LGBT Trumps Religion in U.S. Human Rights Report

By

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken

NEW YORK, April 26 (C-Fam) The U.S. State Department has released its annual Human Rights Report criticizing other countries for their conservative stances on human sexuality and sexual and reproductive rights (SRH).

The Human Rights Report is a Congressionally mandated annual investigation into the human rights records of nearly 200 countries. As expected, the Biden report is informed by a progressive understanding of human rights that is inconsistent with established human rights law but which is consistent with the arguments of leftwing UN agencies and treaty monitoring bodies.

Among other topics, the report investigates governmental compliance with “reproductive rights,” whether they offer legal recognition of people’s “preferred” genders, as well as whether they recognize sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) as special categories worthy of protection. None of these are established human rights.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken inaugurated the report saying that “There is much work to be done to uphold the rights set out in the Universal Declaration.”

While UN member states never agreed to an international right to abortion, nor does the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights declare such a right, the Biden administration made abortion access a key policy priority and reinstated a section of the report dedicated to reproductive rights, initially introduced by Barack Obama and removed by Donald Trump during his administration.

The report criticizes El Salvador for its abortion bans, reported on Hungary for “requiring women to view fetal vital signs before undergoing an abortion” and singled out Burkina Faso, Cameroon, and Uganda, among others, for their lack of access to “sexual and reproductive health.”

The report also called out Burundi and Romania for lack of access to sex education saying that “there were infrastructure and information barriers to an individual’s ability to maintain their reproductive health, including the lack of community health care and age-appropriate sex education for adolescents.”

Blinken also noted that the report includes specific provisions on members of vulnerable communities, a term often used to promote special recognitions and rights to LGBTQI+ individual and groups.

The report flagged Poland for not allowing “LGBTQI+ couples to adopt” and criticized a legislative initiative that “prevented ‘LGBT ideology’ in schools, called for protection of children against moral corruption, and declared marriage as a union between a woman and a man only.”

The report also called out Hungary for impeding “transgender or intersex individuals from changing their assigned sex or gender at birth on legal and identification documents” and for its child-protection law mandating that “websites containing any form of LGBTQI+ content…[require] users to verify they were 18 or older with warnings concerning ‘adult content’.”

Concerning the work of LGBTQI+ organization, the reports says that in Uganda “many LGBTQI+ organizations reported that operating health programs, particularly HIV prevention and treatment programs, shielded them from potential harassment or shutdown, although promoting advocacy for LGBTQI+ persons was their primary mission.”

The report also flagged Burundi for allowing the Catholic Church to order its schools to stop working with organizations that violate Church teaching. This reading seems to be starkly at odd with traditional freedom of religion.

Robert S. Gilchrist, U.S. State Department Senior Official, said that this report “is more central than ever in a world where we increasingly see facts smeared as lies, lies presented as facts, and information manipulated to disturbing ends by autocrats and other malign actors.”

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