United Nations Human Rights Fail

The UN general assembly passes a resolution every two years condemning extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions. The resolution specifies killing for racial, national, ethnic or religious reasons and the killing of refugees, street children and indigenous people, among other groups.

But this time, it has left sexual orientation off the list with an amendment replacing a resolution that has stood for the last ten years. Instead there is a rather feeble 'discriminatory reasons on any basis'.

There are 76 countries where homosexuality is a criminal offence, six where it's punishable by death, which are Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Sudan and Yemen - and Uganda is considering adding the death penalty to its laws criminalising homosexuality.

The amendment passed by 79 votes to 70. Seventeen countries abstained and 26 were absent. The 79 were the six where homosexuality is punishable by death and the rest included Uganda, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Lebanon, Kenya, Algeria, Tunisia, Jamaica, Malaysia, China and the Bahamas. South Africa also voted for it, despite being the first country to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Two other countries in favour of removing sexual orientation from the list were the Russian Federation and Qatar where the next two FIFA World Cups will be held.

Britain and the US condemned the motion. But the resolution was approved by the committee, which includes all 192 member states with 165 in favour, 10 abstentions (including the USA) and no votes against. This means that even though 70 countries voted against the amendment, not one voted against the final resolution.

The Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions has highlighted documented cases of extrajudicial killings on the grounds of sexual orientation including individuals facing the death penalty for consensual sex; individuals tortured to death by State actors because of their actual or perceived sexual orientation; paramilitary groups killing individuals because of their actual or perceived sexual orientation as part of “social cleansing” campaigns; individuals murdered by police officers with impunity because of their actual or perceived sexual orientation; and States failing to investigate hate crimes and killings of people because of their actual or perceived sexual orientation.

So not only can you be murdered for being gay, you could well be killed just because someone thinks you are, or it suits them to think you are. Being bi or transgender is just as dangerous.

There is a belief in many member states that homosexuality is a western disease, that being gay is a choice and that it's un-Christian or un-African or un-Islamic. Western countries are often reluctant to criticise or get involved with the laws and cultures of other countries for fear of being accused of cultural imperialism.

Any brutal practise that is claimed to be traditional, religious or cultural - such as FGM, for example - can be considered off-limits whereas actions like the killing of street children are widely condemned. Moral relativism rears its ugly head, especially when the religion card is played, so critics back off and do the dance of cultural appeasement.

It's much easier to come to the defence of children, indigenous peoples or other groups that are not condemned by orthodox religion, for a start. There are very few countries that disapprove of homosexuality for other than religious reasons (although China is one of them).

The fact that the UN previously included sexual orientation in the list didn't stop many countries actively persecuting and executing LGBT people but now that it is not even explicitly on the list, there will be even less incentive to respect their human rights or to be covert about the murders, LGBT rights workers will have an even harder job and lives will be lost as the West stands by and wrings its hands.

Master of all you survey

Torture numbers and they'll confess to anything
Greg Easterbrook

Since Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, large-scale data collection by survey has been part of government in this country. Can surveys based on self-reported information ever be reliable, whether it's an 11th century peasant reporting how many ducks she has to a Norman or a 21st century woman giving personal information over the phone or online? Are such surveys inherently any more reliable and honest than the 'personality' quizzes in teenage magazines? Not least among the factors influencing responses are the way questions are framed and how the respondent thinks the information will be used.

A recent survey for the Office for National Statistics (ONS) based on interviews with 450,000 people for an Integrated Household Survey (IHS) has been reported as finding that 71% of people in the UK are Christian and 20% have no religion, 1.5% are gay or bi and nearly 80% perceive themselves to be in good health. (All IHS statistics are considered experimental until assessed by the UK Statistics Authority).

The IHS asked respondents 'What is your religion, even if you are not currently practising?' with the intention of discovering 'religious affiliation - that is identification with a religion irrespective of actual practice or belief'. Not surprisingly, this has been reported as 71% are Christian.

Another survey by the ONS in 2008 found that only 22% described themselves as Christian and 45% said they had no religion.

The 2011 census will include the question 'What is your religion?'. This question was asked in the 2001 census and before that only in 1851. There has been controversy about the result of the 2001 census where 71% of people self-reported as Christian. Many of these, it is believed, identify as culturally rather than religiously Christian. Most of them rarely go anywhere near a church. According to a survey done by the Church of England, only 5% go at Christmas and 2.8% at Easter - the most important Christian festival.

Less seriously, 0.8% of people put their religion as Jedi in 2001 which offically makes them a bigger group than Sikhs, Jews or Buddhists in the UK.

The ONS deputy director said that the religion question in the next census would be 'a fabulous insight into societal changes to see how people register their religion'. Registering it is of course not the same as actively practicing it. And is 'fabulous' the best word to use for such a serious project?

Both religious and non-religious groups use these surveys in their campaigns to demand or challenge legal, financial and educational privileges, and governments use the findings to decide on funding, among other things, so they are more important than being of passing cultural interest. The widely differing findings are hardly a solid basis for policy or anything other than reflecting how variable survey findings can be.

People can and do change their minds about what they believe (although probably not so many of them in such a short space of time) but sexuality is a little less mutable.

The gay/bisexual statistic in the survey has led to headlines like 'Only one in 100 Britons is gay despite long-held myth' in the Mail.

It's inevitable that some groups will use stats to serve their own agenda and affected people will challenge them, especially if they have fought hard for equality.

One response to these findings on Facebook was '‎2,185,072 gay men and lesbians are currently registered on Gaydar in the UK - equating to 6.7 per cent of the UK population'.

More officially, in 2005, HM Treasury and the Department of Trade and Industry did a survey to help the Government analyse the financial implications of the Civil Partnerships Act (pensions, inheritance, tax benefits). They found that there were 3.6 m gay people in the UK – around 6% of the population. This figure was greeted by some gay rights activists as realistic.

If there are now only 1.5%, where have the other 4.5% gone since 2005? It should be noted that 3% of IHS respondents either said 'Don't know' or refused to answer. Again, the differences in survey results make basing any action on them a leap in the dark.

As to the 80% who 'perceived themselves to be in good health', what does this prove? Feeling well and being well are not the same thing at all for a start.

Even when stats are not used to tax the hell out of conquered Anglo Saxon peasants with very good reasons to be creative in their self-reporting, surveys are not like scientific tests. They are not reproducible in lab conditions, the methodology can be peer-reviewed but there can't be placebo questions, double blinding or a control group. At best, they can provide useful demographics, at worst they tell us nothing and can be used for propaganda. If you don't like the findings of the current survey, just hold on and there'll be another one along shortly.

Natural Law

The Pope has said that UK equality law is against natural law.

In his speech confirming his visit here in September, he said: "Your country is well known for its firm commitment to equality of opportunity for all members of society.

"Yet (...) the effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs.

"In some respects, it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed."

The parts of equality law that the Pope objects to are those that accord the same rights to gay people as to everyone else, particularly in employment. The Church (both Catholic and Protestant, by the way) wants the right not to employ gay people in certain areas. Catholic adoption agencies also want the right to turn down gay couples, preferring to leave children in care rather than let them be adopted by people whose sexuality they find unacceptable. Some have threatened to close down if they cannot have this right.

The Pope is saying that according equal rights to homosexuals and denying the Church the right to discriminate against them violates natural law. Under 'the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded' , some are more equal than others.

The term 'natural law' or lex naturalis has varied meanings. Philosophers have defined it in different ways since the Ancient Greeks. For Catholics, it has a specific meaning, as defined in the Catholic Encyclopedia.

The natural law is the rule of conduct which is prescribed to us by the Creator in the constitution of the nature with which he has endowed us. This law we learn not through the unaided operation of reason, but through the light of supernatural revelation.

The natural law consists of one supreme and universal principal, from which are derived all our natural moral obligations and duties.

The natural law is universal, that is to say, it applied to the entire human race, and is in itself the same for all.

Natural law is something that God has instilled in us all, whether we believe in him or not. There is an objective, unchanging morality that exists independently of humanity, outside of time. Accepting homosexuality as equal to heterosexuality is against it.

The godless have stopped up their ears against the truth and are hell-bent (literally) on defying natural law. But deep down, they must know that the Pope is right because of this seed of lex naturalis planted in us all by God.

Where this leaves people whose religions have their own inherent laws that they believe come from their god(s) is not clear. It would be interesting to know what a Muslim or Sikh, for example, thinks about their internal moral compass coming from the Christian God.

Many Catholics do not share the Pope's hardline views on homosexuality, contraception and other matters. Perhaps part of the reason for his visit is to whip them into shape.

Cherie Blair aka Judge Cherie Booth, a Catholic, has also been talking about religion and morality. She suspended the sentence of a man who broke another man's jaw after an argument in a bank queue. Her reason was that he was a religious person. She said: 'You are a religious man and know this is not acceptable behaviour'.

She appears to be saying that religious people have an inherent, natural, sense of right and wrong purely by virtue of being religious. As the defendant was a Muslim, the particular religion appears irrelevant.

The defendant may be a) religious and b) remorseful but the two facts should not be conflated as they have apparently been here. As a judge and the wife of an ex PM, Booth should know that choice of words matters. Saying something like 'you are a religious man and...' represents all religious people as a homogenous group, all possessed of the same characteristics. By extension, the non-religious as a group cannot be expected to have this sense. If that is not what she intended, then she should have made her position clearer. Questions will inevitably be asked about how she would have sentenced a non-religious person.

It's not just about justice being done, but about it being seen to be done.

It could be argued that a religious person who knows right from wrong has less excuse for bad behaviour than someone who is not religious.

The Pope may wish to have a word with Booth while he is here to clear up the fact that morality comes not from any old religion but from Christianity alone.

What both Booth's view and the Pope's have in common is the assumption that morality, a sense of right and wrong, is founded in religion and has a supernatural, extra-human, source. Both views of course ignore scientific findings that morals and rules of social behaviour are evolved pro-social traits that exist in all social animals to a certain degree and are at their most complex and codified in humans.

The Pope and other religious spokespeople are also opposing equality law because they think it is a threat to their freedom of speech. By which they mean their right to express their prejudices along with their beliefs. Religious hard-liners are often quick to play the victim, claiming their own rights are under threat, while trying to deny others the right to criticise them or, in some cases, even to question their beliefs. Freedom of speech is not the issue here. It is only when words constitute harassment or incitement to violence that the law steps in.

The Pope said in the same speech that "Fidelity to the gospel in no way restricts the freedom of others - on the contrary, it serves their freedom by offering them the truth".

I would be much obliged if someone would explain the logic of this to me.

UPDATE: 8 February

The NSS has been contacted about another apparent case of sentence reduction on religious grounds. Sukhvinder Singh Gill was intially sentenced to 33 months at Leicester Crown Court last year for making fake designer clothes. Last week his sentence was reduced to 12 months even though he had been in prison before. Judge Cook said: "Offending on this scale is serious. Legitimate businesses were cheated out of profits they deserved and an immediate custodial sentence was entirely justified". He added that Gill is "highly respected in the Leicester Sikh community" as one of the reasons for shortening the sentence.

The person who contacted the NSS commented that "He is not respected in the Sikh community - I am from the same community and this story dilutes the stature of Sikhism and the blatant favouritism and special dispensation given by the Appeal Judiciary smacks of religious bias."

Reparative therapy for homosexuality

The American Psychological Association has adopted a resolution that mental health professionals should not tell clients that they can change their sexual orientation through therapy or other treatments following a lengthy task force report on the subject.

British bodies have yet to adopt such measures despite the fact that therapists here in the UK are making such claims and attempting to 'cure' people. An article in BMC Psychiatry found that 17% of practitioners surveyed had assisted at least one client/patient to reduce or change their homosexual feelings, most commonly (66%) by counselling.

One member of the British Psychological Society interviewed by The Guardian said: 'Although homosexual feelings are usual in people, their physical expression, and being a person's only way of having sexual relations is problematic. The physical act for male homosexuals is physically damaging and is the main reason in this country for AIDS/HIV. It is also perverse'.

The main reason people feel the need to change their sexual orientation is religion. Religious responses to homosexuality cover the whole spectrum, from tolerance to fear and loathing of the God Hates Fags variety found at Westboro Baptist Church in America. It is generally believers from the more hard-line and evangelical groups who feel the need to change themselves - or who are pressured to do so, but not exclusively so.

The treatment is often called 'reparative therapy'. Reparation means making amends (as a losing side is forced to do after a war) or repairing. Neither of which implies anything other than homosexuals are wrong or broken.

One of the apparently moderate approaches in this country is that of the True Freedom Trust. They accept that homosexuality is not a wilful choice and class it along with any other sex outside of marriage (sinful).

However, they also say that 'ongoing change in all areas of our lives is possible through the work of the Holy Spirit within. Counselling and therapy are one (sic) of the tools God uses in this process (...) although we do not see it as our aim to 'cure' homosexuality. We do not believe a sexual relationship is essential for a meaningful life. We therefore seek to foster positive attitudes to singleness in the church'.

So it doesn't matter how nature made you as long as you do nothing about it. But should you want to change, therapy is recommended. And the implication is that you should want to change if you want to stay within the faith community.

The Christian Medical Fellowship, who will be familiar to readers of my earlier posts as a group with an interesting relationship with the truth, also appear to take this moderate approach.

They admit that 'genetics may contribute in some way. But this does not mean that those individuals are unable to exercise choice.' Like the TFT, they are promoting celibacy.

For both organisations, faith trumps nature. The CMF says: 'we need to protect the individual's right to bring his or her feelings and behaviour into line with his or her religious and moral values, rather than the other way around (...) This right should be defended even when it means learning to live with sexual feelings that the individual may not value and may not wish to nurture (...) Questions about the divine intervention for the ordering of human relationships are theological and ethical issues, for which science and psychiatry have no answers'.

This last sentence would imply that God made people gay in the first place.

Even this vague stab at a moderate tone is undermined elsewhere on their site where it says that 'Homosexual acts are dangerous' and 'Monogamous homosexuals are extremely rare'. Which is much more in keeping with their general tone.

The Church Times has a section on homosexuality which appears to take a balanced view of evidence but, like other apparently moderate groups, they take refuge in the fact that there is no hard and fast scientific evidence for a single cause for homosexuality and conclude that: 'Unfortunately, this means that empirical evidence can be used rather like biblical texts to argue that homosexuality is a normal variant on the spectrum of sexual orientation, a biological abnormality, a moral/immoral choice, or whatever else.' They do not appear to understand the word 'empirical'.

In one way, these more temperate responses are more dangerous. The out and out ranters are easy to spot, caricature and contend with. It is the apparently liberal, tolerant and caring groups who are more likely to attract young people confused about their sexuality. Even though they are apparently accepting of everyone's nature and even, to a degree, of genetics, human sexuality is (once again) something inherently bestial and sinful to be conquered and quelled. Their attitude is really just a thinly veiled version of 'Love the sinner, hate the sin'.

Celibacy is unnatural (in the sense that our instinct is to reproduce, not in a judgemental sense). Enforced celibacy, or abstinence as religious groups often call it, as a condition of acceptance by a community, is not healthy either when it is practised or when it fails. It's a fix that ignores and denies human nature (again). If there were truly nothing wrong with being gay, there would be no need to promote battening down natural instincts or seeking therapy, however caring the terms used.

To return to the APA ruling, the lengthy report it is based on looks at the efficacy of therapy for 'curing' homosexuals and converting them back to the straight and narrow.

'Contrary to claims of sexual orientation change advocates and practitioners, there is insufficient evidence to support the use of psychological interventions to change sexual orientation' said Judith M Glassgold, chair of the task force behind the report.

'At most, certain studies suggested that some individuals learned how to ignore or not act on their homosexual attractions. Yet, these studies did not indicate for whom this was possible, how long it lasted or its long-term mental health effects. Also, this result was much less likely to be true for people who started out only attracted to people of the same sex".

As well as pointing out the flawed methodology of studies purporting to show the efficacy of 'cures', the APA was also concerned about mischaracterizing homosexuality as a mental disorder. Or perhaps more accurately the re-characterizing as this was the medical position in the past. It was not until the 70s that American practitioners agreed to remove it from the list of mental disorders.

The fact that it is acceptable for practitioners in a position of trust to take on vulnerable people, make promises they cannot keep according to the evidence and, by attempting a cure in the first place, tell these vulnerable people that there is something deeply wrong with them, is shameful, especially when the clients/patients are not adults but young people forced to attend by their families.

There is a freedom of conscience and expression issue here. It is a right to believe and express any point of view that does not go as far as inciting violence. If your religion tells you that homosexuality is wrong, then that is what you may say. A practitioner may see themselves trying to cure lesbians, gays and bisexuals as an act of Christian charity.

However, when the person expressing and acting on a belief is a professional dealing with vulnerable people, there must be guidelines. Doctors are allowed a conscience clause that exempts them from acting against their religion - for example, they are allowed not to recommend a patient for an abortion or the morning after pill. But they must refer the patient immediately to another doctor who will.

Therapists who believe that homosexuality (or the physical expression of it) is wrong should be given a similar exemption and the obligation to refer should be imposed on them, rather than allowing them to offer treatment that has no evidential basis and potential risks of harm. They are supposed to be scientists, after all (at least, some of them).

The Wellcome Trust has launched a website to examine attempts at cures, which it warns may well be damaging. The site is an excellent resource for links to research and first-hand testimonies of gay people.

The National Secular Society has written to both the Royal College of Psychiatry and the British Psychological Society calling on them to adopt the same position as the APA. The RCP has responded that: 'The college takes very seriously the call by the National Secular Society to issue broader guidance to our members and will look into the issue further.'

Dr Petra Boynton has also covered this subject in her very fine blog and is calling on her colleagues to petition the RCP, BPS and BMA.

Should you be interested in the Biblical teachings on homosexuality that such attitudes are based on, Romans 1:26-7 is the only place where lesbianism is condemned along with male homosexuality and Leviticus 18:22 is the most cited reference.

UPDATED 2 OCTOBER 2012: Britain's biggest professional body for psychotherapists, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, has finally ruled that reparative therapy is unethical. It has written to nearly 30,000 members that it 'opposes any psychological treatment such as 'reparative' or 'conversion' therapy which is based upon the assumption that homosexuality is a mental disorder, or based on the premise that the client/patient should change his/her sexuality". BACP recognises World Health Organisation policy that so-called therapies can cause severe harm to mental and physical health.

The BACP guideline change follows a case in which Christian psychotherapist, Lesley Pilkington, was struck off the members' list for offering conversion therapy to an undercover journalist. Her appeal was turned down in May this year.

The other main professional body for British psychotherapists, the UK Council for Psychotherapy, issued similar guidance to members in early 2010, shortly after the Pilkington case emerged.

However,anyone can legally call themselves a psychotherapist or a counsellor. In 2007 the (Labour) government announced plans for statutory regulation to prevent this but the Department for Health has since dropped the plan.