Austin Ruse, whose group C-Fam partners with repressive governments to resist international recognition for LGBTQ rights, sounded the alarm last week, declaring in a fundraising email that he is frightened for “the Church” and “all the children in the world.”
What has Ruse so angry and frightened, he told supporters, is the Yogyakarta Principles, a document that was created more than a decade ago by a group of international human rights experts and was updated last fall. The original document was meant to apply international human rights law to people being persecuted for their actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.
The updated version (referred to by its creators as YP plus 10) was meant to bring the document up to date with developments in human rights law and “the emerging understanding of violations suffered by persons on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity and the recognition of the distinct and intersectional grounds of gender expression and sex characteristics.”
To Ruse, this is all a “wicked” plot “from the very pits of hell” which is designed to “impose the gay ideology on the whole world.”
Returning to the Religious Right’s ugliest tactics for opposing LGBTQ equality, Ruse charged that the principles would protect “adults having sexual relations with children” and would make church teachings on human sexuality a violation of human rights.
Holy Mother Church teaches there is only one sexual orientation and that is between men and women in Holy Matrimony and for the purposes of joining with the Father in creating new souls for Him!
This teaching, handed to us by God Himself, would be a human rights violation according to this dangerous new document. The document orders national governments to enforce these new rules.
Ruse, a conservative Catholic, also targeted human rights expert Michael O’Flaherty, who was the rapporteur at the 2006 meeting at which the original principles were drafted. O’Flaherty is currently the director of the European Union Fundamental Rights Agency but to Ruse he’s just a “disgraced former Catholic priest” who “was the man behind the recent and sadly successful referendum to force gay ‘marriage’ on Ireland.” (“Force” is an odd word choice here given the overwhelming public vote in favor of marriage equality in Ireland’s 2015 referendum.)
Ruse is, frankly, a bit of a drama queen: “In the next few weeks,” he wrote, “the UN General Assembly will meet and upon that cold battle ground we will meet the Yogyakarta Principles and powerful homosexual activists. … I promise you we will stop them or will die trying.”
