Calls for children's right to sex at the UN

Background briefing: although this is not an official UN document, it expresses the ideas of many officials and NGO hangers-on. See the document in full here.

From C-Fam: At the Human Rights Council in Geneva this week, a radical homosexual
umbrella group released a homosexual rights document authored by several UN
human rights officials that claims that even the youngest children are capable
of discerning their sexual identity and they should be given governmentally
protected free reign to express it. The document goes on to demand revision of
international and national laws to reflect these and other ideas on the far
frontier of social policy.



Called the Yogyakarta Principles, the document lists 29 rights that
already exist in binding international law such as the right to life and
freedom from torture, and reinterprets each one to include homosexual rights.
Based upon the idea that “international human rights law imposes an absolute
prohibition of discrimination in regard to the full enjoyment of all human
rights,” the Principles assert that nations are legally bound to change their
constitutions and penal codes to incorporate homosexual rights.

The Principles also assert that states that must force changes in school
curricula, facilitating “access" by those who seek sex change operations, “the
right to express identity or personhood, including through speech deportment,
dress, bodily characteristics, choice of name or any other means”,
non-discrimination “against asylum seekers on the basis of sexual orientation
or gender identity and “the right to found a family, including through access
to adoption or assisted procreation (including donor insemination)”

According to the Principles, “sexual orientation is understood to refer
to each person’s capacity for profound emotional, affectional [sic] and sexual
attraction to, and intimate and sexual relations with, individuals of a
different gender or the same gender or more than one gender.” The document
states that “gender identity is understood to refer to each person’s deeply
felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not
correspond with the sex assigned at birth, including the personal sense of the
body (which may involve, if freely chosen, modification of bodily appearance or
function by medical, surgical or other means) and other expressions of gender,
including dress, speech and mannerisms.”

Of the 29 human rights experts who drafted the Principles, 11 are UN
special rapporteurs or treaty monitoring body members. Other members include
former UN officials such as Mary Robinson, former High Commissioner for Human
Rights. Conservative observers at the Human Rights Council told the Friday Fax
that by signing onto the Jogyakarta Principles, “These UN Special Rapporteurs
have betrayed the requirements of impartiality and independence required by
their mandates.”

Conservatives argue that the Principles’ equating sexual orientation and
gender equality to other established discrimination categories such as age,
race, and religion pose threats to the freedom of speech and freedom of
religion for any individuals, organizations or institutions that present a
traditional view of marriage and the family. They also point out that the term
“sexual orientation” has never been included in a non-discrimination clause of
any binding UN document. Likewise, the terms “sexual rights” and “gender
identity” have never been included in a binding UN document or defined by the
UN General Assembly.

The document concludes by calling on the UN system to endorse the
principles and incorporate them into the work of the organization and calls for
action from all levels government, the media and civil society.