An email from the World Congress of Families, which now operates as a project of Brian Brown’s International Organization for the Family, boasts of two upcoming regional gatherings. The anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ WCF generally has a big annual global summit and smaller regional gatherings, at which “delegates learn how and why it is important to protect the natural family as the fundamental and sustainable unit of society and defend the sanctity and dignity of all human life from conception to natural death.”
The Caribbean gathering, whose co-hosts include Focus on the Family, will be held in St. Lucia November 17-18. The topics include: population control in Jamaica, comprehensive sex education, “Five Fatal Inconsistencies in Gender Theory,” and “Marriage Is the Foundation of Civilization.”
The local organizer for the conference, who is supported by WCF regional coordinator Rebekah Ali-Gouveia, is Sarah Flood-Beaubrun, a member of the St. Lucian Parliament and founder of the Caribbean Centre for Family and Human Rights (CARIFAM). Other speakers include WCF’s Don Feder, Focus on the Family’s Glenn Stanton, Family Watch International’s Sharon Slater, and Pastor Scott Stirm, an activist who has led opposition to LGBTQ equality in Belize. Many of the same people took part in another regional WCF gathering that was held in Antigua in June.
CARIFAM is a nonprofit founded in 2012 that claims it is “dedicated to protecting the family, human rights and human dignity” and says its mission is “to be the foremost organization in the Caribbean dedicated to the protection and promotion of fundamental human rights premised on the inherent dignity of the human person.” But CARIFAM’s anti-LGBTQ agenda follows the Religious Right pattern of portraying equality advocates as threats to children and society. CARIFAM denounces efforts at the United Nations to “normalize unnatural and unhealthy sexual behaviors and to include these terms even in child-centered programs so that these behaviors could be inculcated in children in their earliest stages of learning.”
CARIFAM complains that “every other Caribbean nation has come under increasing pressure to liberalize abortion laws and amend various pieces of legislation promoting a permissive and indulgent value system that is destroying our societies.”
Later this month, on November 28-30, Malawi will host another WCF regional conference, “The African Family & Cultural Colonization,” at which Brown, Feder, and Slater will appear. According to a WCF email, Malawi’s Vice President Saulo Chilima is scheduled to speak, along with Roman Catholic Bishop Luke Msusa, WCF Africa coordinator Theresa Okafor; Ann Kioko of the African Organization for Families; Moira Chimombo of SAFE Africa; Rev. Zacc Kawalala of Word is Alive Ministries.
Registration is being handled by the African Organization for Families which was founded “to defend the natural family from various pressures especially from the Western Countries which were imposing among others same-sex unions, abortion and destructive comprehensive sexuality education agenda.” Co-sponsors include Family Watch International and CitizenGo.
