CV NEWS FEED // The UN’s Independent Expert on sexual orientation and gender identity presented a report at the UN Human Rights Council implying religions are misinterpreting their own teachings regarding LGBTQ issues and must accommodate LGBTQ ideology or be held accountable by governments.
In the report given during the council’s 53rd session last week, Victor Madrigal-Borloz, a UN bureaucrat who has worked to protect “human rights” for certain groups while supporting the persecution of others, critiques religious people’s responses to LGBTQ issues and abortion and calls for their punishment if they do not conform their views to his own.
In an attack on religious freedom, he demands access to “healthcare” for women and “transgender” people by limiting conscience-based protections for religious people. He supports punishing religious people who “justify” so-called “discrimination” because of their faith. If governments choose to allow conscience-based refusals, he says, they must also “ensure” medical care by setting up “referral systems”.
Madrigal-Borloz claims that religious beliefs which dissuade homosexual practices or “transgenderism” are “not supported by international human rights law.”
He recommends that religious leaders condemn “narratives” depicting LGBTQ people as “seeking to recruit others into particular sexual orientations and gender identities.”
Yet this concern of people of faith was validated recently after a “pride” march in New York City featured marchers chanting “we’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.”
Madrigal-Borloz also recommends that religious groups “examine the historical role of religious institutions in the perpetration of human rights violations”. He says traditional values are “hostile to the human rights of women, LGBT persons,” and other minorities. He criticizes the idea of the “natural family” present in nearly every major world religion and in most cultures throughout human history:
“It has been argued that the apparent monolithic religious censure of LGBT persons is a recent phenomenon, informed in part by ‘homocolonialism’ and as a response to the perceived threats surrounding heterosexual family structures dominant in most faiths…The concept of a ‘natural’ order as the guiding principle of human and social existence is also present in conservative doctrine.”
Madrigal-Borloz, who is not a theologian, further questions religious teachings on homosexuality and “transgenderism,” saying these teachings are “a matter for theological debate.” The report critiques what he calls the “dark corners” of religions where “LGBT people are regarded as sinners.”
The report continues: “Laws enacted with the aim of mandating standards of conduct purportedly demanded by interpretations of religious dogma effectively deny lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans and other gender diverse persons the right to equality and, often, equal recognition under the law.”
Madrigal-Borloz recommends that religions stop using “religious narratives” to justify “discrimination” against LGBTQ people. According to the report, those who do so should be punished.
