Belize Action Frowns on U.N. Turnaround Over LGBT Expert

On Monday, a vote at the United Nations General Assembly cleared the way for the appointment of an independent expert, Thailand’s Vi-tit Mun-ta-bhorn, on sexual orientation and gender identity issues. Belize’s representatives at the U.N. had twice previously voted in favour of appointing the expert, but on Monday, a vote was initially and erroneously cast in favour of an amendment by African countries to defer the appointment. Blaming a “mix-up” or communication error, Belize approached U.N. staff to correct its vote on the record to go against the deferral and in favour of the appointment. The turn of events has displeased Belize Action, the Christian advocacy organization which opposes the appointment. Today, it announced via press release that Belize is now, “Supporting the enforcement of global homosexual rights. This is in direct contradiction to commitments the Prime Minister made to Church leaders in recent meetings. Belize needs to know that their Government voted in favour of the United Nations globally imposing of homosexual rights to the nations in direct violation to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights concerning religious, family, and educational rights and freedoms. It is a manipulation of true human rights, as explicitly articulated in the UDHR, in the worst degree.” Belize Action’s Director Scott Stirm spoke to News Five in Belmopan this afternoon, where he vowed to lead the resistance against the wide “enforcement” agenda of Muntabhorn and the U.N.

Scott Stirm

Pastor Scott Stirm, Director, Belize Action

“We don’t believe that this is a global appointment for the United Nations for an LGBT advocate. He has expressly stated – I’ll read off his own comments of what he said are his target goals and what he’s going to do: to push for decriminalizing same-sex relationships in the nations; that means he’s going to go after the seventy-plus nations as that have laws that criminalize same sex behaviour; to push for no longer treating LGBTI people as if they had a “problem” or “disorder” – this is what happened in Brazil; the counsellors are being sent to jail, because when somebody says I have these feelings, and they are counselling them away from these gender confusion feelings, they get thrown in jail. It’s craziness and ridiculousness, so we just don’t believe that this is an appointment to just look into certain things; this is a step toward enforcement. Officially recognizing people’s gender identity status; what that means is policies, laws in nations that require nations to recognize a different gender for their drivers’ licenses, for probably passports, birth certificates, all these kinds of things. Number four, clarifying misconstructions and misinterpretations; what that means is that they are going to go after anybody that speaks against them – we are already seeing this happen. And then the last one, which we find terribly offensive, which is integrating sexual orientation and gender identity empathy into curriculums from childhood onwards. What that means is, what’s being pushed from the United Nations level, is comprehensive sexuality education, which is, basically it’s terrible –homosexual and heterosexual pornographic material to primary school kids. There’s been a strong pushback on this area. So this is just somebody who’s going to look into these areas? We don’t believe that for a New York minute.”