Today, on the 60th Anniversary of the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the General Assembly will vote on aresolution calling on member states to remove laws that criminalize homosexuality.
The US government is one of the only Western democratic nations that has declined to support a United Nations Declaration calling for the global decriminalisation of homosexuality.
The Declaration will be put before the UN General Assembly this Wednesday, 10 December, which is Human Rights Day and the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
"It will be the first time in its history that the UN General Assembly has ever considered the issue of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) human rights," noted British gay human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell of the London-based LGBT rights group OutRage!
Surprise! Surprise! The United States of America doesn't support allowing queer people to live free from the threat of state violence.
It has only been for the past 5 years that the Constitution has guaranteed the right of gay people to not be thrown in jail for having sex. (And only Justice O'Connor's decision specifically used an equal protection for gay people approach.) A couple of the sitting justices were pretty fussy about that, and we know that Scalia would like nothing more than to reinstate such laws....and he'd have plenty of allies in this country. He is a part of a movement that seeks the obliteration of gay life.
Election day was somewhat stunning for many LGBT Americans. The loss in California felt like a bigger kick in the teeth than the other 28 constitutional amendments that excluded us from marriage, and recall that 19 of those banned all recognition of our families. Americans really do seem to enjoy voting against gay people. A lot of us have developed a sort of fatalism that expects our fellow citizens to vote against us. I'll be honest, when I see an anti-gay initiative pop up somewhere, the biggest question that runs through my mind is this: "How big will the margin of our defeat be?"
California is harder because many thought the state was "different" and that people would be hard-pressed to actually take a right away. Not when it comes to queer folks, though. It's still part of America, and Americans have demonstrated time and again that they are willing to do us harm, and to excuse those who do us harm. This vote in the UN is just more confirmation of that.
The United States is an anti-gay nation.
