On 6th of December Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her speech at the United Nations in Geneva called on all countries to respect the civil rights of LGBT individuals.
She talked about why countries need to recognize LGBT rights and treat them as regular human rights. “Being LGBT does not make you less human,” Clinton said to the audience, which included delegates from countries that criminalize homosexuality. “And that is why gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights”.
She also mentioned violations of gay rights LGBT people are an “invisible minority” who are “routinely arrested, beaten, terrorized, even executed.” More than 80 countries currently have anti-LGBT criminal laws”, Clinton said. Talking about violations of human rights (which are also LGBT rights) she said “It is violation of human rights when people are beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation, or because they do not conform to cultural norms about how men and women should look or behave. It is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay, or allow those who harm gay people to go unpunished. It is a violation of human rights when lesbian or transgendered women are subjected to so-called corrective rape, or forcibly subjected to hormone treatments, or when people are murdered after public calls for violence toward gays, or when they are forced to flee their nations and seek asylum in other lands to save their lives. And it is a violation of human rights when life-saving care is withheld from people because they are gay, or equal access to justice is denied to people because they are gay, or public spaces are out of bounds to people because they are gay.”
Hillary Clinton took a part in discussion about marking “homosexuality” as a Western invention. She said “Some seem to believe it is a Western phenomenon, and therefore people outside the West have grounds to reject it. Well, in reality, gay people are born into and belong to every society in the world. They are all ages, all races, all faiths; they are doctors and teachers, farmers and bankers, soldiers and athletes; and whether we know it, or whether we acknowledge it, they are our family, our friends, and our neighbors. Being gay is not a Western invention; it is a human reality.”
Secretary of State also talked about the need to make progress and LGBT rights as official rights. She mentioned that obligatory law has an educational effect and records behavior: “Laws that discriminate validate other kinds of discrimination. Laws that require equal protections reinforce the moral imperative of equality. And practically speaking, it is often the case that laws must change before fears about change dissipate.”
