The removal of specific words that could save specific lives

Our Lady of Perpetual Win (seriously, you should subscribe to her RSS, or better yet, don’t, so her pageview stats inflate somewhat), blogged today about a disgraceful bit of discriminatory politics at the United Nations.

Unless you speak up and tell the world that gays, lesbians and other sexual and gender minorities are due the same protection of their human rights under the law that the rest of us have, this is what you’re supporting.

United Nations — African and Arab nations succeeded by a whisker in deleting three words from a resolution that would have included gays in a denunciation of arbitrary killings. Europeans protested in vain.

The reference in the three-page draft came in the sixth of 22 paragraphs and urged investigations of all killings “committed for any discriminatory reason, including sexual orientation.” The provision was among many that had been proposed and analyzed by a “special rapporteur” (investigator) on the subject.

Benin, the chair of the African group of nations, proposed the amendment and Morocco, on behalf of the Islamic Conference, argued that there was no foundation for gays in international human rights instruments as there was in cases of race, gender and religious discrimination.

Because the words “including sexual orientation” were struck from this passage, and despite the “committed for any reason”, countries that kill based on sexual orientation including most of the Muslim states that follow Sharia law will continue to do so with impunity, because the especial force behind those words were stripped away. The denunciation of arbitrary killings is good, because arbitrary discriminatory killings happen every day in every country around the world, but the killing of gays and lesbians is practically institutionalized in some countries like Iran. And it is so, mostly because of their religion.

Religion fucks everything up. And not just certain zealots within the religion — the religion itself fucks everything up. Because it always trumps vague wordings like this. Unless the UN speaks up explicitly about the systematic murder of gays and lesbians in these religiously tainted countries, the religion will always take precedence over the explicit denunciation as inhumane of this religiously motivated practice.

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The removal of specific words that could save specific lives
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