The homosexual rights movement is gaining momentum around the world. Just in the last few months, the United Nations (UN) made new advances in its attempts to redefine gender and sexuality, homosexual rights activists hosted large demonstrations in both Washington, D.C. and Taipei, Taiwan, and Argentina approved the first same-sex marriage in Latin America. As this momentum grows and the homosexual agenda is increasingly imposed on countries around the globe, those morally and religiously opposed to homosexual and trans-gender behavior confront an ever growing threat to their religious freedom.
LGBT lobbyists perpetually deny any connection between the “civil rights” they demand and the religious freedom of those who morally oppose homosexuality, but the evidence is clear. In North America, Europe and Asia, religious freedoms are already being overruled by the “rights” claimed by homosexual individuals in legal suits claiming illegal discrimination. This is not a scare tactic but a very real threat with mounting evidence to support it. Therefore, in order that we might better work together to ward off this attack on each and every person’s religious liberty, we want to clarify the nature and import of this debate.
Religious Freedom v. Civil liberties
Nearly all democratic governments around the world acknowledge the religious freedom of its citizens. This freedom includes both freedom of belief and freedom of practice. Logically, however, a government must put limits upon the freedom of religious practice at the point at which those practices impede upon the civil and human rights of other individuals. The government dictates where this line between religious freedom and civil liberty is drawn.
The LGBT lobby recognizes this and is currently working to redraw this line by establishing homosexual and trans-gender individuals as a protected class equivalent to race or biological gender, and creating new “human rights” to protect this new class of people-rights that are in direct opposition to the religious beliefs and practices of most individuals. They seek to elevate a behavior into a protected class of people who practice that behavior.
As human beings, LGBT individuals already have the same human rights as everyone else. LGBT “rights,” by definition, create new rights and establish new priorities among already existing rights, saying that the behavior of one group is a right superior to the beliefs of another. Thus, the sought-for new rights ultimately imperil anyone or any organization that sees homosexual behavior as morally wrong. “Human rights” – true ones – are necessarily balanced against the rights of others. But how would we reconcile homosexual “rights” against the religious belief that such behavior is a moral wrong? Any legislation that asserts, explicitly or implicitly, that homosexual and transgender behavior is a right and LGBT individuals are a protected class within those rights is an invitation to coercion and a debilitation of religious freedom.
Current Attempts to Redefine Homosexuality
LGBT lobbyists are fully aware of the import of establishing homosexuality and transgender behavior as a legally protected class equivalent to race or gender, for it is the foundation of the entire “homosexual rights” movement. Once this is established, every other “right” they demand will legally fall into place. Radical activists in the UN have been attempting to redefine sexual orientation and gender in UN human rights documents for decades. The UN “Yogyakarta Principles,” for example, place sexual orientation and gender identity on an equal footing with race and explicitly call on governments to force religions to ignore gender differences in both practice and belief. Hate crime legislation, same-sex marriage, adoption measures, and other seemingly innocuous pieces of legislation that reinforce the misconception that homosexual and transgender individuals are a specially protected class under both civil and human rights law.
Homosexuality is not a civil liberty
Homosexual and transgender behavior should not and cannot be specially protected under civil rights legislation because such behavior is in fact that-a behavior. Despite extensive efforts within the scientific community to identify a “gay gene,” all scientific evidence indicates that no such gene exists and homosexuality is a psychological rather than biological phenomenon. Unlike race and gender, homosexuality is neither biologically determined nor otherwise innate.
The assertion that homosexual and transgender individuals should be specially protected under the law further assumes that freedom of sexuality is a fundamental human right equivalent to freedom of religion or freedom of speech. In truth, however, governments have long been involved in regulating human sexuality, as in the case of laws against pedophilia and polygamy or laws defining marriage. Sexuality is a behavior inherently tied to the growth and development of every human being and therefore the growth and development of a society. As a result, governments have an active interest in defining and controlling this behavior in order to produce the best outcome for a society.
Same-sex marriage
The legalization of same-sex marriage is currently the greatest threat to the religious freedom of all individuals who oppose homosexual and transgender behavior because it legally reinforces this fallacious belief that sexuality is a human right. Committed marriage is the privileged channel through which governments have defined boundaries for appropriate sexual relationships. All other sexual relationships have long been considered less desirable and have been subject to various degrees of regulation or outright prohibition. If LGBT lobbyists were to succeed in legalizing same-sex marriage, it would remove this distinction, diminish marriage to simply one of many alternative adult sexual relations on which the government cannot place limitations and elevate sexuality to a human right. Once this is established, homosexual and transgender individuals will be legally entitled to special protection under the law, as they will be a sexual minority whose rights are threatened by the religious practices and beliefs of other individuals. At this point, the battle to defend both marriage and religious liberty would be lost.
Conclusion
We must recognize what is at stake in each and every battle against hate crime legislation, same-sex marriage, and any other radical legislation that advances the homosexual agenda. For if homosexuality and transgender behavior is universally protected under civil and human rights law, religious freedom will be undone-lost to a new human rights regime that privileges desires over responsible behavior and subjects religious freedom and rights of conscience to an ideology of license. If we do not hold off these very real attacks on our true human rights, we will no longer be able to protect our religious freedom to address homosexuality or similar behaviors we morally oppose. We must be constantly aware of these attempts to redefine sexuality and be prepared to defend against them, for government controls the line between the freedom of religious practice and other civil liberties. We must ensure that line is properly drawn.