On December 6, President Barack Obama’s support for the demands of the “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender” agenda rose to the next level when he issued a memorandum directing federal agencies abroad to “improve protections for LGBT asylum seekers and to strengthen opposition to criminalization of LGBT status or conduct.” The key phrase in the directive was Obama’s claim that so doing is but another part of the “United States’ commitment to promoting human rights.”
This shift in characterizing the sexual and political demands of those who engage in homosexual behavior as a “human right” is as purposeful as it is dangerous to liberty, marriage, and the family. And if Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech last week in Geneva was any indicator, the appeal to “human rights” is the new moniker for silencing and punishing any person, organization, or state that will not support the homosexual agenda.
In Geneva, Clinton said:
Our commitments to protect the freedom of religion and to defend the dignity of LGBT people emanate from a common source. (No, this is not a typo.) For many of us, religious belief and practice is a vital source of meaning and identity, and fundamental to who we are as people. And likewise, for most of us, the bonds of love and family that we forge are also vital sources of meaning and identity. And caring for others is an expression of what it means to be fully human.
She then went a step further, intertwining what it means to be “fully human” with human rights: “It is because the human experience is universal that human rights are universal and cut across all religions and cultures.”
In other words, Clinton presented things dear to each of us—love and family, our faith and who we are—and then used them to play on our heart strings and further the administration’s contention that a denial of these things to anybody, for any reason, is a violation of the highest order for it is a violation of “human rights.”
Clearly these arguments, both President Obama’s and Secretary Clinton’s, are framed in such a way as to make those whose experience has not been “universal” in embracing sexual behavior appear insensitive, if not outright cruel, toward same-sex couples who only want to fabricate new ways to share “the bonds of love and family” heterosexual couples share. Here we must remember that our culture does not rest on some momentary, politically correct expression of “human rights,” but on the eternal bedrock of natural rights, fixed and ordered by the same God who joined man and woman together as one flesh in the Garden of Eden.
Throughout history we have had enlightened elites demanding a reordering of such rights and the result has been death, in culture and in life. (Just think of what the reordering of natural rights did in the 20th century, where millions more Jews and Christians died than in prior history.) Or consider the enlightened pursuit of new human rights amid the eugenics movement which led to “three generations of imbeciles being enough” (Oliver Wendell Holmes). Now, the states with mandatory sterilization laws deal with restitution payments while the new human right to slaughter one’s own child for any reason has led to nearly 54 million missing among us.
If “caring for others is an expression of what it means to be fully human,” then it’s all the more reason to contend for natural marriage, regardless of the emotional pleas to the contrary. Marriage is the one and only relationship that is absolutely essential to the future of humanity: at all times and in all places. It naturally builds family—mom, dad, and children—and gives hope that the next generations will carry on into the future.
Therefore, society should protect and strengthen marriage, not undermine it. And while Americans should certainly stand up to defend God-given rights for all, they should reject deceptive calls to redefine our future based on the demands of the moment.