Pope: Saving humanity from homosexuality just as important as saving rainforest

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In his end-of-year address to Vatican personnel, Pope Benedict XVI said that eliminating “self-destructive” homosexuality is an important part of “human ecology,” and drew a direct comparison with saving the rainforest.

The Pope’s words come on the heels of the decision of the Vatican—along with the U.S., several Islamic states, and a number of other nations—to refuse signing a U.N. resolution calling for an end to anti-gay laws worldwide, a resolution to which all member states of the European Union were signatories.

BBC News reports:

He explained that defending God’s creation is not limited to saving the environment, but also protecting man from self-destruction.

The pope was delivering his end-of-year address to senior Vatican staff.

His words, later released to the media, emphasised his total rejection of gender theory.

Pope Benedict XVI warned that gender theory blurs the distinction between male and female and could thus lead to the “self-destruction” of the human race.

This sentiment is not surprising in that it represents established Church doctrine, but many will find the way in which the Pope framed his thoughts inappropriate at best. In a modern world in some ways buckling beneath exponential population growth along with rapidly dwindling traditional resources, one wonders exactly what criteria—other than scriptural hermeneutics—the Church considers in defining what is and is not “self-destructive.” The Catholic Church is well-known for its stance against contraception, for instance, even in AIDS-plagued and hunger-stricken African communities.

Also on the agenda for the Pope’s address were his hopes that World Youth Day, which His Holiness attended in Sydney earlier this year, not be viewed as “mere spectacle” or a “rock concert” with the Pope as the star.

U.S. refuses to sign U.N. declaration in favor of decriminalizing homosexuality

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Standing alone among the major Western powers, the delegation from the United States refused to sign on Thursday a non-binding United Nations resolution calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality.

The measure, co-sponsored by France and the Netherlands, was signed by 66 countries. In at least 80 nations, homosexuality is a criminal offense; in some countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, it is punishable by execution.

BBC News reports:

The countries signed a declaration sponsored by France and the Netherlands demanding an end to legal punishment based on sexual orientation.

Sixty other countries of the UN’s 192 member states, including a number of Arab and African states, rejected the non-binding declaration.

They said laws on homosexuality should be left to individual countries.

Gay men, lesbians and transsexuals worldwide face daily violations of their human rights.

France and the Netherlands drafted the declaration in part to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Signatories included all 27 members of the European Union, Japan, Mexico, and Australia, as well as three dozen other member states.

France’s human rights minister, Rama Yade, called the lack of U.S. support “disappointing,” especially for a country which so vocally prides itself on its defense of human rights abroad.

Why did the United States refuse to sign? An MSNBC article explains:

According to some of the declaration’s backers, U.S. officials expressed concern in private talks that some parts of the declaration might be problematic in committing the federal government on matters that fall under state jurisdiction. In numerous states, landlords and private employers are allowed to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation; on the federal level, gays are not allowed to serve openly in the military.

Carolyn Vadino, a spokeswoman for the U.S. mission to the U.N., stressed that the United States — despite its unwillingness to sign — condemned any human rights violations related to sexual orientation.

Gay rights activists nonetheless were angered by the U.S. position.

“It’s an appalling stance — to not join with other countries that are standing up and calling for decriminalization of homosexuality,” said Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.

She expressed hope that the U.S. position might change after President-elect Barack Obama takes office in January.

The federal government of the United States has never concretely expressed that Equal Protection—the Fourteenth Amendment provision which is supposed to force states to guarantee the extension of rights to all citizens—applies to matters of sexual orientation. It has left the legislation of sexuality open to the various states, such as California, where voters last month passed Proposition 8, a measure defining marriage as solely between a man and a woman. Consequently, many gays in the U.S. feel merely tolerated and frequently openly discriminated against by U.S. law. They say the federal government should take a stand against anti-gay laws and use Equal Protection to ensure compliance at the state level.

Syria represented a group of 60 countries which refused to sign the declaration. The Vatican City also abstained, stating that, while it supports an end to anti-gay laws and persecution, its view is that such a declaration “gives rise to uncertainty in the laws and challenges existing human norms.”

And that, French and Dutch delegates might argue, is exactly what the declaration was intended to do.

Homophobia and Society

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Here’s an essay I composed for philosophy class:

 

As of 2006, homosexuality is illegal in 81 of the world’s nations.[1] The offense is punishable by death in some countries (particularly in the Middle East). Of course, it is not only governments which execute gay citizens—in 1992 a U.S. naval officer was stomped to death by fellow seamen, and in 1998 University of Wyoming student Matthew Shephard was severely beaten, pistol-whipped, and left tied up to die by two men who had asked him for a ride.[2] But long before a person’s fear, disdain, or hatred for homosexuality reaches such a boiling point, the expression and cultivation of dismissive and persecutory attitudes towards homosexuals individually or as a group can be observed throughout society. Anti-homosexual bias is sometimes the consequence of religious or other cultural beliefs; more often it is the product of fear as the result of miseducation. Whatever its causes and manifestations, discrimination against homosexuality is historically and scientifically unfounded and constitutes unethical nonsequitur for the individual who believes that one should respect the freedom of others as one would wish his or her own freedom to be respected.

One can choose to place sexuality at any distance from the focus of the Weltanschauung, but objectively speaking, sex is an activity and not an ID badge. The seed from which springs much of the misunderstanding of homosexuality is the idea that the homosexual is somehow diseased or defective, that the practice of homosexual behavior is a sign of moral errancy or genetic corruption. No studies have conclusively shown that homosexuality is the result of congenital physiological factors. Even Simon LeVay, author of one of the studies most frequently cited as evidence that homosexuality is the result of biological triggers, said in 1994: “I did not prove that homosexuality was genetic . . . I didn’t show that gay men were born that way, the most common mistake people make in interpreting my work.”[3] Some people who identify themselves as homosexuals embrace biology as the fountainhead of their gayness, feeling they were “born that way.” But science tends to disagree, and a fairly broad concensus among psychologists and neurologists feels that humans are born bisexual, that sexual orientation is primarily if not exclusively the product of nurture and not nature, so to speak. More accurately, the tendency of a culture to divide its people into “homos” and “heteros” is the result of social influences and cultural practices and has little if any basis in biology. The Kinsey studies found that a majority of males and females recalled both homosexual and heterosexual experiences or sensations at one or more points in their lives. [4] While most research psychologists agree that sexual preferences determined and exercised early in life can be difficult to change at will later, those persons who have been either exclusively heterosexual or exclusively homosexual throughout life do not form a decisive majority.

Religious pretexts for the discouragement or forbodement of homosexual behavior are hypocritical and unequivocal at best. While the Bible does state that a man should not lie with a man as he would with another woman, it states with equal clarity and authority that unruly children should be stoned by the community.[5] One wonders what percentage of those who believe that homosexuality is morally wrong for religious reasons also feel that disobedient kids should be put to a painful death at the hands of the neighborhood. Moral law from religious texts is quite selectively observed, as it turns out, especially in the Abrahamic faiths.

For all their perceived cultural and political differences, Anglo-American and Muslim societies seem in many cases to share the sense that homosexuality is corrosive to the “moral fiber” of the community. If certain people who self-identify as homosexuals seem eager to outwardly project their lifestyles, it can be cogently argued that such behavior is a reaction to discrimination, not a cause of it. To assert otherwise is to assert that the African-American civil rights protestors of the 1960s were expressing dissent in order to force their blackness upon others, a clearly ridiculous proposition. The state typically prohibits lewd sexual behavior or assault whether it is homosexual or heterosexual in nature; hence, it should extend the same social opportunity and legal recognition to homosexuality as to heterosexuality.

The irrational belief that the existence of homosexual relationships is somehow a threat to the “sanctity of marriage” is a displacement of responsibility. The sanctity of marriage is defined by the values and actions of the married couple and is not the result of any external influence, except to the extent that the married couple allows it to be. Similarly, the idea that the presence of homosexuality in the community is a danger to family values implies that family values are not set and maintained by the family.

Aside from the fact that safe, consensual sex between any two human beings could not possibly be coherently perceived as a threat to the human rights of any other individual, the best reason for personal and social acceptance of homosexuality is that it has always existed and will probably indefinitely persist throughout the animal kingdom, to include homo sapiens. Certain expressions of homosexuality were widely permitted in Greek culture, for instance, and are still accepted or encouraged in numerous cultures around the world in which the revelatory faiths are not dominant. More than 1,500 species of animal life have been found to exhibit homosexual behavior[6]; certain male penguins mate for life, for one example among many. Some psychologists have theorized that the wide appearance of homosexuality in certain dolphin communities is an evolutionary response to depopulation due to over-aggression among males.[7] Even absent of the conviction that homosexuality is neither morally nor biologically perverse, the sensible individual must realize that fear and hatred of those who engage in homosexual behavior is primarily self-destructive. Those who would seek to nourish their senses of self and of community would do well to encourage diversity rather than attack it.

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[1] Al-Ahram Weekly Online, Issue 793. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/793/cu5.htm

 

[2] Southern Poverty Law Center. http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=392

 

[3] Discover magazine, March 1994.

 

[4] Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, 1948; Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, 1953.

 

[5] The Holy Bible, Deuteronomy Ch. 21

 

[6] Wikipedia Online – Homosexuality.

 

[7] BBC News, Oct. 19, 2006.