>> ZJ: Recently, the official lobbying reports of the anti-gay Family Research Council were
released online. The reports detail the FRC's lobbying expenses for the first quarter of
2010, totalling $25,000, as well as the specific targets of their lobbying. One of the issues
listed was House Resolution 1064, a bill to condemn Uganda's proposed "Anti-Homosexuality"
law. The law would define a new crime of "aggravated homosexuality" which would apply to "serial
offenders". The sentence for this crime is death. Just to be clear on what this means,
if this law applied to straight people instead, any one of you who has had more than one intimate
relationship, or been intimate with the same person more than once, could be convicted
and killed for that. That is what this law would do to gay people. So why exactly would
the FRC oppose a resolution to denounce this bill? Why isn't this something that we should
unequivocally condemn? It's really quite simple: Either you consider this acceptable, or you
do not. So, does the FRC want to see gay people in Uganda killed by their own government?
And if not, then why should our country remain silent about the proposed execution of gay
people? In the FRC's lobbying report, Resolution 1064 is described as "Pro-homosexual promotion".
Really, FRC? Saying that gay people shouldn't be killed is just "pro-homosexual promotion"
to you? So now it's "pro-homosexual" to refrain from murdering us, from outlawing us, from
making our very existence illegal? That's not "pro-homosexual". It's pro-justice. It's
pro-freedom. It's *pro-humanity.* And if your twisted ideology leads you to abandon the
most basic respect for human life as being "pro-homosexual" when it happens to encompass
anyone who isn't straight, you really need to reconsider what it is you stand for. If
you don't want our country to denounce the murder of gay people, then you either don't
think this is wrong, or you don't think it's wrong enough to speak out against. But this
is *not* a trivial wrong. People's lives are at stake here, and if you think that's any
less important just because they're gay, you are a blight upon the earth. Of course, while
the FRC may be morally clueless, they can recognize a PR disaster in the making. After
their lobbying reports came to light, they released a statement to try and explain their
intentions here -- as if there's anything to explain. According to the FRC, they do
not support the proposed law in Uganda, and they were only lobbying to change the language
of the resolution -- specifically, "to remove sweeping and inaccurate assertions that homosexual
conduct is internationally recognized as a fundamental human right." But even this makes
no sense. 67 countries, including the United States, are signatories to the UN declaration
on sexual orientation and gender identity, which does affirm that nations should "ensure
that sexual orientation or gender identity may under no circumstances be the basis for
criminal penalties". The UN Human Rights Committee has ruled that laws prohibiting sexual activity
based on sexual orientation are in violation of the right to privacy. Homosexual conduct
*is* a fundamental right, and it is internationally recognized as such. And why shouldn't it be?
It is a part of that most basic freedom: the freedom of association. How is it that straight
people can have the right to be straight, and yet gay people can't have the right to
be gay? Why should straight people have rights that we don't? When we look at countries like
Saudi Arabia, where unrelated men and women can be arrested for merely socializing, let
alone having sex, we immediately recognize that this infringes upon their freedoms. We
know that such a violation of human rights is unacceptable. So what makes the criminalization
of gay people any more acceptable? Why should we receive any less protection? If straight
people are allowed to have sex, why can't we? If they shouldn't be punished for it,
why should we? There are no grounds to claim that we have any less of a right to love one
another than the rest of the world does. That is not a "straights-only" right. It's not
even a "pro-homosexual" right. It is a *human* right. And nobody has any right to violate
that.