even tolerated, he argues, because that’s the first step that leads to everything else.

“The average American is not in favor of homosexuality,” Lively claims.  “But they are afraid to speak publicly about it, because the gays have so much power and they can do harm to those people.  Most people are vulnerable to some sort of intimidation, especially if they are in any position of influence, or in the media spotlight.”  Lively welcomes the initial nod of an agreeing taxi driver as evidence… though the driver later seems to change his mind and want to be left out of the discussion (“no, no”) but is creatively edited to appear as though he’s simply gesticulating.  Moments later, in front of the office building occupied by the LGBT establishment organization, Human Rights Campaign, Lively says “they are trying to declare that homosexuality is a human right. And they’re devoting massive amounts of money to promoting this agenda around the world, instead of addressing genuine human rights.”  The HRC is apparently such a monolithic fundraiser that poor, underfunded churches can’t keep up the opposition.

Next, the film makes a stop at London’s Tavistock Institute of Human Intelligence, which during World War II was exploring “new methods of psychological war, not only against fascist Germany, but also the Soviet Union.”  Tavistock is said to have conspired with the CIA to create the MKULTRA project, for the purpose of manipulating people.  While Canadians may see this as an aside, to a Russian audience, the suggestion is planted that England is still engaging in psychological warfare against them today.  Naturally, the producers find someone “who knows a lot about this” apparently super-secretive institution, Daniel Estulin, who claims that the Tavistock Institute “is the place which created and later imposed on the consciousness of European youth such cultural accents as ‘free love,’ orgy, and civil marriage.”

MKULTRA did indeed experiment with hypnosis, behaviour modification, physical and sexual abuse, LSD, and sensory deprivation.  There have also long been claims that Tavistock contributed to the program.  But in Estulin’s estimation, MKULTRA was really a “fifty- or hundred-year plan” to normalize homosexuality and sexual liberation, “literally to change the paradigm of modern society.”  The film also alleges that “the psychological components of the Ukrainian Revolution — chants, behaviour models, slogans — were also created here.” Estulin cautions that the endgame is “genetic manipulation to eliminate memory,” and warns that after lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trans* people are accorded equality, “… then you can have transhuman.  You can have post-human.  You can have man-machines, such as the Terminator.  You can have cyborgs.  You can have beings that are not totally human as a result of synthetic biology, because today you can literally create a human being in a laboratory.” And frighteningly enough, I guess, they might all want human rights.

The filmmakers also pay a trip to The Fertility Institutes in Los Angeles, where the segment opens with the clinic doctor bragging that they’ve become world-famous for being able to choose a boy or a girl.  Here, they examine LGBT parenting by taking viewers through the clinical process of in-vitro fertilization, complete with ominous music, in a way that is meant to create a chill over the cold sterility of the process.  They make repetitive claims that gays always want boys and lesbians always want girls (and of course, there could be no alternate explanation for that, nudge-nudge-wink-wink): “Green is genetic disorders, like Down’s Syndrome, or they have a genetic problem. Okay? But most of them have boys and girls.  The male gays want boys, and the female gays want girls,” the clinician generalizes with a large grin that is lingered on, suggestively.

There is ample film time spent on Pride parades, as the film editors cut in every example of nudity or garish costumes that they can find, interspersed with footage of kids and teens in attendance.  BDSM folks turn up frequently, and some of the footage looks like it actually comes from the Folsom Street Fair, in a way that makes one wonder if Porno Peter LaBarbera was behind the camera (alas, I can’t find the film credits, or I’d check).  “Aren’t you afraid your child would want to become like them?” The narrator asks one parade onlooker, being careful to stay within the perception of choice and whim, and avoid any thought that sexuality could be something intrinsic and individually-rooted.  “Naw,” is the reply, “we actually want to encourage him to see everything, everything in the world…”

“Sodomites unconsciously understand that what they are doing is wrong,” the narrator assures us, as the camera searches the crowd for any expressions that could seem sad, scared, or otherwise negative.  “However, on the surface, everyone makes an effort to express joy,” he adds, coming up short of appropriate footage and needing an explanation.  Then, they do their level best to depict children of LGBT people as unhappy, ashamed or even terrorized… rather than simply intimidated by being in a large crowd with so much activity taking place.  “The child’s soul feels that everything around them contradicts nature’s law.”

Surrogacy is the next focus of attention.  Remember that Russia is currently debating banning out-of-country adoptions and / or adoptions by LGBT parents.  “Where there is no woman,” the narrator asserts, “there is no continuation of life.  But sodomites try to bypass the laws of nature.  Large sums of money are spent on exactly this: mother-mother, father father.”  At this point in the film, IVF and surrogacy are both portrayed as human trafficking.  “The sodomites have paid for and received living goods for their money.”  The film returns to the assertion that gay parents want only boys, and lesbians want only girls: “for what?  Perverted acts?”  Naturally, a pair of men in New Zealand that subjected their adopted child to heinous abuse and were convicted of molestation are now given ample screen time, and portrayed as evidence that this is the norm.  They allege by extension that all children of LGBT parents are brainwashed into covering up abuse and “to think that this sort of behaviour was acceptable.”  The surrogate mother in this case had been Russian: the intended lesson is clearly that western LGBT people are taking advantage of Russian mothers to provide exploitable children through adoption.  IVF is even framed as a genocide in which one child is created but many others are destroyed.  “It’s an unnatural process.”

Sodom also takes aim at a lawsuit against a florist, Baronelle Stutzman, who refused to sell flowers to an LGBT couple.  Because of the gay mens’ intolerance and ignorance, we are told, Stutzman is likely to lose her house and her business.  Viewers are manipulated into tears and rage at the thought that the special right to have equal access to goods and services has trumped the perfectly ordinary, everyday, sensible right to deny someone else exactly those things.  “But why are the rights of all the other people violated in the light of the first?” the narrator later asks.

There is an undercurrent of discussion about neocolonialism that infuses the film — or more honestly, one that hijacks the discussion of neocolonialism.  There are plenty of examples of anti-LGBT conferences and meetings with religious and political leaders by people like Scott Lively, and it is actually American groups’ homophobia that has been trying to change Asian, European and African nations through fearmongering and lobbying.  But the film reverses this so that the American government is portrayed as deliberately promoting homosexuality around the planet, “as plague, as cancer.”  Yet corporate globalization, militaristic interference, and widespread espionage are not identified as colonial problems… only homosexuality.  One Moldovan political leader relates how his attempts to ban a pride parade resulted in a stern talking-to from an American-connected diplomat.  How fascist.

Later in the film, prison rape takes centre stage, with abuses in Gldanskaya (a Georgian prison) that are claimed to have been directed by an American puppet dictator and inspired by Abu Ghraib.  The abuses are portrayed as a deliberate attempt to spread homosexuality through non-consensual torture.  “There was one goal: to break, diminish and humiliate.”  They later add, “the same thing awaits people who aren’t accordant with the regime in Ukraine.  The pro-American regime will use the same methods in jails and prisons.  There are currently thousands imprisoned from Kiev to Odessa, and only God knows what is being done to them.”

As the film winds to its conclusion, it presents Russia’s law banning “gay propaganda” as the solution, warning that any insufficiently condemning representation of LGBT people is dangerous.  Father Mikhail, prior of the Saint Georgiy temple in Tblisi explains: “Everything begins with a harmless character in a movie or a sitcom.  This man is obviously homosexual, but he is funny, witty, and then it stops.  He disappears.  Then another film, then a few more.  It’s like a poison in small doses.  It won’t do anything to you right away.  But with time it gets bigger and stronger, and the tolerance of the system weakens, accepting it more and more each time.”  It underscores Father Mikhail’s point with visions of HIV and gay BDSM.  “Russia occupies one of the leading positions” in restoring order, the narrator says.  “The law banning gay propaganda, a return to traditional values, and the strengthening of the faith of the nation… all this postpones the end of times.”

What separates Sodom from something like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (aside from the choice of minority group that is targeted) in a place like Canada is the context.  Here, everyone has a friend, or a family member, or a co-worker who is gay or lesbian, or bisexual, or trans*.  There is a familiarity that is comfortable.  There are certainly people who are closed-minded to LGBT rights, or are susceptible to a feeling of culture shock at social change, or don’t know (or don’t care to know) any of the issues LGBT people face… but for the most part, Canadians recognize people as people, and don’t feel all that threatened when those people fail to adhere to rigid cultural hegemonic expectations.

The situation is far different in Russia.  Fewer people know LGBT persons, and with the “gay propaganda” law and potential for violence driving them further into the closet, the next generation is far less likely to have any familiarity with them.  In this environment, Sodom is a tinderbox, ready to ignite.  In this context, Sodom cannot help but trigger violence and rage.  There isn’t even the usual lip service to loving the sinner but hating the sin.

LaBarbera and Scott Lively have formed the Coalition for Family Values specifically for the purpose of bringing Russia-inspired laws banning gay “propaganda” to western nations:

“The Coalition for Family Values will be encouraging our current and future affiliates throughout the world to lobby their own governments to follow the Russian example. While the LGBT agenda has seemed like an unstoppable political juggernaut in North America and Europe, the vast majority of the people of the world do not accept the notion that sexual deviance should be normalized. It is time that these voices are heard on the world stage before the so-called elites of the Western powers impose their inverted morality on everyone through the manipulation of international law, which they clearly intend to do…”

And that starts with eliminating LGBT-positive portrayals and human rights protections.  But they’ll have the public believe that they are the true victims of a colonial and fascist agenda.

So now you know.

(Crossposted to Rabble.ca and The Bilerico Project)

REAL Women of Canada, and the naked far-right truth.

¹⁵ “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.
¹⁶ You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles?
¹⁷ Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.
¹⁸ A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.
¹⁹ Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
²⁰ Therefore by their fruits you will know them.
— Matthew 7:15 – 20

Gwen Landolt, of R.E.A.L. Women of Canada (RWoC), has drawn fire for a press release she sent out last week, in which she condemned Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird’s support for the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people in highly oppressive nations like Uganda and Russia.  Landolt takes issue with government agencies advocating for their safety both publicly and behind the scenes.

What her action has really done, though, was to expose the naked truth about the attitudes held by some of the leaders and spokespeople of some of Canada’s far-right organizations, and the depths of their intolerance.

What remains to be seen is whether Canadians will sit up and take notice of what has in fact been a growing trend.

The press release criticizes Baird for “[abusing] his position as a cabinet minister to impose his own special interests in the foreign countries of Uganda, Kenya and Russia,” saying:

“He awarded $200,000 of Canadian taxpayers’ money by way of the Department of Foreign Affairs to special interest groups in Uganda and Kenya to further his own perspective on homosexuality.  He also insulted the speaker of the Ugandan Parliament, Rebecca Kadaga, at a meeting of the International Parliamentary Union in Quebec City when he criticized Uganda for its position on homosexuality and same-sex marriage…

“Last week, Baird admitted working extensively behind the scenes to prevent Russia from passing legislation designated to protect Russian minors from homosexual propaganda.  Baird blasted these laws as hateful, anti-gay and intolerant.  Russia has also restricted foreign adoption of Russian children after incidents of horrendous child abuse; for example, adoptive “fathers” in Australia together with other men, sexually abused a 6 year old boy, starting at 22 months of age, born of a Russian surrogate mother…”

“Pro-Life” Apparently has an Exception

What Landolt is deliberately omitting is the fact that the attention being paid to Uganda specifically has to do with its Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which had at its genesis included a death penalty for homosexuality.  While this death penalty may or may not still be in the bill (which is awaiting reintroduction and being kept somewhat secret, at the moment), homosexuality is already criminalized in Uganda with sentences of up to 14 years in prison, and the bill would add several alarming new dimensions, including:

• A definition of “homosexuality” which is so vague that almost anyone could be convicted of it;
• A definition of “aggravated homosexuality” which is overly-broad, and includes “serial” offences.  If the death sentence remains in the bill, then aggravated homosexuality is the charge to which it would apply;
• A weird “intent to commit” clause that could open any physical contact to interpretation;
• A financial incentive for people to accuse others of trying to seduce them;
• The targeting of friends, family and landowners for aiding / abetting LGBT people, for failing to report LGBT people, and for renting a room to LGBT people;
• The criminalization of advocacy for or even defending an LGBT person, with a sentence of 5 – 7 years (criminalization of LGBT advocacy has also been an objective in recent bills proposed in Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among others); and
• The criminalization of anyone who fails to report in under 24 hours anyone who is gay, who witnessed a same-sex wedding (it’s unclear if said wedding had to occur in Uganda), who rents a room to a gay person, and more, with a sentence of up to 3 years.

Landolt’s characterization of Russia’s “homosexual propaganda” bill is no better.  She repeats the Russian claim that the bill is to protect minors, even though the law applies to virtually any positive portrayal of LGBT people, and in any public or Internet space.  Emboldened by the passage of the legislation and the sentiment surrounding it, violence and predation has surged dramatically.

More importantly, Gwen Landolt demonstrated that she is aware of the facts she is omitting… and doesn’t care.  In an interview with CBC, she made a weird argument that a human rights issue isn’t a human rights issue if the nation in which it is occurring doesn’t consider it to be a human rights issue.  And then, she went further:

When asked about reports that Uganda has considered the death penalty as punishment for having homosexual relations, Landolt said, “It may be unwise by Western standards, but who are we to interfere in a sovereign country?”

A Far Right Group Implodes

This was too much for even Canada’s ideological right, drawing criticism from Barbara Kay, of the National Post, who said that Landolt “set at an unbridgeable distance well-wishers and occasional collaborators,” herself included:

Does  she realize the implications of what she has said? And from whose moral-relativist playbook she has drawn this leaf?

… If Ms. Landolt believes it is justifiable to ignore the persecution of people whose beliefs or behaviours she is unsympathetic to, as long as it is happening elsewhere, she has lost the moral authority to criticize persecution in other countries of those whose beliefs and behaviours she *is* sympathetic to.

Kay closed by speculating that R.E.A.L. Women of Canada “may just have imploded,” while other conservative writers are dismissively writing off RWoC with characterizations like “a housewives’ advocacy group that’s view of women was frozen in time around 1958.”

R.E.A.L. Women of Canada presents itself as “one of Canada’s leading women’s organizations,” but has for decades has been directly opposed to feminism and womens’ issues that they find theologically offensive, such as abortion, contraception, sex work, affirmative action and even unions (which have driven several of the gains that women have made in the workplace).  RWoC also has a reputation for trying to stymie international initiatives to better the lives of women, if those initiatives include reproductive rights (i.e. contraception), LGBT rights, feminist objectives and more.  They have acted as legal interveners on nearly every major social issue that has come before Canadian high courts, including a 1993 attempt to prohibit abortion, the 1999 ruling that gave same-sex couples the same legal and economic rights as opposite-sex couples, the legal battle over whether spanking was child abuse, a court decision on whether safe injection sites could be legalized, a few different cases where they attempted to establish legal personhood for the foetus, and the Supreme Court’s hearing on the sex work.  Gwen Landolt is famous for apologizing to the world on Canada’s behalf when Canada legalized same-sex marriage, and earlier this year, R.E.A.L. Women of Canada claimed that extending human rights protections to trans people was a plot to normalize pedophilia.

It remains to be seen if the group’s special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations will be affected by Landolt’s antics.

Fringe ≠ Alone

Gwen Landolt’s devil-may-care attitude is far from unique among the Canadian far right.  (And it is at this point that I need to clarify why I use the phrase “far right” so much, and “Christian” not at all.  Although many of the ideological far right phrase their perspective as being Christian, it is not truly representative of Christian faiths, at least a few of whom are LGBT-affirming.  I believe it’s important to make that distinction for many reasons, including the fact that this clarification dispels the belief that there is an inherent and irreconcilable conflict between LGBT human rights and religious freedom).

Indeed, it takes little time to find other far-right figures sharing similar perspectives.

RWoC’s frequent collaborator, LifeSiteNews (the media arm of Campaign Life Coalition), has lauded Nigeria for its anti-LGBT legislative proposals, and also applauded Uganda’s refusal to bow to pressure to drop the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, in 2009.  They later softened the stance on Uganda’s bill, but continue to collaborate with an organization singled out as one of three key groups fomenting anti-gay hatred in Africa.  LSN and C-FAM have also portrayed Russia’s anti-gay law as one of protecting children from the promotion of “deviant sexual behaviors,” saying that the suggestion that the law is a form of discrimination “appears to be more hyperbole than anything else.” LSN even recently attacked American televangelist Pat Robertson for not being extreme enough.  Naturally, the website has also posted a more-or-less one-sided article echoing Gwen Landolt’s sentiments, and posting the Prime Minister’s office information so that readers can flood him with same.

Although less known, Ron Gray, RoadKill Radio host and former leader of the Christian Heritage Party, also touted Russia’s anti-gay law as something that Canada should strive for, adding (barely a minute into the video):

“People who take children to watch a gay pride parade, for example, or in any way put such propaganda on innocent children are in my mind actually guilty of child abuse.  And that goes for teachers, politicians, and media types who tell children the lie that homosexuality is praiseworthy…”

RKR has also campaigned against LGBT-inclusive anti-bullying education, networked with Scott Lively (an architect of both Uganda’s and Russia’s infamous laws), and has also been guilty of obscuring facts about Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill.

When Was the Last Time an American Conservative Wanted to Emulate Russia?

Gwen Landolt’s comments also come at a time when American far right groups are trumpeting Russia’s law in similar fashion, and encouraging developing something similar on this continent, such as this declaration from a National Organization for Marriage spokesman:

With the battle for the family waging across this nation, instead of condemning a sovereign nation for its laws we need to be changing ours. The family unit is under attack and we must stand against those who want to redefine and destroy it. The family is the foundation of a society and the glue that holds it together. I applaud the Russians for taking a stand for children!

The day may be coming soon in which Canadians will need to decide whether these things are truly representative of the Christian perspective, or whether “Christian” is being exploited as an excuse to hate.

While it is tempting to dismiss Gwen Landolt and R.E.A.L. Women of Canada as being “fringe,” it’s important to realize that their ambivalence toward the lives and well-being of LGBT people is not occurring in a vacuum.  It’s also important to know that given the group’s seeming ability to regularly circumvent Parliamentary process so that they can be added on to committee and Senatorial meetings (as happened on at least two occasions with the recent trans human rights bill C-279), it has not been without its influence.  Indeed, the press release was just starting to appear on news sites’ front pages, when senior Foreign Affairs officials already met with RWoC representatives to hear their grievances.  “Fringe” isn’t supposed to have government departments on speed dial.

They Hypocrisy of Crying Colonialism

And what’s more, Canada’s ideological far right seems to be unable to recognize that these attitudes are indeed hateful, and out-of-step with Canadians.  Instead, Landolt says:

Mr. Baird’s actions are highly offensive to conservative taxpayers.  He cannot and must not undermine other countries’ sovereignty and dignity, rooted in stable family structures and religious faith, in order to impose his own value system on them.

Incidentally, Landolt’s discussion of sovereignty and accusation of colonialism is curious, in that this tactic is the means by which American Evangelicals and Fundamentalists have successfully swayed discussion in many African nations.  Given that many countries on that continent suffered under colonial rule and are still relatively recent to sovereign status, it is an accusation that resonates with many African peoples, who still desire to resist western influence and remain self-determining.

Ironically, the tactic is being used to deflect attention from the fact that those same Evangelicals and Fundamentalists are attempting to export their homophobia to Africa, a continent where anti-gay sentiment and rhetoric was not previously of any significance.

And if RWoC is aware of and careful to use similar talking points, then it’s safe to say that their — and Landolt’s — attitudes have not developed in a vacuum.

“Sex by deception” and the shades of yes

A series of recent rulings (and the media circuses that have accompanied them) in the UK has raised questions about what is being termed “sex by deception” — that is, instances where people who are possibly trans are said to lie about their gender, in order to seduce another person.  In these cases, it’s often unclear whether the person in question is trans or if the gender representation is for other reasons, due to media ignoring questions of self-identification, using mixed pronouns and sensationally portraying people with phrases like “sex fraud woman who posed as a boy to seduce a girl.”  Even after a legal ruling is given, it’s still unclear in many of these instances who the defendant is, and how they identify — which at post-trial stage is an indictment of both media reporting and judicial clarity.

There have already been some previous thoughts expressed on the most recent ruling by Zoe O’Connell (who sifted through the legal text), Jane Fae, and others, and because of the near impossibility to determine what actually happened from a distance, I won’t even try to touch on any of the specifics of any of the specific cases.  I’ll be sticking to generalities only.

There are two key questions at the heart of the discussion.  The first is whether or not one’s gender identity is deception.  Obviously, I don’t believe that’s the case, and at this point in time, most people who have investigated trans phenomena have come to realize that it is deep and integral in at least some way, and far more substantive than what was previously commonly believed by the public at large.  And because this discussion has a question of validation at its root, it can be a very hot-button issue for trans people.

Gender vs. Sex

However, there is also a difference between one’s gender, which is an outward expression and socially constructed to a significant degree, and one’s physical sex.  In illustration, transsexed people typically transition between sexes to be true to themselves, while various other and often overlapping trans people live between genders or defy them in some way (that is to say, there are a couple sometimes differing but not mutually exclusive narratives that make up “trans*”).

When discussing whether deception takes place, there is sometimes a language breakdown that happens because one person is thinking about what a person’s gender identity is, while another is thinking about their genitalia.  For example, as someone who transitioned, I view the years before transition, when I was trying to pass as a man to meet others’ expectations, and trying to conform to my pre-transition body as the period of my life closest to being a “deception,” given that I had been consciously been putting on an act (24/7) during that period of my life.

But the other key question at the heart of things is the nature of consent.  And that is why my own thoughts on this are a bit more complex and nuanced.

Consent

Before I came out and started transition, there were very few safe spaces for trans people, where I could interact with people without fear and hiding.  One was the BDSM community, which has a strict and very discerning stance on what constitutes consent.

Note: it’s always nebulous to call something “the _____ perspective,” and individual opinions and nuances may vary, but this is a general consensus as I learned it: consent by kink standards should come from people who are of the age of majority (legal reasons), without coercion, influence, imbalance or obligation (mixed legal and ethical reasons), and with clear prior communication by both parties about what is being consented to (ethical reasons).  [It may seem odd to some readers, but it actually is possible to resolve social justice perspectives with the power exchange that happens in BDSM — it is a major detour from this subject, however, so I’ll simply be focusing on consent here, and hope that this discussion simply helps to illustrate this point]

It’s a level of consent that many heteronormative couples don’t strive for or even think about. That standard can call into question consent that is given because one feels that it’s their marital duty. It certainly calls into question sex while intoxicated, or where there is an obviously disparate question of power / authority to manipulate, or many other situations in which someone makes an exception to engage in a sex act that they otherwise wouldn’t normally consent to.  The starstruck “he’s not my type, but oh gosh, he’s the President” rationale could raise questions about ethical consent, in some kink circles.

So having sex and failing to disclose one’s sex certainly enters a grey area when this standard of consent is applied. Note that I didn’t say that consent is automatically invalidated.

Legal vs. Ethical

When I started talking about kink perspectives on consent, I brought up a blend of legal and ethical considerations.  It’s important to recognize that whether something is ethical can be an entirely different question from whether it is legal.

It is usually legal, for example, to deceive a partner about one’s marital status, age, past history (including legal convictions), sexual orientation, medical and mental health (including lying about having had a vasectomy, a deception that can result in pregnancy), religious affiliation, wealth / connections, and – heh – prowess.  Some of them are much more serious than others.  Many of them are not typically interpreted in general society to automatically invalidate consent on a legal level, although there may be contexts where legalities are questionable.  And although some cause harm, privacy is often seen as more important in a legal context, depending on how much harm is involved. None of those are very ethical on the surface, but they rarely become legal questions, unless there are extenuating circumstances — such as if the person consenting is under the age of majority, if the person becomes pregnant, and / or if the person initiates lies about being in their peer group.  That’s because law prefers to deal with absolutes, and many of these questions are context-dependent.

Failure to disclose HIV status is a bit more difficult, although it is still not an apt comparison to non-disclosure of trans status: there is no possibility of developing lifelong consequences just because a partner is trans. Either way, people with HIV can be (and most often are) responsible, and take ethical steps to avoid passing the virus on.  The U.K. — where the specific legal cases that started this debate have taken place — recognizes this in law, and doesn’t automatically determine HIV status to invalidate consent.

Gender panic, on the other hand, is seen as the sole exception.

[Edit: okay, possibly next-to-sole exception.  I nearly forgot that Britain has another unusual precedent in R. v Brown, in which the House of Lords ruled that people cannot legally consent to violence, except through legal activities (i.e. surgery).  There have since been rulings that lesser forms of pain — such as branding — can be consented to, but it’s unclear if these rulings overturn R. v Brown.  Either way, the possible existence of a second exception where consent is automatically invalidated changes this context only slightly.]

Shades of Yes

In issues of both legal and ethical consent, there are varying degrees that have to be recognized.  Legal discussions most often parse consent by verbalization:

• express,
• deemed, or
• implied consent.

And if one of those are met, then the question becomes whether that consent was revoked, or if there was a context-sensitive circumstance which would reasonably invalidate that consent.

Ethical discussions parse consent by the motivation of the person who consents:

1. fully mutual (where both partners are fully empowered and participating for mutual pleasure – the obvious ideal),
2. generous (in which one sees neither pleasure nor betterment in the experience, but is not in a position of disempowerment, and participates solely out of a desire to fulfill another),
3. transactive (a situation in which someone might consent to sex in order to advance their finances or position, but is not significantly from a perspective of disempowerment — can include some sex work, depending if it’s engaged in more from a perspective of opportunity than of necessity),
4. survival-motivated (a situation that is transactive, but comes from deeper marginalization, and will likely only maintain that disempowered status quo — sex work can also be included here, such as the most commonly thought-of survival sex work),
5. impaired (drugs, alcohol, and it’s also arguably possible to include things like crappy self-image, when it’s inferred by the consenter rather than exploited by their partner),
6. inadequately communicated (as in deception by omission or unintended deception),
7. obligated (a person is a bit more under another’s power; fulfilling one’s “wifely duty” might fall in this category if there are profound negative elements being endured in the process),
8. coerced / by willful deception, or
9. forced.

Each of us will draw the dividing line between ethical and unethical consent differently, and sometimes with weird jumps (i.e. heteronormative couples might see obligation as a perfectly fine motivation, but transactive sex not).  I’ve ranked them based on how much autonomy the person consenting retains, and the degree of equal power between partners during the negotiation (which can be different from the power exchange afterward — this is drawing from the BDSM principle, after all).

As much as consent can be divided up and rated, of course, “no” is still “no.”  What this is designed to do is give some clearer ideas about when “yes” actually should be considered “no,” or at least be reassessed.

Legal Exceptionalism

Legally speaking, there is an instance in which I could see consent being legally invalidated, or at least where the question would become very murky: if the trans individual bared their genitals and expected their partner to interact with them, without it having been previously discussed.  In the incidents in the U.K. that sparked this discussion — including the most recent precedent-setting one — that did not happen.  The discovery of the person’s trans status did not happen until some time after the sex.

Given this, we’re allowed to be all over the map on where we think this question falls ethically, but we have to recognize that on a legal level, this is pure trans exceptionalism.  With the number of things that aren’t automatically considered deception and don’t instantly invalidate consent, it is pure gender exceptionalism — fuelled by a combination of homophobia, transphobia and possibly also misogyny — behind the decisions to convict.  British courts have been setting precedents that are very different than the conclusions I’d come to, certainly.

The U.K. precedent also sets up a legal question as to whether a trans person is always automatically defined by their genitalia (or even by their genital history), rather than their gender identity.  In a way, the precedent implies that in the eyes of the court, trans people are committing fraud, just by existing.

There’s also a greater concern.  There has often been an apparent vindictiveness evident in the media coverage surrounding some of the “sex by deception” cases — often driven by family members, but also incentivized by the profitability of sensationalism.  Given that transphobic animus can often stop at nothing (including lying) to hurt and demonize, does this precedent then put the burden of proof on the trans person to demonstrate that they had disclosed their trans status?  And if so, does this create an opportunity for transphobes to exploit the criminal justice system to punish people they find morally objectionable?

How does one prove that they disclosed to a partner that they’re trans, in a one-said / other-said scenario? Given that judgments in these cases often go to whoever is deemed more believable and about whom fewer aspersions have been cast, this opens up a whole lot of legal vulnerability.

At this point, it’s worth saying something about post-act regret.  The trans panic defense and the deception claim may even be related at times, and parcel to something I have seen happen: the after-the-fact change of mind, regret, guilt and homophobia that can set in after a consensual sexual encounter, which sometimes then get turned against their playmate in the form of violence and retribution.  The person suddenly blames a trans individual for “trying to make them gay,” and is overwhelmed with guilt for having enjoyed a sexual encounter.  I’ve experienced being on the receiving side of that, though luckily not as seriously as others have.  If the legal system provides a new form of retribution for post-act regret, then trans people have become subject to a new kind of violence.

In any case, the legal question has become seriously complicated in the U.K.

Ethical Questions

Regarding whether there is an ethical imperative to disclose, with the distinctions above to ground us, we have to ask a few questions.

What are the hardships of disclosure?  At what moment is a trans person supposed to disclose?

The reality is that disclosure is often far more negatively consequential to a trans person than a cis partner: trans people are often subject to hate and even brutality for being open about being trans or having a trans history.  There is never a good moment to disclose.  There may not even be a consistently ideal time to, since context changes everything.  Individual value judgments also factor into the question.

What if it is the cis person who initiates discussion, with hopes of leading toward sex? What if the discussion happens in a public area, with a reasonable expectation of harm if one discloses? What if the cis person is pushy or even coercive?

How much right to privacy should one have from an intimate partner, and are there circumstances when privacy might take precedence?

Who has to disclose?  If the sexually-active person in question is post-operative, is there still an obligation to disclose a trans history?

What if the person is pre-transition and they’re still struggling with it and in self-denial?  (One of the jarring questions couples face when one partner comes out as trans is why it wasn’t disclosed sooner:  often, this dredges up an extended timeline of when the person knew they were different, when they decided to try to live according to the dictates of their body and birth assignment, when they came to self-acceptance, when they realized they would someday need to transition, and when they finally came out.)

What if the sex in question doesn’t involve a partner’s penis or vagina? If the person in question is providing oral sex and their pants stay on, does it really matter what’s in their trousers?  Is there a value judgment to be made between a one-night stand and a reasonable expectation of a longer-term sexual relationship?

Does having genitalia contrary to what is believed (or assumed) substantively change the act of sex? Does it necessarily change a person’s sexual orientation? How does one define or quantify the harm?

Open-Ended As It Should Be?

There are dozens of questions that affect the question of ethical consent.  I’m not going to have any one single answer for that would apply in absolutely every situation… nor do I think that it’s possible to have any absolute one-size-fits-all rule.

But I do want people to understand the complexities, and how that question differs from the one of legal consent.

Doing something about anti-gay lobbying in Africa

If you’ve frequented any LGBT media at all, you’ve heard about Uganda’s proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill (often referred to as the “Kill the Gays Bill”), and possibly other anti-gay legislative bills that have been debated in African nations.  Perhaps you’ve signed on to petitions directed to various governments to urge them to put pressure on those nations to drop this type of legislation.

And if you’ve been paying close attention, you’ll have seen that when governments do put the pressure on nations like Uganda, often the situation for LGBT Africans becomes worse, with political leaders vowing to enact extreme punitive laws at the earliest opportunity, and the public hatred surging and escalating further.  This has caused LGBT people in Uganda to ask for concerned folks to avoid media and public admonitions, and avoid threats to cut aid, or to avoid tying aid to human rights.

The current approach has enabled anti-gay lobby groups to spin our concern into a perceived colonial will to impose homosexuality on Africa.  In reality, of course, it’s these neo-conservative groups who wish to import their homophobic version of morality on the Ugandan peoples, but when this becomes a pressure-on-nation scenario, it still gives the appearance of validity to claims of colonialism.  Uganda and several other African nations have long histories of suffering under the will of other nations, so this proves to be a powerful and effective point of deflection and deception.

But for those of us in North America who are concerned for LGBT people around the world, this creates a quandary.  We care for the safety and well-being of our sisters, brothers and everyone in between.  We want to do something.

It turns out that we can.  Although it’s best to leave the situation in Uganda and elsewhere to citizens of those nations, we can take the battle to western organizations that are exporting hate.  In the early days of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, we understood this, and challenged people like Rick Warren (successfully) to cut ties with anti-gay agitators, and exposed the full extent of the hateful agendas of others, like Scott Lively.  This, we can still do.  Rather than appearing to impose our will on Africa, we are combating the genuine attempts of neo-conservative groups to impose theirs.

Last week, I posted one such challenge, calling on LifeSiteNews to explain its extensive partnership with Human Life International, one of the groups identified in Colonizing African Values – How the U.S. Christian Right is Transforming Sexual Politics in Africa as being a key anti-gay lobby group in Africa (along with the American Center for Law and Justice, a part of Pat Robertson’s extensive ministries).  To that end, I ask that people sign onto the petition at Avaaz to push LSN for a reply.  I also ask that people encourage their friends to do the same.

This is not the only campaign of the sort that can be launched, of course.

This morning, Canadian publications are reporting that a Canadian group which listed homosexuality, lesbianism and “transvestitism” as “sexual sins” it considered to be “perversion” has been receiving funding from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) for work in Uganda.  It is not yet known if Crossroads Christian Communications (a televangelist empire which grew out of the program 100 Huntley Street) has used any of the $544,813 in funding it has received for anti-gay lobbying or even if the group has taken a position on the bill at all — the grant was intended to dig latrines and promote hygiene.  But questions are being asked.  [This report follows on the heels of a January report in Quebec media that indicated CIDA funding of theological aid groups grew by 42% since the Harper Conservatives came to power in 2005, while non-religious groups working internationally saw their funding stagnate (details will be released in the spring edition of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies).]

And on Thursday, February 7th, President Obama spoke at the 61st annual National Prayer Breakfast, sponsored by the Fellowship Foundation, a.k.a. “The Family,” another group involved in funding and supporting anti-gay hatred and lobbying.  GetEQUAL condemned the President’s attendance:

“We’d like to see the President stop coming to events that are sponsored by people who are trying to kill and imprison us,” said Cathy Kristofferson, co-lead organizer with GetEQUAL Massachusetts and active supporter of LGBT Ugandans. “We’re disappointed that the president is sending mixed messages to our youth and to our friends abroad, by giving supportive speeches one day and then supporting those who was to murder us four days later.”

Challenge the groups involved in anti-gay lobbying in Africa.  Challenge those who fund, support and cheer them on.  Challenge those who would lend their presence and prestige to these groups, even if some of them are our allies.  The connection to anti-gay lobbying in Africa needs to be called out, shamed, defunded and isolated.

This, we can do.

(The previous Open Letter to LSN and the petition.  Know of similar efforts?  Let me know!  Crossposted to The Bilerico Project)

Violence is almost never an acceptable response. Neither is rationalizing it.

In August 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins entered the Family Research Council (FRC) headquarters and opened fire, injuring a security guard as he was tackled — fortunately, before he could cause any more damage.

Periodically, I see people who I otherwise respect trying to dismiss the incident as insignificant, or even making excuses for Corkins.

Violence is not an acceptable response to hate.  I’ll add the caveat “unless someone is in direct danger.” I believe in the right to self-defense and accept that there could be extreme situations that preclude using the word “never,” i.e. mass criminalization and mob violence.  But that was not the case here and is besides the point.  Floyd Lee Corkins deliberately chose to seek out the FRC with the intent of killing people.  I blame the idiot with the gun.  Whether a right-wing nut or a left-wing nut, violence is not an acceptable response to hate.

When we try to rationalize actions like Corkins’ — even when we’re not completely serious and just using hyperbole — we are (consciously or unconsciously) creating an environment in which violence is seen as an acceptable response.  It isn’t.

Further, rationalizations have a tendency to lead toward absurdity.  The most vivid example of this is the contention that if a woman is raped, she should be held at least partly responsible if she wore a particularly short skirt. Selecting clothes is not an act of consent, and yet increasingly, this rationalization is used to minimize or even absolve sexual violence.  Rationalization of aggression needs to be called out, no matter who is doing it.

“Well, if they’re going to be that way, they’re going to have to expect that people aren’t going to like it.”

And it is not that long ago that being lesbian or gay was rationalized as reason enough to expect to be targeted for violence.  It is still seen that way for trans people.

Instead, be the change you wish to see.

If we are to condemn victim-blaming and rationalizations of hate and violence, then we also need to practice the alternative we expect others to live up to… even if the victim in a particular case has been vile.  I do not believe that violence and fear are the response to violence and fear that we should espouse.  Inspire. Be the change you wish to see. And that means not making excuses for violence.

Challenge the ideology, not the individual.

Identifying hate

The Family Research Council has tried to take advantage of the Corkins episode by blaming the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups and has categorized FRC as a hate group for the voluminous anti-gay and otherwise vitriolic / targeted rhetoric it has habitually used.

There is value in what the SPLC does, in that it draws attention to and demands answers for hateful comments.  Identifying hate challenges those identified to either back down from hateful positions or to reveal the full and extreme extent of them for all to see.  Both are revealing to the social dialogue on minority issues.  But identifying hate is not a license to target individuals or groups for violence.  And if we begin rationalizing its use that way, then we risk encouraging people with poorer judgement to act violently, whether we intended to or not.  And if we cannot be clear on this, then we risk losing the moral high ground.

No matter how vile the FRC has been in its rhetoric, violence is not an acceptable response.

Montreal LGBT couple beaten in Paris

I’ve heard via Michelle Blanc that on the afternoon of Wednesday August 1st, a Montreal trans advocate (who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting) was assaulted with her partner in Paris, in view of the couple’s children.  Marie-Ève is with l’association Fierté Montréal Pride and has been active within Montreal’s transgender community.  Claire, who has French citizenship, is a member of the board of la chambre de commerce gai du Québec and is actively involved in LGBT activism.  [Trigger warning: discussion of violence follows.]

Two people in an old model Renault Clio with a Rottweiler and a pitbull cut the family off in traffic and began shouting insults.  “Marie-Ève heard the driver tell his passenger: ‘they are Canadian…. It’s two girls but this is a guy who removed his balls, and we’re going to get into it.” [i.e. the colloquial “we’re going to teach them a lesson”]  Although attempting to change lanes to avoid a confrontation, a traffic jam allowed the Clio to block them, and Marie-Ève exited the vehicle.

At first, one of the attackers opened a window to encourage their two dogs to attack, but fortunately, both animals showed no sign of aggression.  One then kicked Marie-Ève in the head and knocked her to the ground, stunned by the blow.  She then received several more punches and kicks to the head.  Claire tried to intervene but was in turn violently grabbed and received several blows to the head.  At one point, an attacker tried to strangle Marie-Ève with her necklace.  Their children knew well enough to stay in the car, but watched in horror as the attack took place.

Despite the mid-afternoon activity, the many passersby and the couples’ calls for help, no one intervened until an attacker began goading passersby and one responded that a call to police had been made.  Finally, a rider on a scooter stopped and encouraged the assailants to leave, which they did.  No one tried to assist the couple.

The family is now at home in Québec.

L’association Lesbian & Gay Pride Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon has put out a call for any witnesses to please step forward:

“La Lesbian & Gay Pride Montpellier LR demands that perpetrators are identified, arraigned and brought to justice without delay. We ask the public prosecutor in Paris to investigate the matter as a hate crime motivated by xenophobic, transphobic and lesbophobic bias, so that the guilty are punished and the seriousness of their actions is not erased. We also demand effective identification of persons who assisted in the attack and who chose not to provide assistance to victims. We can not accept that such acts can take place with impunity, for all to see, and without a sense of duty, solidarity, citizenship and assistance.”

“… At a time when France seemed on the road to equality, it is high time that the government implement an ambitious plan to fight against all discrimination, educates law enforcement personnel and hospital treatment and support for victims, and calls on judges to exercise zero tolerance.”

“Discrimination = Crime de la différence !”

I’ve included their statement here (in the original French).  It is my failing that I have not learned fluent French, and would not be able to translate it all well.  I apologize for any errors in anything that I have translated or related.

Communiqué de presse – 02 août 2012

Deux québécoises sauvagement agressées en plein jour devant leurs enfants !

APPEL A TEMOIN

L’association Lesbian & Gay Pride Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon vient d’être saisie par deux victimes d’une agression xénophobe, transphobe et lesbophobe qui s’est déroulée en plein cœur de Paris (18ème arrondissement) en plein après-midi le 1er août 2012, sur deux ressortissantes canadiennes venues faire du tourisme avec leurs enfants de 6 et 7 ans.

Les deux jeunes femmes, sont originaires du Canada, Marie-Eve est Québécoise et transgenre, sa compagne Claire d’origine française. Marie-Eve occupe des responsabilités au sein de l’association Fierté Montréal Pride, structure avec laquelle la LGP Montpellier LR a noué des liens d’amitiés au travers des mandats internationaux qu’exercent les deux associations. Quant à elle, Claire est membre du conseil d’administration de la chambre de commerce gai du Québec et est activement impliquée dans la communauté.

Cette agression odieuse, sauvage, révoltante et scandaleuse s’est déroulée sous les yeux de leurs jeunes enfants. Les auteurs de l’agression, s’en sont pris aux deux jeunes femmes au prétexte de leur origine canadienne, de l’identité de genre de Marie-Eve, et de leur orientation sexuelle.

Marie-Eve et Claire allaient faire le plein avant de rendre la voiture de location par le boulevard de Clignancourt. Une voiture de type Clio blanche (ancien model) avec une conductrice à son bord, accompagnée d’un homme et de deux chiens, un Pitbull et un Rottweiler, coupe la route aux deux jeunes femmes. Marie-Eve au volant, klaxonne la Clio et se voit insultée. Celle-ci répond en français et québécois. Les deux individus répliquent par un doigt d’honneur et le jet de cigarette sur leur voiture de location. Marie-Eve entend la conductrice indiquer à son passager : « elles sont canadiennes ». Les insultes reprennent de plus belle et se font de plus en plus violentes : « C’est deux nanas mais elle c’est un gars a qui ont a enlevé les couilles et on va vous rentrer dedans. ».

Le feux passant au vert, Marie-Eve change de file afin de mettre fin à cette situation. Pris dans les embouteillage, les agresseurs positionnent volontairement leur véhicule à hauteur des deux jeunes femmes. Marie-Eve fait constater au passager de la Clio l’imprudence de sa conductrice et se voit en réponse cracher au visage. Dans l’incompréhension face au comportement de cet homme, Marie-Eve sort de son véhicule. Aussitôt ils ouvrent une fenêtre pour menacer Marie-Eve avec les 2 chiens. Celle-ci constant que les deux animaux ne montrent pas de signe d’agressivité, s’adresse à l’homme. L’agresseur saisit alors les montant de la portière du véhicule dans lequel il se trouvait, prend son élan et assène un violent coup de pied en plein visage à sa victime. Marie-Eve se retrouve projeter au sol complètement sonnée par la violence du coup. L’homme continuera de s’acharner sur Marie-Eve, toujours étendue sur le sol, en lui portant plusieurs coups de pieds au visage. Malgré la peur, Claire sort du véhicule et tente de s’interposer mais se retrouve à son tour attrapée violemment par l’homme et par la femme qui la tire agressivement par les cheveux, la mord à la main, le griffe au dos et la roue de violemment coups poings à la tête. Elle est ensuite jeté par terre et fini ainsi par se dégager pour porter secours à sa conjointe qui, toujours au sol, recevait des coups de pieds au visage.

Malgré la douleur, Marie-Eve parvient à reprendre ses esprits et remarque sa compagne ensanglantée se fait à son tour servir des coups de poings et des coups pieds par les deux agresseurs en même temps. Elle décide à son tour d’intervenir et tente d’immobiliser l’agresseur. C’est alors que la conductrice de la Clio saisit violemment Marie-Eve par les cheveux et tente de l’étrangler à l’aide de la chaîne autour du coup de la victime. Claire intervient à son tour et permet à Marie-Eve de se dégager qui en profite pour immobiliser l’homme au sol. La fatigue et la douleur conduise la victime à relâcher son étreinte. L’homme en profite à son tour pour se dégager avant de porter un coup violent au visage de Marie-Eve, puis lui mettre plusieurs doigts dans la bouche et de la traîner sur le sol.

Malgré une agression proférée en plein après-midi et la violence de la scène qui s’est déroulée devant de nombreux passants, personne n’a trouvé bon d’intervenir pour secourir les victimes ! Les deux jeunes femmes se sont senties démunies, livrées en pâture devant une foule qui leurs disait de rentrer dans leur pays, et terriblement angoissées à l’idée de ne pas pouvoir ce sortir du lynchage en règle qu’elles subissaient sous les yeux de leurs jeunes enfants traumatisés par la scène et hurlant de terreurs !

Les agresseurs continuent de s’acharner sur les victimes qui doivent leur salue au hurlement poussé par les victimes demandant aux passants d’appeler la police. L’un deux fini par répondre que l’appel est passé. Un scooter conduit par un autre individu surgit alors de nulle part, s’arrête à la hauteur d’un des agresseurs et l’enjoint de monté à l’arrière avant de s’adresser à la conductrice de la Clio pour l’inviter à prendre la fuite « go, go, go ! ». Les auteurs parviennent donc à prend la fuite avant l’arrivée de la police appelée sur les lieux.

À cause de leur état physique, le traumatisme et la peur extrême des victimes, Marie-Eve et Claire sont conduites en ambulance par les pompiers à l’hôpital Bichat de Paris qui délivrera un premier certificat initiale des blessures !

Jeudi 2 août, les victimes ont déposé plainte au commissariat du Vème arrondissement de Paris et ont transmis aux forces de l’ordre le numéro de plaque minéralogique des auteurs de l’agression. Elles seront examinées par la médecine légale vendredi 3 août.

La Lesbian & Gay Pride Montpellier LR exige que les auteurs soient identifiés, interpelés et traduits en justice sans délai. Nous demandons au Parquet de Paris de se saisir de cette affaire d’une violence haineuse, xénophobe, transphobe et lesbophobe afin que les coupables ne restent pas impunis et soient sanctionnés à la hauteur de la gravité de leurs actes. Nous attendons également que soient identifiées les personnes ayant assistées à cette agression et qui n’ont pas trouvé utile d’apporter assistance aux victimes. Nous ne pouvons accepter que de tels actes puissent se dérouler en toute impunité, aux yeux de tous, et au détriment d’un devoir de solidarité, de civisme et d’assistance.

De telles agressions barbares n’ont pas de place dans une société civilisée. La Lesbian & Gay Pride Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon suivra avec beaucoup d’attention les avancées de cette affaire révoltante et met en garde contre toute tentative de classement sans suite de ce dossier, et ce au-delà du retour au Canada des deux victimes.

Marie-Eve et Claire souffrent de nombreuses blessures et hématomes, sont terriblement affectées d’avoir été victimes d’une telle sauvagerie, devant leurs enfants, sans intervention extérieure, sont blessées dans leur identité, et en état de choc. Les enfants sont traumatisés, apeurés, et ont passé la nuit à pleurer. La famille attend désormais avec impatience de rentrer chez elle, au Québec.

La Lesbian & Gay Pride Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon salue le courage de Marie-Eve, Claire et leurs enfants. Nous leur renouvelons notre profonde amitié, et notre soutien. L’association restera plus que jamais à leurs côtés. Nous poursuivrons notre collaboration avec notre homologue Fierté Montréal Pride avec laquelle nous assurerons le suivi de cette affaire. A l’heure où la France semble sur la voie de l’égalité, il est grand temps que le gouvernement mettent en œuvre un plan ambitieux de lutte contre toutes les discriminations, sensibilise les forces de l’ordre et personnels hospitalier au traitement et à l’accueil des victimes, et demande aux juges de faire preuve de tolérance zéro.

Discrimination = Crime de la différence !

APPEL A TEMOIN : nous demandons que toute personne ayant assistée à cette agression ou disposant d’éléments, de contacter l’association au 06 76 31 36 31 ou le commissariat de police du Vème arrondissement afin d’aider la police à identifier les auteurs de cet agression.

L’équipe de la LGP Montpellier LR

On Persecution Complexes and Rage

The interplay of rage and persecution complexes works to shape trans, LGB — and in fact all — struggles against oppression.  It can become an eternal feedback loop that can stymie any attempt to move progressive causes forward, if it succeeds in establishing its circuitous pattern.

This translates to many struggles, so I’m going to speak generally and with varied examples — but I’m reminded of this most recently by the claims of persecution over a confrontation that happened at the New York dyke march, by Cathy Brennan, so will probably focus there most frequently.

(Oh dear god, I invoked the name. Now here come the bajillion bloody emails and the character assassination — it’s like goddamn Beetlejuice.)

Because I’ll be talking in generalities, I’ll be using terms like “oppressor / oppressed.” And because privilege is relative, and we all have some form of it or another relative to someone else, there are times when just about any group takes on the role of the oppressor — ourselves included.  So if I jump around a bit, you’ll need to bear with me.  The principle is what I’m focusing on, moreso than the many players.  Rather than participate in the game, I’d rather dismantle it.  Break the cycle, not perpetuate it.

Hypocrisy on Free Speech and “Protecting Freedom.”

On June 6th (the same night that the trans human rights Bill C-279 advanced to committee) Conservative MP for Westlock – St. Paul, Brian Storseth’s Private Member’s Bill C-304, An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act (protecting freedom), passed Third Reading in the House of Commons, and advanced to the Senate for ratification.  Bill C-304 abolishes Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which pertains to electronic communication of hate speech.

Sun Media commentator Ezra Levant barely got through taking credit for the bill’s passage before taking advantage of a recent censure of comments he made on his television show to change focus and declare his intent to destroy the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) within the coming year, in the name of freedom of speech.

Both are the culmination of roughly ten years of media campaigning against speech-related laws and standards, and while the principle of freedom of speech is admirable, the application being upheld and idealized by speechies is already showing its proponents’ hypocrisy.

Bill C304 is one of several Private Members’ Bills that pundits have been watching, concerned that the procedure may be used by Conservatives to pass legislation that the party wants to maintain some plausible deniability about (another bill which has provoked concern is Blake Richards’ C-309, which proposes to ban masks at protests).  And given the questionable Reform Party -era ties to hate groups, plausible deniability was probably a politically prudent approach for the Conservatives to take.  Liberal and NDP Members of Parliament have previously spoken out against Storseth’s bill, but often expressed that they felt it was too contentious to pass.

Section 13 was one of the approaches used to defuse the inciting of racial hatred in Canada, and had been thought of as a way to keep neo-Nazis in check, although it’s historical use has been mixed and controversial.  Ernst Zundel was the focus of several different actions against hate speech that he published in print and on his website, before he was finally deported to Germany, where they had no qualms about convicting him of 14 counts of inciting racial hatred.  In December 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada also finally upheld a conviction against Jim Keegstra for a 1984 arrest after teaching Social Studies students that the Holocaust never happened.

But hate speech legislation began to lose popular support when it was used to target Macleans magazine and writer Mark Steyn for articles promoting what evolved into “Demographic Winter” lore (i.e. fears that Islamic Fundamentalists were outpopulating Western nations and would “win” by sheer numbers).  It was also used against former Western Standard publisher turned Spin News Network commentator and entertainer Ezra Levant for publishing cartoons that portrayed the prophet Mohammad as a terrorist.  Proceedings were later thrown out or dropped, but not without some personal cost to each, highlighting some concerns that call for some legitimate reform.

Personally, I’m not all that partial to speech legislation.  I do agree that there needs to be something there to address the extremes of Zundel and Whatcott, but also that there has to be restraint on its use and the way it’s prosecuted. But at the same time, for as much as there are accusations of “fascist” motives from both left and right-wing pundits in our increasingly polarized political climate, the abolition of speech law does disarm a tool that could have provided a means to bring something of that nature about.

Free Speech and the Responsibility That Comes With It

I wrote about the subject earlier, when discussing Bill Whatcott’s Supreme Court trial, a proceeding which concerns a Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission ruling:

Hateful speech is never free.  While an individual comment, or poster, or ad, or flier may be free speech, the weight of cumulative aggressions and microaggressions serve to demonize communities, alienate them, and discourage them from participating in society.  As it becomes more common, accumulated hatefulness makes it seem acceptable or (to some) even necessary to act on that, and by knowing this, entire communities are terrorized in a way by each new onslaught.

And yet there is a danger in criminalizing speech.  The same groups that hate is already designed to silence and intimidate into hiding could very easily become the same groups that society seeks to silence first, when given the tool of speech legislation.

Ideally, hateful speech should be answered, and called out.  Hateful speech must be answered.  It must be responded to.  Freedom of speech is not simply a question of saying or publishing anything and everything that one might wish to say.  It comes with a responsibility to answer to these things, and call them out as attitudes that need to change.  The problem is that it typically isn’t answered to by the majority, and if sufficient inequality or disparate antipathy exists, the minority may either feel too disenfranchised to respond, or the channels that they need to respond in aren’t interested in giving them the opportunity.

Spin News Network personalities get particularly poor marks for positioning themselves as apparent free speech champions by promoting Islamophobes like Geert Wilders and trying to provoke hate speech complaints of their own, while at the same time making a point to run Charles McVety’s transphobic / homophobic ads without criticism or contrary opinion, calling to ban Islamic speakers, and justifying the barring of entry to people like Bill Ayers.  If freedom of speech comes with a responsibility to counter those things that are hateful, then Sun Media has repeatedly shed that responsibility whenever it has been politically inconvenient to their editorial viewpoint, like skin of an embarrassing colour.

In addition to facilitating dialogue instead of squelching it, freedom of speech also comes with a responsibility to maintain some civility and decorum.  Canada’s speechies often fail on that count as well.  In the most recent example, Levant was condemned by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council for an uncivil tirade last December, and his response was to flip CBSC the bird.  Civility too, it seems, is no longer in fashion.

Broadcast Standards Under Fire

Levant took the opportunity to take up a campaign to destroy the CBSC:

“According to the Canadian Broadcast Stan- uh, Censors Council, that’s not actually what got me in trouble.  What got me in trouble was my point of view.  I wasn’t -quote- ‘balanced.’ Now, I have an opinion, that’s my job actually, to have an opinion.  I don’t pretend to be a ‘neutral’ reporter here, my job is to put out my opinion forcefully….”

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council was set up at the initiative of Canadian television networks, for the purpose of establishing limits that would help immunize the industry against the kinds of complaints that could potentially result in a drive toward real censorship.  It has allowed the actual government body in play — the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) — to refer complaints back to a body that champions the idea of media policing itself, rather than taking any binding action of its own.  Spin News Network has been upset with the CRTC ever since the latter twice refused to make special exceptions for the station so that it could have preferred carrier status, which would put it near the top of the dial and make it mandatory for cable networks to provide it prominently.  It’s not hard to guess who foxnewsnorth‘s Sun TV’s endgame target will be, but for now, the buffer of the CBSC is in the way.

To that end, Ezra Levant has promised a 5-point campaign to destroy the Council within the coming year, by:

1. Systematically violating the CBSC’s standards on a daily basis, and inviting other censured people on his program for the purpose of reoffending;
2. Picking out what Levant describes as inconsistencies and phrasing the CBSC’s function as being outside the law — of course, the CBSC wasn’t set up as a legal body (and consequently, its rulings are non-binding), but as a voluntary code of practices that televised media in Canada decided to set for itself and abide by;
3. Mobilizing right-wingers to comment and blog incessantly on the subject;
4. Getting a bill started in Parliament — this could be interesting, since the CBSC is not a government body nor a legal body, but a voluntary media board (though to be fair, for a station to get a better placement on the dial, there is a CRTC requirement to abide by the code); and
5. Mobilizing viewers to flood MPs, the PM and the Heritage Minister with emails and letters

So, far from accepting the responsibilities that go with freedom of speech, Sun News Network and at least one commentator are dedicated to actively working against anything that encourages these responsibilities, however symbolic and voluntary it might be.

The Overton Window and Harper’s Stake

To be fair, Spin News Network and Sun Media are private corporations, and not under any obligation to provide air time or column space to dissenting voices, although arguing this point says something interesting about fair and unbiased media in Canada.  For the Harper Conservatives, reaping the accolades from right-wing supporters over the passage of C-304 and acting as a government that is supposed to work on behalf of all Canadians, the same can’t be said.

The Harper Government has played both sides of the “free speech” equation by happily positioning themselves as free speech champions, while waging an economic stifling of speech through the defunding of environmental science, status of women groups, Aboriginal advocacy and human rights organizations and yet maintaining charitable status and even financial subsidies for partisan political supporters and think tanks that consistently produce convenient reports.  At times, the government’s imbalanced treatment has led to intimidation tactics and accusations of terrorism in order to marginalize political opponents.  The end result is a faux free speech environment in which state sanctioned speech is signal-boosted to the tune of millions of dollars, and dissent is economically marginalized to the point of having little to no avenue through which to counter spin.

Here’s why these responsibilities matter.  Before his death in 2003, Joseph Overton, vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy (a think tank devoted to free market ideology), proposed a political concept that has since become known as “The Overton Window.”  At any given moment, the window of popular sentiment and political viability is in flux, and the key to achieving policy is to expand or shift the window to encompass it.  This is done by changing the conversation through several means — including repetition, erasure and ridicule of opposition, manipulation and spin — until an idea shifts from being previously unthinkable and then radical to becoming acceptable, seemingly sensible and then popular… until it is inevitably established as policy.

If this resonates with the dramatic polarization that has been taking place in the past few years on political topics like environmentalism, abortion and birth control, government budgeting and austerity, LGBT rights, police powers, public health care, bullying, and social programs like EI and welfare, then you’ve obviously noticed the explosion of concerted campaigns to shift that window.  And move, it clearly has.  I’m betting that most of us in our lifetime never would have thought we’d be fighting for the availability of the Pill, watching neo-conservatives fight for the right to deny medical care, or expecting CNN to run a semi-sympathetic profile of a “kinder, gentler” Ku Klux Klan.

This happens not from free speech, but from abdicating the responsibilities that come with it — or, in the case of defunding and silencing unfavorable speech, making concerted efforts to control the conversation.

The free speech advocates in media and government are less interested in promoting diversity of speech, and more interested in shifting the window of where and how that speech occurs.

(Crossposted to Rabble.ca)