Shrunken Christianity becomes more militant

The Vatican of course has form on this issue cooperating with an assortment of repressive regimes so to block in 2008 a proposed United Nations declaration on sexual orientation and gender identity, sponsored by France and the Netherlands. The proposal, intending to be a resolution, included a condemnation of violence, harassment, discrimination, exclusion and stigmatisation based upon sexual orientation and gender identity. So too did it condemn killings and executions, torture, arbitrary arrests, and deprivation of economic, social and cultural rights based upon these same grounds.

The Vatican wasn't alone in this opposition, as an Arab League backed statement opposed the intended declaration, but the Holy See was amongst the very first to voice opposition under the spurious claim that such a declaration would be a 'slippery slope' to be used to force countries to accept same sex marriage, and that the proposed concept of 'gender identity' would merely provide legal uncertainty, and undermine the State's ability to enter into and enforce new standards of human rights conventions.

Once again the language of human rights used to undermine the intent of human rights.

And so state sanction around the globe against homosexual people -the very state sanction called for by Archbishop Tomasi- continues in seventy-six countries, five of which sanction the death penalty.

Christians and other religious groupings regularly describe Gay people as depraved, deviates, intrinsically and objectively disordered. Gay people are also regularly depicted as causing grave harm to society or as threat to the family.

Religion has a special focus upon, if not an obsession with Gay people, proving the adage from H.L Mencken that the definition of a Puritan is "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy". It is also the area where the actual practice of liberal values is at its most fragile. Prejudice against Gay people is not the sole preserve of the religious, even if the religious have honed this prejudice into a knife-edge.

What if Vatican diplomats weren't advocating state sanction against Gays, but against others from their arsenal of non-negotiables such as divorcees? Women who have abortions? Imagine the outcry. Just because there is a current strategy in regards to the thin line of Gay people, don't think that other categories of non-negotiables could not just as easily be swapped. The thin line is politically expendable, but once conceded the liberal and democratic bulwark looks decidedly unstable.

But isn't this forest and trees? Religion is on the march globally and is more than prepared to use its non-Western numbers to enact political change.

It is a new dawn, and it is time to wake up.