Surely 'Gay Rights' are 'Human Rights' too?

Often I have heard of people referring to the 'gay rights movement' but surely in this day and age we can accept that 'gay rights' are in fact human rights to which we are all entitled! I ask this question in the context of the proposed legislation in Uganda, "The Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009".

Whose stated principal is to:

... establish a comprehensive consolidated legislation to protect the traditional family by prohibiting (i) any form of sexual relations between persons of the same sex; and (ii) the promotion or recognition of such sexual relations in public institutions and other places through or with the support of any Government entity in Uganda or any non governmental organization inside or outside the country.

This Bill aims at strengthening the nation’s capacity to deal with emerging internal and external threats to the traditional heterosexual family. This legislation further recognizes the fact that same sex attraction is not an innate and immutable characteristic.

The Bill further aims at providing a comprehensive and enhanced legislation to protect the cherished culture of the people of Uganda. legal, religious, and traditional family values of the people of Uganda against the attempts of sexual rights activists seeking to impose their values of sexual promiscuity on the people of Uganda.

There is also need to protect the children and youths of Uganda who are made vulnerable to sexual abuse and deviation as a result of cultural changes, uncensored information technologies, parent-less child developmental settings and increasing attempts by homosexuals to raise children in homosexual relationships through adoption, foster care, or otherwise.

The bill creates a range of offences and sets out a number of penalties up to and including the death penalty for LGBT people found guilty. Overall the legislation is a bigoted and hateful and is more akin to the thinking of a bygone era.

Prior to December I had little if any knowledge of the situation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) people in Uganda or of this bill. But over the last month or so I have begun to education myself more and more about the situation on the ground, about a week or so ago I received an email from an LGBT organisation in Uganda seeking help from other LGBT organisations, groupings and individuals around the world to try to get their governments to make diplomatic interventions on their behalf. The email moved me particularly the where the author says that members of their group have received death threats and some have disappeared or been arrested and that the situation continues to worsen on the ground day by day.

Yesterday I read an article on the Irish Times website, entitled "Uganda's Obligations", in it the author suggests very strongly that the bill has come about as a result of a "Deeply conservative evangelical influence partly imported from the US". Finding this both interesting and worrying I did a little more digging in the U.S. and found that in fact it seems logical to conclude that this is true based on an article in the New York Times entitled "Americans’ Role Seen in Uganda Anti-Gay Push", the author Jeffrey Gettleman has been kind enough to include recordings of talks given by three widely discredited American Evangelical Christians, having listened to these recordings over the last day it is abundantly clear to me and for all the various reasons outlined by Gettleman in his article and the content of these recordings that Evangelical Christians certainly have contributed to the hatred that has arisen in Uganda of LGBT people which as led to lynchings, death threats, beatings and the practice of correctional rape against Lesbian Women.

Surely we can all agree that if this legislation were to pass (and it's likely that it will) it would be a return in some sense to the dark ages, and that it would most certainly be an affront to Human Rights and the spirit in which the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was written.

While the Universal Declaration on Human Rights is not an internationally binding treaty the Declaration was explicitly adopted for the purpose of defining the meaning of the words "fundamental freedoms" and "human rights" appearing in the United Nations Charter, which is binding on all member states. For this reason, the Universal Declaration is a fundamental constitutive document of the United Nations. As Ireland is a member of the United Nations surely we have both a moral and legal obligation to protect human rights around the world, for if we are for human rights in Ireland we are by their virtue for human rights everywhere!