Finding the Homosexual in Women’s
Rights
THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS
DORIS E. BUSS
Carleton University, Canada
Abstract ———————————————————————
In recent years, organizations on the American Christian Right (CR) have become
established actors at the United Nations, working to limit international agreement on
developments seen as ‘anti-family’, such as women’s rights, population policy and
abortion. At the same time, the Vatican has established itself as a strong voice
opposing international law and policy on women’s rights. For both actors, women’s
rights represent a direct challenge to the ‘natural family’ and hence a particular world
vision premised on a sexual division of labour. While women’s rights is a central
preoccupation for both actors, ‘homosexuality’ and the prospect of lesbian and gay
rights and ‘gay marriage’ is also a recurrent theme, intricately connected to women’s
rights. This article explores the relationship between women’s rights and homosexuality
as drawn by these two actors. It asks why, in an international arena that offers little
concrete recognition of, or protection for, lesbian and gay identities both the CR and
Vatican are concerned about a presumed homosexual agenda. It also explores what
role the debate about women’s rights plays in facilitating this ‘homosexual agenda’.
In addressing these questions, this article seeks to explore, and raise further questions
about international women’s rights as a language for international discussion about
social relations.
——————————————————————— Keywords
anti-gay, Christian Right, gender, lesbian and gay, United Nations, Vatican, women’s
rights
In recent years, a new actor has emerged on the international civil society
scene. American Christian Right organizations,1
concerned by international
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 6:2 June 2004, 257–284
ISSN 1461–6742 print/ISSN 1468–4470 online © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1461674042000211326
recognition of women and children’s rights, have launched what they define
as an international ‘natural family’ alliance. Christian Right activists are
building a global alliance of conservative religious faiths, including Protestants,
Mormons, Catholics, Jews, Hindus and Muslims, focused on resisting
international law and policy developments seen as ‘anti-family’ – with family
defined as ‘the voluntary union of a man and a woman in the lifelong
covenant of marriage’.2
While the alliance remains a largely American and
Christian dominated affair, it has become an established actor at international
arenas, often working with the Vatican on issues relating to women and
children.
The international politics of the Christian Right (CR) is largely directed at
the United Nations (UN), its agencies, committees and, more often, the major
UN-hosted international conferences of the 1990s and early part of the
twenty-first century, such as the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and
Development, the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women or the 2002 UN General
Assembly Special Session on Children. At these venues, the CR, alongside the
Vatican, has worked to restrict international agreement on women’s rights,
population policy, children’s rights, abortion and sexual and reproductive
rights. Their intervention, at these and other venues, usually takes the form
of looking for, and trying to prevent the inclusion of specific words – such
as ‘abortion’, ‘health services’, ‘gender’ – into international agreements,
decisions or policy documents.
In their international politics, the CR and Vatican target what they refer to
as ‘radical’ feminism (see Buss and Herman 2003: ch. 6) and women’s human
rights, particularly reproductive rights, as primary aspects of an agenda they
view as antithetical to the ‘natural family’. But, it would be a mistake, I argue,
to dismiss this movement as simply anti-feminist. In its global politics, the
CR identify a number of international enemies of the ‘natural family’ including
globalism, socialism and homosexuality.3
My focus here is on one of those
enemies: homosexuality. In the area of women’s rights, homosexuality is
often directly linked to ‘radical feminism’, with the CR and Vatican suggesting
that it is not possible to read the language of women’s rights without
recognizing its homosexual dimension. This raises two main questions
explored in this article: why homosexuality? And what is the relationship, as
understood by the CR, between homosexuals and feminists?
In an international arena where feminist, environmentalist and human
rights actors have gained a degree of legitimacy and global profile, lesbian
and gay organizations remain marginal at best.4
International agreements
and policies exist for women’s rights, children’s rights and HIV/AIDS, but
there is no international agreement or plan of action for ‘sexual minorities’,
to use the terminology of the UN (Heinze 1995: 50–61; Morgan and Walker
1995: 212). Some attempts have been made to include lesbian and gay issues
in international documents and human rights initiatives, such as the 2003
resolution on human rights and sexual orientation placed before the UN
Human Rights Commission, which expressed ‘deep concern at the occurrence
258 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––
of violations of human rights in the world against persons on the grounds of
their sexual orientation’. The reference to ‘sexual orientation’ was strongly
resisted by some Muslim countries – Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya
and Malaysia, in particular – who proposed amendments deleting the two
words. Unable to move forward, the Commission deferred discussion on the
resolution until 2004.5
Attempts such as this have been sporadic, often
constituting minor provisions attached to larger documents (on, for example,
women’s rights or HIV/AIDS), and are, for the most part unsuccessful. Where
women’s rights may have achieved at least formal or notional acceptance,
lesbian and gay rights are resolutely opposed at the international level.6
Despite the patchy record of lesbian and gay international political activity
(Walker 2000: 351), the CR and Vatican continue none the less to evoke the
spectre of homosexuality and a homosexual agenda at work internationally.
If lesbian and gay activists have had only a marginal impact on international
law and policy, why are the CR and Vatican so concerned? And, if lesbian
and gay activists maintain a minor international presence, from where and
how do the CR and Vatican see the homosexual threat emerging? And, what
is this relationship between feminism and homosexuality for the CR? Are
feminists and ‘homosexuals’ the same enemy, or do they merely work in
concert? While it might be tempting to dismiss this focus on women’s rights
as a convenient stratagem for a movement in search of a (homosexual)
demon, does this tell the whole story? Might it be that the language of
women’s rights and feminist activism resonates at some level with a CR vision
of the interplay between social order and sexuality?
In this article, I take a closer look at the CR’s depiction of a homosexual
force at work internationally. My objective is two-fold. First, understanding
the CR’s construction of homosexuality as an enemy of the ‘natural family’ is
essential to making sense of this global social movement and its international
agenda. Frank Lechner argues that in its global orientation, religious orthodoxy
– what Lechner (1993: 28) calls ‘fundamentalism’ – advocates a
particular world view and attempts to change the ‘actual balance of power in
the world and the cultural terms in which global actors operate’. The construction
of enemies is one of the devices by which the CR maps its world view
and global political project. As with other conservative religious movements,
the CR at the UN evidences a ‘friend–foe way of thinking’ (Meyer 2001: 8),
in which a politics of change is constituted through a process of contesting
‘the enemy’ (Aho 1994: 14–15).
Second, the relationship between homosexuality and women’s rights helps
to reveal and complicate the world view that underlies some aspects of CR
global politics. In turn, it also reveals, and is constitutive of, global dynamics
around women’s rights. The rise of an international CR politics occurs at a
time when, for a variety of reasons, women’s rights have secured an unprecedented
degree of international recognition. While this recognition is far from
unproblematic (see, for example, Mayer 1995), it suggests a global order in
which the language of women’s rights, for good and bad, has become a
–––––––––––––––––– Doris E. Buss/Finding the homosexual in women’s rights 259
framework within which to contest social relations. What larger questions
might this raise for feminist and human rights advocates about women’s
human rights and the direction of future international engagement?
I start this article by providing a brief and inevitably partial overview of
CR activists reviewed for this research. The groups discussed self-define as
‘orthodox religious believers’7
who are active, to varying degrees, in the
‘natural family’ politics at the UN and, in most cases, the World Congress of
Families (WCF), discussed in more detail later. In this study, I draw on the
publications and newsletters, statements and interventions of these CR groups
at UN meetings from the late 1990s to the present, as well as publications
from affiliated CR ‘think-tanks’, and transcripts of interviews with activists
conducted in 1999. As with any other social movement, the alliance of
orthodox faiths active at the UN is inherently unstable, contradictory, at times
conflicted, in a state of change, and inevitably pragmatic. The analysis
presented in this article is based on the work and politics of an array of CR
activists and institutions in this movement, but tends to focus on those who
act as the public face and negotiating arm of the CR at the UN. Inevitably,
there will be disagreements among CR activists, tensions between grassroots
and elite members, frontline workers and policy entrepreneurs and evolving,
and sometimes contradictory policy positions. The groups studied and referred
to here represent the leading force in the movement towards an orthodox,
‘natural family’ alliance at the UN.
THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT AT THE UN
In the period following the 1995 UN conference on women in Beijing, China,
a number of American Catholic, Protestant and Mormon organizations began
to mobilize a conservative Christian coalition at the UN. Initially focused on
resisting what it sees as a feminist take-over of the UN,8
this coalition has
broadened its remit to spearhead a global campaign on behalf of the ‘natural
family’, defined as the married union between a man and woman. The result
is that the CR has become an established actor in international arenas,
repeatedly clashing with feminist and other NGOs, and seeking to build
alliances with sympathetic state governments, and, less successfully, other
orthodox faiths, such as Islam, Judaism, and more recently Hinduism.9
CR international activism has become a distinct entity, continuous with
but notably different from its domestic manifestation in US politics. In this
article, for the sake of clarity, I refer to this alliance as the ‘CR UN’, to capture
both its difference in make-up, and arena of political struggle. The CR UN
parts company with its domestic allies on several fronts. First, it focuses almost
exclusively on the socio-political dimensions of global change, particularly as
they are seen to affect the ‘natural family’. For both the domestic and
international CR, there is a crisis in the ‘natural family’, but for the CR UN
this crisis has assumed global proportion necessitating international action.
260 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Second, the target of this international activism is the UN and, particularly
the now ubiquitous UN-hosted international conference. The 1990s saw the
unfolding of a relatively new arena for political engagement in the form of
international meetings on various issues from the environment (Rio de
Jainero, 1992), population and development (Cairo, 1994), human rights
(Vienna, 1993) and women (Beijing, 1995). The involvement of high-level
state representatives, together with an activist NGO sector turned these
conferences into dynamic events at which policy options were considered,
the negotiation of fundamental policy change was made possible and future
agenda items prefigured (Charlesworth 1996; Clark et al. 1998). These conferences,
and particularly the involvement of NGOs, represent for the CR UN
the worst possible aspects of an activist international order10
as well as,
paradoxically, the most effective means for their own international participation
(Buss 2004).
Some of the groups I include in the CR UN, such as Concerned Women for
America,11
Focus on the Family12
and to a lesser extent Eagle Forum,13
are
active in American domestic politics and have only recently developed
a political presence at the UN. Other activists have organized separate,
internationally oriented groups for the specific purpose of engaging in a
‘natural family’ politics at the UN. Organizations like the Catholic Family and
Human Rights Institute (C-Fam)14
and the Mormon organization World Family
Policy Center (WFPC; formerly NGO Family Voice)15
have taken a leadership
role in developing a coherent CR UN voice at the international realm.
Alongside these activist groups, and providing much of the policy direction
for the CR UN, are several CR ‘think-tanks’,16
of which the Howard Center is
the most notable. The Howard Center provides a base for some CR UN activists
and produces specialized ‘research’ material on ‘the family’ that informs CR
UN positions on various related issues.17
It is also one of two convenors
(along with the World Family Policy Center) of the WCF.18
With its regular,
regional meetings and conferences, the WCF is emerging as a permanent,
global, inter-faith institution, instrumental in guiding the CR UN’s attempt to
build an alliance of orthodox faiths at the UN.
Another key actor allied with but distinct from the CR UN’s ‘natural family’
politics is the Vatican, acting at the UN through its offices of the Holy See.19
As a permanent observer at the UN, the Vatican has rights of access that are
greater than those afforded to non-governmental organizations, such as the
CR UN. At UN conferences, this means that the Vatican can vote on the final
document, add reservations to conference agreements, access state only
meetings and rooms and negotiate alongside other states. In this capacity,
the Vatican defines itself not as a Catholic actor, but more as a state-like
entity with universal citizenship, working on behalf of ‘the integral good of
every human being’.20
The CR UN regard the Vatican, with its status at the UN and its self-defined
moral project, as a leader in the ‘natural family’ movement. This open alliance
with the Vatican is likely to raise eyebrows among some American Christian
–––––––––––––––––– Doris E. Buss/Finding the homosexual in women’s rights 261
Right activists for whom there is a history of anti-Catholic sentiment (Herman
1997: 42–4). Several of the CR UN activists I interviewed, however, expressed
open support for the Vatican’s international politics, seeing it as providing a
voice of morality at the UN (see, for example, Moloney 1999; Reid 1999;
Wright 1999).
LOOKING FOR – AND FINDING? – AN INTERNATIONAL ‘HOMOSEXUAL’
AGENDA
Both the CR and Vatican make their opposition to homosexuality clear. In the
case of the CR, this anti-gay position has translated into extensive and wellorchestrated
campaigns in American domestic politics to oppose measures
extending rights and protection to lesbians and gay men (Gallagher and Bull
1996; Herman 1997). Within the Catholic church, the 1986 release of the Letter
to all Catholic Bishops on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons began John
Paul II’s legacy of explicit opposition to homosexuality, and identification of
homosexuality as a ‘political problem’ ( Jordan 2000: ch. 2). The letter on
pastoral care, issued by Cardinal Ratzinger of the Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith, sought to clarify the Vatican’s position on homosexuality,
stipulating that homosexuality, whether practised or not, is an ‘objective
disorder’, indicating a ‘strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral
evil’.21
A further clarification issued by the Vatican in a June 2003 document
‘Considerations on Unions between Homosexual Persons’,22
condemned homosexual
acts as ‘against the natural moral law’, closing ‘the sexual act to the
gift of life’. Homosexual unions are to be opposed because ‘they’re not able to
contribute in a proper way to the procreation and survival of the human race’
and create ‘obstacles in the normal development of children’.
In recent years, the Vatican has taken a politically active stance against
lesbian and gay rights, issuing, for example, a condemnation of lesbian and
gay ‘unions’, and rights to adoption.23
In 2003, the Vatican issued a seventeenpage
document calling on Catholic politicians worldwide to bring their
political positions more in line with their religious beliefs in the areas of
abortion, cloning and same-sex marriage (Paulson 2003; Williams 2003).
Recent moves by some states, such as Canada, to recognize same-sex marriage
are being hotly contested by the Vatican both through further explicit
condemnations issued through its offices in Rome and, in the context of
Canada, by directly intervening in the Supreme Court of Canada hearings on
same-sex marriage.24
Despite the clear anti-gay position of both the Vatican and CR, there is a
central tension, at the very outset, in their international opposition to
homosexuality: while the threat of a homosexual future is proclaimed by
both actors, neither clearly nor consistently explains what the international
homosexual movement – or its agenda – is. Rather, the CR UN and Vatican
tend to be vague and sometimes even contradictory about this homosexual
262 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––
threat. In a 1999 interview, Austin Ruse, President of Catholic Family and
Human Rights Institute, shrugged off the idea of an active lesbian and gay
movement at the UN. ‘The question of homosexuality does not come up here,
it just does not come up in the United Nations. . . . I am surprised, honestly, I
am surprised that they [homosexuals] are not here’ (Ruse 1999).
Yet only months before this comment, Ruse and other CR UN activists
opposed a series of measures, at various international negotiations, which
they saw as attempts to advance homosexuality, including gay marriage.
These measures include the use of the term ‘gender’, described by Austin Ruse
in a 1998 article as a ‘codeword for gay rights [used] by homosexual
activists’.25
In an article on the 1998 negotiations on the International Criminal
Court, Richard G. Wilkins, Law Professor and Managing Director of the World
Family Policy Center (WFPC) at Brigham Young University and Kathryn O.
Balmforth, former Executive Director of WFPC, argue that ‘United Nations
human rights organizations have embarked on a concerted effort to reinterpret
already accepted human rights documents to include new rights for homosexuals’
and that these efforts are supported by the likes of Mary Robinson,
former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.26
If ‘questions of homosexuality’ do not come up at the UN, where do these
seemingly pro-gay initiatives come from? If ‘homosexuals are not at the UN’,
who or what was behind the supposed efforts to advance gay marriage and
introduce homosexuality through the term gender? Neither the Vatican nor
the CR UN offer a detailed analysis of the homosexual threat apparently at
work internationally. In contrast to its well-defined and orchestrated antigay
campaign in domestic US politics (Herman 1997), the CR internationally
appears more ad hoc in its opposition to homosexuality; impressionistic
rather than specific; allusive rather than documentary.
This failure to articulate a coherent vision of the homosexual threat
depicted by the CR UN and Vatican may be explained by a number of factors.
First and most obvious, the absence of an orchestrated campaign for lesbian
and gay international rights might make it difficult for CR UN activists to
label the threat they see emerging internationally. Similarly, the very lack of
a specific ‘coding’ of lesbian and gay issues by way of international human
rights guarantees, for example, may mean that the CR UN is a movement in
search of a target, at least as far as its anti-gay politics are concerned.
Second, the CR UN remains a relatively new participant in international
venues, though this is less true of the Vatican, and it may be that its failure
to give a clear embodiment to its enemy is partly due to the CR UN’s own
lack of clarity about who and what it faces internationally. We might expect
that as the CR UN continues to develop its international political engagement,
combined with its emerging research agenda through various affiliated ‘thinktanks’,
more detailed investigation of, and analysis into, the homosexual
threat will emerge in its campaign literature.
Whatever the reason, the CR UN and Vatican characterization of the
homosexual threat is defined at the outset by this central tension between a
–––––––––––––––––– Doris E. Buss/Finding the homosexual in women’s rights 263
movement that threatens yet is largely unidentified and unexplained. The
result is that homosexuality pops up in CR UN campaign literature, but is
either defined as shadowy and threatening – ‘small but . . . very rich, powerful,
and dangerous’27
– or a movement that works in conjunction with other,
often more concrete actors, like ‘radical’ feminists.
For example, in an article that originally appeared in the Family Research
Council Insight series of essays, journalist Tom McFeely (2001) characterizes
homosexuals as operating by ‘stealth’ and ‘subterfuge’. In an argument echoed
throughout CR UN campaign literature and which I discuss in more detail
later, that campaign of stealth takes the form of ‘definitional subterfuges’
(2001: 118) in which terms like ‘orientation’, ‘gender’ and ‘various forms of
the family’ (2001: 119) are deployed in a ‘deliberately confusing and inaccurate’
manner (2001: 118).
In other contexts, CR UN activists warn of a ‘homosexual’ threat linked
to various actors and ‘agendas’. They depict homosexuals as working in
collaboration with the ‘population control movement’ to discourage motherhood
and reduce fertility through the ‘incessant call for abortion rights
. . . and sexual freedom’ (Hamm 1995: 143). They highlight international
negotiations on children’s rights, the International Criminal Court and HIV/
AIDS as areas where attempts are made to secure explicit recognition of
lesbian and gay identities and the legitimacy of gay marriage through
terminology such as ‘various forms of the family’, ‘persecution’ and ‘men
who have sex with men’.28
And, as I will discuss in more detail later, efforts
to secure women’s rights are depicted by the CR UN as duplicitous attempts
to gain recognition – through the language of rights – of homosexuality
including homosexual marriage.29
The Vatican opposes many of the same initiatives identified by the CR UN
as part of a homosexual agenda, and at some UN conferences, the Vatican
appears to work in concert with the CR UN and its allies.30
In general,
however, the Vatican has been more circumspect in its specific identification
of a homosexual force at work in international arenas. In its 1995 statement
of reservations on and interpretation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform
for Action (on women), the Vatican objected to the language of ‘sexual and
reproductive rights’ because it gives women ‘unqualified control over sexuality
and fertility . . . [and] could be interpreted as a societal endorsement of
abortion or homosexuality.’31
In more recent UN interventions, the Vatican
has rarely invoked the ‘h’ word – homosexuality – using instead strong
language depicting a sexualization of social issues, including human rights,
that is part of a larger moral corruption of society and the family. The
Vatican’s intervention at the 2002 General Assembly Special Session on
Children is perhaps the best example of this approach:
When moral values are trampled on with impunity, when the atmosphere is
artificially charged with eroticism, when the meaning of human sexuality is
emptied and trivialized and children are even induced into unspeakable lifestyles
264 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––
and behavior in an alarming climate of permissiveness, the risk of violence
grows.32
In this and other statements, the Vatican uses suggestive and vaguely
indeterminate language to evoke the spectre of a radical sexual liberality that
works in unison with what Pope John Paul II calls the western ‘culture of
death’ (Urquhart 1995: 172). Vatican statements issued in the context of UN
meetings and conferences, refer to ‘minority’ interests representing a ‘narrow’
or ‘small’ segment of the population, pushing a dangerous ‘ideology’ on the
international community.33
That ideology, sometimes called ‘gender ideo-
logy’,34
is a reference to feminist and lesbian and gay attempts to secure
greater recognition and rights. In its report on marriage and ‘ad hoc’ unions,
for example, the Pontifical Council for the Family (2000) argues that ‘gender
ideology’ – the view that ‘being a man or a woman is not determined
fundamentally by sex but by culture’ – is being used as ‘the very bases [for
attacking] the family and interpersonal relationships’ (2000: para. 8). ‘Claiming
a similar status for marriage and de facto unions (including homosexual
unions) is usually justified today on the basis of categories and terms that
come from the ideology of ‘‘gender’’ ’ (2000: para. 8).
The Vatican’s preoccupation with upholding the family defined by marriage
‘between man and woman, that is, husband and wife’35
as a ‘social truth’36
has been a recurrent theme at recent UN conferences. Read together with
references to ‘moral pollution’ and ‘unspeakable ‘‘lifestyles’’ ’ in the context
of violence against children,37
and the ‘proper use of sexuality’38
in the
context of arresting the spread of HIV/AIDS, and a picture emerges of an
international force at work to undermine the ‘natural family’ and promote a
campaign of sexual liberality that includes ‘homosexuality’.
This picture of an indeterminate sexual liberalism at work internationally
leaves many questions unanswered, such as: who or what lies behind this
campaign of sexual liberality? What is this international force and what does
it hope to gain by undermining the ‘natural family’ and promoting a new
sexual order? In place of a concrete answer, a dominant theme emerging
from CR UN and Vatican publications and statements is that the homosexual
agenda, whatever it may be, is primarily advanced through the language of
women’s rights.
FEMINISTS, HOMOSEXUALS AND HOMOSEXUAL FEMINISTS
For both the Vatican and CR UN, the link between homosexuals and feminists
is made in a number of ways. First, feminists are defined as homosexuals,
and more particularly ‘lesbians’. The feminist movement is ‘peopled’ by
lesbians (Reid 1999) ‘leading feminist ideologues are themselves lesbians’
(McFeely 2001: 119) and UN conferences, such as the Beijing Conference,
have offered a ‘clear place’ for lesbians.39
–––––––––––––––––– Doris E. Buss/Finding the homosexual in women’s rights 265
In support of this characterization of a feminist homosexual agenda, the
CR UN and Vatican point to attempts, supported by feminist activists, at the
1995 Beijing Conference on Women to include in the agreed document,
references to ‘sexual orientation’ (Sanders 1996; Fried and Landsberg-Lewis
1999: 113–14). The draft agreement at Beijing referred to sexual orientation
primarily in the context of women’s right not to be discriminated against on
the basis of sexual identity. The phrase ‘sexual orientation’ was kept bracketed
– and subject to negotiation – until the early hours of the morning on
the last day of negotiations when it was struck out (Sanders 1996; Fried and
Landsberg-Lewis 1999: 113–14). Several states, including the USA, Canada
and the European Union, agreed to read sexual orientation into their obligations
under the Beijing agreement. Defining lesbians as feminists, and feminists
as lesbians is, of course, nothing new (see, for example, Herman 1997:
ch. 4), but the CR UN maintain a terminological distinction between ‘feminists’
and ‘homosexuals’, suggesting that beyond an overlap in personnel, the
feminist and homosexual movements are otherwise distinct (McFeely 2001).
They come together at the points where their different agendas overlap.40
Thus, the second link drawn by the CR UN between feminists and homosexual
activists is a shared investment in a particular vision of social change that
might be characterized as an undermining of the ‘natural family’.
The CR UN use various terms to suggest that issues such as abortion, a
sexual division of labour, diversity of families and the legal and social
recognition of homosexuality all serve to undermine the social order predicated
upon the ‘natural family’. A review of CR UN activist material reveals
identification of a panoply of different agendas/forces/ideologies all working
in alliance to build a ‘post family’ social order (Carlson 1999: 10). ‘Feminist
ideologues’ (McFeely 2001: 119) work on behalf of a feminist agenda that
includes abortion, a ‘reproductive rights agenda’41
and ‘homosexual rights’.42
The ‘homosexual agenda’,43
also referred to as the ‘gay rights agenda’ (McFeely
2001: 118), promotes ‘homosexual ideology’44
and a ‘radical safe-sex’
agenda,45
supported by an array of ‘pro-homosexual forces’,46
mostly unidentified
but including a ‘coalition of left-wing governments’,47
and quite possibly,
the ‘condom lobby’, working on behalf of the distribution of condoms and
against the promotion of abstinence to curb the spread of AIDS.48
Underpinning most of these references to various agendas at work internationally
is the argument that all of these forces and agendas seek to
undermine the ‘natural family’ and particularly the Christian family (Buss
and Herman 2003). There is not space in this article to do justice to the
‘new family theology’ that underlies and structures much of the CR UN
understanding of its international political project (but see Buss and Herman
2003: chs 1 and 5). What emerges from the above is a conviction by the CR
UN and Vatican that the interests of feminists and homosexuals converge in
this ‘post family’ dystopia. Thus, while homosexuals and feminists are depicted
by the CR UN as more or less the same people (feminists are lesbians), and
share a similar commitment to a social change antithetical to the ‘natural
266 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––
family’, a third point of convergence emerges: both homosexual and feminist
ends are achievable through the promotion of women’s rights.
In a 1999 interview, Austin Ruse, President, Catholic Family and Human
Rights Institute, described the ‘feminist agenda’ at the UN as a complete ‘sea
change in mankind’ contingent upon women’s liberation from their biological
bodies.
Buss: And what is the agenda that radical feminists are advancing?
Ruse: The agenda? Do you mean at the end of the day what did they want? I
don’t really know, perhaps it’s a complete change, a sea change in mankind. I
mean at the end of the day perhaps that’s what they are looking for. . . . it seems
. . . the most important thing to them is complete freedom from their reproductive
systems, which some feminists have referred to pregnancy as a kind of sexual
slavery.
The implication in most CR UN activist publications is that the ‘sea change’
that lies at the heart of feminist activism and that will be achieved through
the international recognition of women’s rights, also serves homosexual
interests, precisely by rewriting the social – and biological – order. CR UN
publications as well as Vatican statements at UN events focus on the language
of women’s rights as triggering a radical rewriting of the social order in
which sexual relations, including the ‘natural family’ and the ‘natural’ roles
of men and women, are undermined. Terms such as ‘reproductive rights’ and
‘health’ are identified as signifiers of efforts to make access to abortion a
fundamental human right,49
while sexual rights and education, particularly
as applied to adolescents, are identified as referring to the promotion of
varied sexual conduct.50
In the following section, I explore in more detail how the CR UN read these
different terms as signalling a radical social agenda. The CR UN and Vatican
see language as the key weapon of feminist and homosexual forces. The word
that most clearly symbolizes the importance of language and the shared
interests of feminists and homosexuals is ‘gender’.
The Gender Agenda
Language is the weapon of choice at the United Nations – where politicians
‘negotiate’ instead of vote, where battles are fought with words instead of
bullets and where victory is won with syllables not swords. That’s because U.N.
delegates, charged with protecting human rights worldwide, understand that
words communicate ideas and ideas have powerful consequences.51
Very generally, the CR UN argument about the power of language, repeatedly
found in its campaign literature, goes something like this: feminists use vague
or ‘innocuous’52
sounding language to mask another agenda: most commonly,
the promotion of abortion and the destruction of the ‘natural family’.53
For
–––––––––––––––––– Doris E. Buss/Finding the homosexual in women’s rights 267
example, CR UN activists point to ‘reproductive health’, and variations on
that phrase including ‘sexual rights’, ‘reproductive rights’ and ‘health services’,
as duplicitous attempts to make abortion a universal human right.54
For
example, recent CR UN activist literature – primarily newsletters – carried the
story about a Canadian government delegate to the UN who ‘revealed’ that
the phrase ‘reproductive health services’ includes abortion. According to the
Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, the revelation occurred as
follows:
Following a request by the United States to explain the seemingly innocuous
word ‘services’ in relation to ‘reproductive health care,’ the Canadian responded,
‘Of course it includes, and I hate to say the word, but it includes abortion.’
Gasps could be heard from all across Conference Room 4 at UN headquarters
in New York City.55
This ‘admission’ by an unnamed Canadian is held out by CR UN activists as
the smoking gun proving what they have long argued: ‘that some delegations
push radical social agendas by using such innocuous language – a strategy
to avoid real debate on what they know would be controversial positions’.56
The Vatican, meanwhile, has long condemned ‘ambiguous terminology’
such as ‘ ‘‘women’s right to control their sexuality’’, ‘‘women’s right to control
. . . their fertility’’ or ‘‘couples and individuals’’ ’ that it says characterize
international agreements on women’s rights and related issues. These terms
are objectionable to the Vatican because they ‘could be understood as
endorsing sexual relationships outside heterosexual marriage’, and as a
‘societal endorsement of abortion or homosexuality’.57
The Vatican recently issued its own dictionary clarifying the meaning of
‘ambiguous terminology’ such as ‘reproductive rights’, ‘gender’ and the
‘Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against
Women’.58
These terms need clarification, according to Cardinal Alfonso Lopez
Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, the body responsible
for compiling the dictionary, because they may take on meanings ‘used to
signify a radical ideological feminism’.59
Perhaps the term most often identified by the CR UN and Vatican as
operating to masquerade a nefarious social reform agenda is ‘gender’. For the
Vatican, the idea that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are socially constructed categories
is inimical to its conception of the ‘natural family’ defined by the specific
roles performed by men and women.60
The Vatican views the complementarity
of women and men as essential to the family with women and men performing
the roles dictated by their different biologies. Women, for example, are ‘wives
and mothers’. While the Vatican argues that these roles are not biologically
deterministic, in that women can be mothers and employees61
this complementarity
between women and men is built on an essential sexual difference.62
Thus, gender, in its suggestion of the social construction of female and male,
poses a threat to the Vatican’s ‘natural family’ form and is resisted by the
268 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Vatican in its interventions at the UN. In its statement of reservations and
interpretations on the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, for
example, the Vatican stated that it understood gender as ‘grounded in
biological sexual identity, male or female’ and specifically rejected ‘dubious
interpretations based on world views which assert that sexual identity can be
adapted indefinitely to suit new and different purposes’.63
The CR UN takes a
similar position, arguing that if gender roles are viewed as socially constructed,
this will lead to homosexuality through the removal of the boundaries
that define male and female.
Unfortunately, when you buy into the concept that there is no distinction
between men and women that leads you down a path that gets you to accept
homosexuality. What’s the difference between a man and a man being together
if there is no difference between men and women? Then, [you get] into all other
kinds of bizarre lifestyles . . .
(Wright 1999)
CR UN activist publications periodically make reference to what I have
termed the ‘five genders’ argument.64
Loosely based on the work of Anne
Fausto-Sterling (1993),65
the CR UN argue that the real agenda behind attempts
to include ‘gender’ is a societal transformation in which gender identity is
not limited to male and female.
[T]he goal (of activists at the Beijing Conference) is to give members of the
human family five genders from which to choose instead of two. When freed
from traditional biases, a person can decide whether to be male, female,
homosexual, lesbian, or transgendered. Some may want to try all five in time.66
Thus, ‘gender’, whether as part of the five genders story or a feminist
campaign to universalize abortion, is a central and recurring feature of CR
UN and Vatican positions at the UN. Through references to the ‘gender
agenda’ or ‘gender ideology’, both the Vatican and CR UN position ‘gender’
as the key to the global political project of feminists, lesbians and gay men.
This emphasis on – and arguably sensationalization of – the term ‘gender’
might be explained, in part, by the importance of the term ‘gender’ in feminist
international political engagement, particularly around women’s rights.
Feminist campaigns and legal strategies to secure international recognition
of ‘women’s rights as human rights’ (Peters and Wolper 1995) have consciously
deployed the term gender to convey, among other things, a more comprehensive
approach to women’s rights rather than simple inclusion into existing
frameworks (Bunch 1995). There is not space in this article to explore fully
the centrality of gender to feminist international activism. However, feminist
analysis of international law and politics incorporates an understanding of
‘gender’ – the recognition that sex roles are socially constructed – as ‘a
central dynamic through which power is articulated’ (Segal 1999: 42). Feminist
–––––––––––––––––– Doris E. Buss/Finding the homosexual in women’s rights 269
scholars, for example, argue that existing international institutions, actors
and the very discipline of international law, are premised on a world view, in
which the duality of masculine and feminine imposes normative constraints
on women’s equality (see, generally, Peterson 1992; Bunch 1995; Sullivan
1995; Peterson and True 1998; Charlesworth and Chinkin 2000; Marchand
and Runyan 2000). In the area of women’s rights, a ‘gender’ analysis is
advocated as a means to explore and challenge culturally constructed notions
of masculinity and femininity that limit equal access to and application of
human rights protections. Similarly, campaigns for ‘gender justice’ within the
new International Criminal Court argue for a more expansive legal recognition
of the ways in which gender structures particular forms of violence (Bedont
and Hall-Martinez 1999; Copelon 2000).
The Christian Right and Vatican resisted these attempts to include ‘gender’
at various conferences from the 1995 Beijing conference on women (Buss
1998), to the Rome negotiations on the International Criminal Court (Copelon
2000). The result is that some international negotiations and agreements have
become a tug-of-war over the inclusion of ‘gender’, with feminists pulling on
one side for keeping the term, and CR UN activists and sympathetic states
and actors, resisting. In these struggles, the CR UN and Vatican demonstrate
a deeply focused opposition to ‘gender’ that cannot be explained solely by
feminist preference for the term. Rather, this opposition to gender is likely
motivated, to a large degree, by the CR UN and Vatican view that ‘gender’
fundamentally challenges the presumed correlation between biology and
sexuality, a topic that has also been the subject of extensive feminist comment
(see, for example, Butler 1993; Ingraham 1994; Martin 1996; Scott 1999;
Segal 1999).
The term gender, for the CR UN and Vatican, poses a clear challenge to the
social order based on the ‘natural family’. Through references to the ‘gender
agenda’ and ‘gender ideology’, these actors draw an explicit link between the
politics of women’s rights and its effect on a social order characterized by a
sexual division of labour. Take, for example, the following comments by
James Dobson, president of Focus on the Family written in advance of the
1995 Beijing Conference on Women and as part of a newsletter explaining
the importance of Christian Right activism at that conference:
[T]he radicals want to dissolve the traditional roles of mothers and fathers. They
also hope to eliminate such terms as ‘wife, husband, son, daughter, sister,
brother, manhood, womanhood, masculine’ and ‘feminine’. . . . The ultimate goal
. . . is a plan to get rid of traditional sexuality in order to destroy patriarchy.67
In this comment, Dobson makes a link between sexuality and patriarchy,
in which the opening up of one leads to the destruction of the other. Gender –
the move from biology to social construction – leaves ‘the door wide open
for governments to include homosexuality, bisexuality and transsexuality’.68
270 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Accepting gender as socially constructed ‘would usher in acceptance of
homosexual, lesbian and transgender/transsexual behavior’.69
At its most basic, CR UN and Vatican opposition to gender as leading to
homosexuality is an argument that ‘sexual practices [are] capable of generating
social change’ (Richardson 2000: 31). Homosexual families, pre-marital
sex and multiple partners are all characterized by the CR UN as leading to a
form of social decay in which the ‘natural family’ will disappear. In this
respect, the CR UN and Vatican offer a vision of the relationship between
sexual and social spheres more fluid than that sometimes suggested by
feminists themselves (Richardson 2000: 29–30). Indeed, the CR UN and
Vatican insistence that gender – the social rather than biological construction
of sex roles – inevitably challenges heterosexuality goes to the heart of recent
feminist debates about the problematic erasure of sexuality from some
understandings of gender. For some feminist theorists, social constructionism,
and the reification of the sex/gender dichotomy have functioned to naturalize
sex as heterosex. The insistence on gender as socially constructed and sex as
biology, positions ‘sex’, and the existence of two sexes – male and female –
as unquestionably ‘natural’, and desire as unquestionably heterosexual (Butler
1990: ch. 1; Ingraham 1994; Smart 1995; Davies 1997). Ironically, the CR UN
and Vatican are raising the alarm about the radicalism of gender at the same
time that some feminists are bemoaning its potential impotence.
The CR UN and Vatican opposition to gender highlights very clearly the nexus
they draw between feminism and homosexuality. A change in the social structure
precipitated by women’s rights raises the alarm of a rupture in the sexual
arena, just as a change in a biologically deterministic sexual sphere heralds the
demise of a social system built upon the ‘natural family’. This conflation of
feminist politics with homosexual outcomes raises a number of issues about
the actual manifestation of sexual politics at the UN, and the role of women’s
rights as a political framework for a larger discussion about social relations.
WHEN HOMOSEXUALITY MEETS WOMEN’S RIGHTS
There are likely a number of factors that motivate and shape CR UN and
Vatican anti-gay politics. Strategically, finding an international homosexual
foe may provide the CR with more continuity between its domestic and
international politics. Many of the CR actors at the UN will have cut their
activist teeth in American domestic politics and thus have a finely tuned
sensitivity for anti-gay politics. The homosexual threat may, in this vein, also
strike a chord with CR grass roots members who might otherwise be opposed
to CR international activism or fail to see the significance of the UN as a
political arena.70
An anti-gay politics also provides a crucial point of alliance between CR
UN actors and Muslim and Catholic countries with which the CR is attempting
to forge a single, ‘pro-family’ movement at the UN (see Buss and Herman
–––––––––––––––––– Doris E. Buss/Finding the homosexual in women’s rights 271
2003). Events at the 2001 UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS
demonstrate the level of antipathy to lesbian and gay rights in the international
arena. References to gay men as one of the groups particularly
vulnerable to HIV/AIDS were removed from the final document because of
opposition by some states, many of them fundamentalist Islamic, who objected
to even the mere mention of ‘men who have sex with men’ (Beattie and
Valkin 2001). This position was supported by the CR UN, and hailed as a
victory for ‘pro family groups’.71
The homosexual threat thus provides the CR UN with something of a rationale
or raison d’etre not as readily found in the spectre of ‘radical’ feminism. In
many respects, women’s rights are a difficult issue for CR UN activists, some of
whom self-identify as feminists (Ruse 1999) and others who find it hard to be
‘against’ rights (Moloney 1999; Reid 1999; Wright 1999). Sarah Diamond has
similarly argued that ‘women’s rights’ has become a problem for domestic CR
politics in the USA: ‘Even on the Right, it is no longer politically correct to
make direct attacks on women’s equality . . . one does not read or hear arguments
from the Right that women should be paid less than men for the same
work . . .’ (Diamond 1998: 127, emphasis in original). Homosexuality thus offers
a potentially more uncomplicated target for the CR. This is not to suggest that
feminism is not still a central villain in CR UN activism. Indeed, I would argue
that ‘radical’ feminists are, in many respects, the dramatis personae in a larger
CR UN politics based on protecting ‘the traditional family’, but which includes
other enemies, such as homosexuals.
Finally, the CR UN and Vatican are at least partly right that the language
of women’s rights, for good or bad, has proved to be a potential vehicle for
securing international recognition of sexual rights (Lai and Ralph 1995; Fried
and Landsberg-Lewis 1999; Otto 1999). The Beijing Conference, with its
bracketed references to ‘sexual orientation’, enabled a reasonably high-level
international discussion of sexuality as a human right. Similarly, the decision
by some state governments to read in sexual orientation to the final Beijing
agreement represented an important step towards international recognition
of some aspects of lesbian and gay rights.
All of these factors suggest that homosexuality is and likely will remain a
key enemy against which the CR UN defines itself. Other enemies, such as
‘radical’ feminists are also important global contenders, and there is no
indication that one or the other occupies first place in a CR UN ‘most wanted’
list. However, it is equally clear that feminist activism and the language of
women’s rights will continue to frame CR UN and Vatican opposition to
various global political initiatives. Not only does women’s rights, particularly
as advanced by ‘radical’ feminists, represent for the CR UN and Vatican a
vision of social relations antithetical to its own, women’s rights also provides
an accessible conceptual platform from which to launch a ‘natural family’
global politics. And it is here, at the intersection of feminist activism, women’s
rights and international politics that I want to offer some tentative, concluding
thoughts.
272 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––
In a study of women’s human rights activism and scholarship, anthropologist
Annelise Riles (2002: 303) argues that for feminists, international human rights
‘served as a marker, an empty box around which a contentious conversation
could be cautiously continued’. Thus, while the language of women’s rights
may have become a political project in its own right, it serves another purpose:
providing an arena and context within which to make other demands on, and
challenges to, the social order. Similarly, one might read women’s rights as
‘keywords’ (see Appadurai 1990) in a period of global change where social
relations are negotiated and contested at forums like the UN-hosted conference.
But at what costs have women’s rights become the empty boxes around
which debate takes place? Certainly, women’s rights, and international feminist
politics, have enabled an important political discussion of social relations
and global change. What are the implications for women’s rights that also
operate as a platform for an international ‘contentious conversation’?
My question is more than just a concern about women’s rights as generating
a ‘backlash’ by orthodox Christian actors. CR UN and Vatican global activism
has demonstrated that in some cases ‘the empty box’ of women’s rights
becomes the focus of different currents and political projects. This is not
necessarily a negative feature. One might argue that a vision of women’s
rights that also entails a consideration of the relationship between sexual
relations and social change is a positive development, suggesting a more
broad-based, inclusive challenge to the dominant order. But it also suggests
the importance of thinking about and tracking the ways in which the language
of women’s rights becomes the host for different debates about social relations.
Future research, for example, might consider why it is that the language of
women’s rights has become something of an international framework for
negotiating social change. And, what implications will this have? Might it
be, for example, that by framing the debates on aspects of social relations,
women’s rights becomes inflected with different meaning, in turn shaping
and constraining a politics of equality?
And what should we make of this focus on the language of women’s rights?
Just as the Christian Right and Vatican emphasize language as the insidious
force of change, so too do some feminists (see, for example, Fried and
Landsberg-Lewis 1999: 105). What are the implications – and limitations of –
a politics focused on language? How important is this recognition at the
international level? Does the ‘tug-of-war’ over gender, for example, help or
hinder a politics of equality?
Doris E. Buss
Department of Law
Carleton University
1125 Colonel By Dr.
Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada K1S 5B6
E-mail: dbuss@connect.carleton.ca
–––––––––––––––––– Doris E. Buss/Finding the homosexual in women’s rights 273
Notes
1 In this article, I use the term ‘Christian Right’ in reference to primarily American
organizations pursuing a conservative politics based on a strict and particular
reading of the Bible. Somewhat unusually, I also include conservative Catholics
and Mormons as part of the Christian Right movement at the United Nations
because of attempts by various organizations to build a broad, interfaith ‘natural
family’ coalition at the UN. For a further discussion of the religious and political
character of the Christian Right, see Lienesch (1993), Herman (1997) and Buss
and Herman (2003).
2 Geneva Declaration, World Congress of Families II, November 1999, available at
http://www.worldcongress.org. The Geneva Declaration is the agreed statement,
and future policy ‘road map’ drafted at the second World Congress of Families
(WCF) held in 1999. The WCF is a regular conference of conservative religious
activists drawn from across the globe and representing a variety of faiths,
including Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Hindu. The WCF seeks to establish an
alliance of ‘the most orthodox believers in each denomination, church or faith
group’ to ‘respond together to the global spread of a militant secularism’ (WCF
website, http://www.worldcongress.org, accessed 13 December 2003). For further
discussion of the WCF and Geneva Declaration, see Buss and Herman (2003);
Buss (2004).
3 For a further discussion of the CR’s global political enemies, see Buss and Herman
(2003). In this article, I use the term ‘homosexuality’, rather than ‘lesbian and
gay’ because it is the term used by both the CR and Vatican. Homosexuality
arguably has a pejorative resonance. To reflect fully and fairly the position and
approach of these two actors, I continue to use ‘homosexuality’ in contexts where
the CR and Vatican would do so.
4 The International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), an umbrella organization
representing various lesbian and gay groups, attempted to gain UN-ECOSOC
accreditation as a non-governmental organization. ILGA was successful in 1993,
allowing it to attend and participate in various United Nations forums as an
accredited NGO. This status was revoked the following year, apparently at the
behest of the United States after controversy erupted over the presence of the
North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) as one of the organizations
within the ILGA umbrella. ILGA was expelled from ECOSOC (see Morgan
and Walker 1995: 213–4; Otto 1996; Sanders 1996; Walker 2000: 346–7), and its
attempts to regain its status as an ECOSOC accredited NGO were eventually
unsuccessful (Archibald 2002b). While there are other, smaller lesbian and gay
organizations with an active international interest, at the time of writing, there
does not appear to be a lesbian and gay organization with a dedicated mandate
at the UN.
5 Jonathan Fowler, ‘U.N. Rights Postpones Attempt to Tackle Gay Rights amid
Anger from Muslim Countries’, Associated Press, 25 April 2003. See also Catholic
Family and Human Rights Institute, ‘Homosexuals Threaten Aggressive Campaign
to Pass UN Human Rights Law’, Friday Fax 6 (19): 2 May 2003, on file with
274 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––
author; Austin Ruse, ‘Emergency Action Alert/Fight Radical Homosexual UN
Agenda’, Friday Fax 2 May 2003.
6 There have been some notable successes in securing international recognition of
lesbian and gay rights (for a discussion see LaViolette and Whitworth 1994: 576–
7; Sanders 1996; Walker 2000), but these are sporadic and partial. The human
rights concerns of lesbians and gay men have been largely ignored at the
international level. Amnesty International, for example, has only recently, and
after much contention, concerned itself with human rights violations of ‘sexual
minorities’ (Baehr 1994). Similarly, lesbians and gay men have had to fight, with
patchy success, to secure recognition of sexuality as a protected ground for
purposes such as refugee claims (McGee 2001; Millbank 2002).
7 See the World Congress of Families website, http://www.worldcongress.org, and
discussion at footnote 1.
8 See, for example, Kathryn Balmforth, ‘Hijacking Human Rights’, speech delivered
at the World Congress of Families II, 14–17 November 1999, Geneva, Switzerland
(http://www.worldcongress.org, accessed 16 December 2003).
9 World Congress of Families Newsletter (2001) 2 (9). Available at http://www.
worldcongress.org (accessed 16 December 2003).
10 CR UN activists point to conferences such as the 1994 Cairo Conference on
Population and Development and the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women as
examples of venues at which ‘radical’ groups ‘hijacked’ the negotiations to push
their own agenda (Kathryn Balmforth, n. 8; Catholic Family and Human Rights
Institute, ‘Powerful NGOs Gather to Put Left-Wing Pressure on UN General
Assembly’, Friday Fax 3 (13): 18 February 2000, http://www.c-fam.org). NGOs,
other than CR groups, are routinely vilified in CR activist publications as, for
example, the source of ‘all the wacky ideas in the world’ (Austin Ruse, President,
Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, newsletter, 21 October 1999, on file
with author).
11 See http://www.cwfa.org
12 See http://www.family.org
13 See http://www.eagleforum.org
14 Founded in 1997 by Human Life International, C-Fam is located in New York
near the UN. See http://www.c-fam.org
15 According to the World Congress of Families website (http://www.
worldcongress.org/wcf3/wcf3_home.htm, accessed 23 April 2002), WFPC was
founded by the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies and the
Reuben Clark School of Law, in partnership with the School of Family Life at
Brigham Young University. WFPC’s mission is ‘to provide worldwide democratic
input and effectively educate the United Nations System on pro-family and other
value-based issues’. Its managing director is Richard Wilkins, a law professor at
BYU. See http://www.worldfamilypolicycenter.org
16 This rise in the number of CR think-tanks and use of social science research
to bolster CR policy positions appears to be a growing trend within the CR
more generally. Other notable research centres, for my purpose, include the
Beverly LaHaye Institute (Concerned Women for America, http://www.
–––––––––––––––––– Doris E. Buss/Finding the homosexual in women’s rights 275
beverlylahayeinstitute.org/bli/), the Family Research Council (http://www.frc.org)
and the new International Organizations Research Group (C-Fam), ‘a think-tank
to research and write about institutions that pose direct threats to the family,
the unborn, the faith and national sovereignty’ (http://www.c-fam.org/iorg.htm
(C-Fam)).
17 With links to the Rockford Institute (see http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/),
the Howard Center (see http://www.profam.org) contains two specialized research
units: The Family in America Studies Center and the Religion and Society Studies
Center, as well as the Swan Library, a ‘clearinghouse of truthful and effective
information’ in support of ‘the natural family’.
18 See discussion, note 2.
19 The Holy See refers to the diocese – the seat – of Rome, but practically, is the
official face of the Vatican at the UN. For a discussion of the status of the Holy
See at the UN, see Kunz (1952). I prefer the term Vatican because it has a broader
meaning and includes both the Holy See and the offices through which the Pope
functions and the Church is governed (Reese 1996).
20 John Paul II, ‘Address to the United Nations General Assembly’, 1996, on file
with author.
21 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic
Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons’, 1 October, signed Joseph
Cardinal Ratzinger and Alberto Bovone (http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/
congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19861001_homosexual-
persons_en.html).
22 Holy See, ‘Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to
Unions between Homosexual Persons’, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
signed 28 July 2003 by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Archbishop Angelo Amato
(http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/
rc_con_cfaith_doc_20030731_homosexual-unions_en.html).
23 See, for example, Pontifical Council for the Family, ‘Family, Marriage and
‘‘De Facto Unions’’ ’ report, 26 July 2000, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/
pontifical_councils/family/documents/rc_pc_family_doc_20001109_de-factounions_en.html;
‘Declaration of the Pontifical Council for the Family regarding
the Resolution of the European Parliament dated March 16, 2000, making de
facto unions, including same sex unions, equal to the family’, 17 March 2000,
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/family/documents/
rc_pc_family_doc_20000317_declaration-homosexual-unions_en.html
24 Campbell Clark, ‘Court to Handle Same-Sex Bill Its Way.’ Globe and Mail, 2 August
2004: A4.
25 Austin Ruse, President, Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, ‘Feminists
at UN Seek Redefinition of Universal Human Rights’, 13 November 1998, http://
www.NewsMax.com (accessed 12 November 2000).
26 Wilkins and Balmforth 2001: 106. See also Concerned Women for America,
‘United Nations Cairo ò5 Preparatory Conference’, 31 March 1999, http://
www.cwfa.org/ (accessed 13 August 1999).
276 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––
27 Austin Ruse, President, Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, emergency
action alert, 2 May 2003, on file with author.
28 On the International Criminal Court, see, for example, Wilkins and Balmforth
(2001) and their discussion at note 21. The 2002 Special Session on Children was
seen to condone homosexual marriage through references in the agreed final
document to various forms of the family: see, for example, Catholic Family and
Human Rights Institute, ‘Press Release: Bush Administration Stops Abortion at
UN Child Summit’, 13 May 2002 (on file with author); Archibald (2002a).
See also, Austin Ruse, President, Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute,
newsletter, 27 June 2001 (on file with author) who reports that ‘left-wing
governments and homosexual activists’ have attempted to ‘hijack the UN World
Conference on Aids [to] turn it into a propaganda tool for the homosexual
ideology’.
29 See, for example, Concerned Women for America, ‘Redefining ‘‘Local Control’’:
18th Commission on Human Settlements Paves Way for Istanbul ò5’, 12 February
2001 (on file with author).
30 See, for example, Archibald (2002a); Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute,
n. 28; ‘Statement by the International Sexual and Reproductive Rights Coalition
(ISRRC)’ press release, 10 May 2002, http://www.reproductiverights.org/
ww_adv_child_coalition.html (accessed 29 May 2002).
31 Beijing Declaration, Chapter V, Adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform
for Action, UN Doc. DPI/1766/Wom (1996), paragraph 11.
32 Holy See, ‘Statement by His Eminence Alfonso Cardinal Lopez Trujillo at the
Twenty-Seventh Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly on
Children, New York 9 May 2002’, http://www.un.org/ga/children/holyseeE.htm
(accessed 1 October 2002).
33 See, for example, ‘Address to the Secretary General and the Administrative
Committee on Coordination of the United Nations’, 7 April 2000, http://www.
vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/2000/apr-jun/documents/hf_jpii_spe_20000407_secretary-general-un_en.html
(accessed 26 January 2004);
‘Intervention of the Holy See at the Commission on the Status of Women’,
4 March 1999, available at http://www.vatican.va and accessing the Roman Curia,
Secretariat of State; ‘Intervention of Cardinal Angelo Sodano at the Millenium
Summit of the United Nations’, 8 September 2000, on file with author.
34 John Paul II, ‘Address to the United Nations General Assembly’, 8 July 1996, on
file with author; Pontifical Council for the Family, ‘Family, Marriage and ‘‘De
Facto Unions’’ ’, n. 23.
35 ‘Declaration by the Holy See Delegation at the Special Session of the General
Assembly of the United Nations on the Adoption of the Documents ‘‘A World Fit
for Children’’ ’, 10 May 2002, http://www.holyseemission.org (accessed
9 October 2002).
36 ‘Statement by H. Em. Cardinal Alfonso Lo´pez Trujillo during the Meeting of
Religious Leaders as Part of the Special Session of the General Assembly on
Children, New York, May 7, 2002’, http://www.holyseemission.org (accessed
9 October 2002).
–––––––––––––––––– Doris E. Buss/Finding the homosexual in women’s rights 277
37 ‘Statement by His Eminence Alfonso Cardinal Lopez Trujillo at the TwentySeventh
Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly on Children’
9 May 2002, http://www.un.org/ga/children/holyseeE.htm (accessed 1 October
2002).
38 ‘Statement by H.E. Archbishop Javier Lozano, Barraga´n, President of the Pontifical
Council for Pastoral Assistance of Health Care Workers, Head of the Holy See
Delegation to the XXVI Special Session of the General Assembly on HIV/AIDS,
New York, 27 June 2001’, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/secretariat_state/
documents/rc_seq-st_doc_20010627_un-aids_en.html (accessed 7 October 2002).
39 Concerned Women for America, ‘In the Aftermath: The UN Fourth World Conference
on Women’, 7 August 1997, on file with author.
40 See, for example, Catherina Hurlburt, ‘The Good Ol’ Girls’ Club: United Nations’
Anti-Family Discrimination Exposed’, Concerned Women for America, 5 March
2001, http://www.cwfa.org (accessed 27 June 2001); Concerned Women for
America, ‘Redefining ‘‘Local Control’’ ’, n. 29; Real Women of Canada, ‘Troubling
Concerns about International Charities’, Reality, September/October 1999, http://
www.realwomenca.com (accessed 7 October 2000).
41 Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, ‘Noted UN Expert Criticizes New UN
Child Document’, Friday Fax 4 (22): 18 May 2001.
42 Catherina Hurlburt, n. 40; Concerned Women for America, n. 29.
43 See, for example, Concerned Women for America, ‘Habitat II: The United Nations’
Attempt to Control Your Family’, 24 September 1997, http://www.cwfa.org
(accessed 13 August 1999).
44 Austin Ruse, President, Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, newsletter,
27 June 2001, on file with author.
45 Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, ‘Pro-Family Groups Claim Victory
on UN AIDS Declaration’, Friday Fax 4 (28): 29 June 2001; see also, David
Wagner and Michele Hunter, ‘Cairo-Practice: The U.N. Seeks to Globalize the
Safe-Sex Ideology’, Insight, Family Research Council, 1994, on file with author.
46 The phrase ‘pro-homosexual forces’, was used in a Washington Times article and
attributed to, but not directly quoted by, Monsignor Reinert, a negotiator with
the Vatican’s delegation to the 2002 UN General Assembly Special Session on
Children (Archibald 2002a).
47 Austin Ruse, President, Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute newsletter,
27 June 2001, on file with author.
48 See, for example, Catholic Family and Human Rights, ‘Condom Lobby Drives
AIDS Debate Besides Abstinence Success in Africa’, Friday Fax 5 (51):
13 December 2002; Austin Ruse, President, Catholic Family and Human Rights
Institute, newsletter, 29 January 2003, on file with author.
49 See, for example, Kathryn Balmforth, ‘Hijacking Human Rights’, n. 8; Catholic
Family and Human Rights Institute, ‘UN Child Summit Postponed Indefinitely,
Negotiations Stymied’, Friday Fax 4 (39): 21 September 2001; Catholic Family
and Human Rights Institute, ‘UN Bureau Releases Draft Document for Next Year’s
Child Summit’, Friday Fax 4 (1): 21 December 2000.
50 See, for example, Concerned Women for America, ‘United Nations Cairo ò5
278 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Preparatory Conference’, 26 March 1999, http://www.cwfa.org (accessed 13 August
1999); Concerned Women for America, ‘The End of Innocence: How the U.N.
Stole Childhood’, on file with author. For further discussion of the CR UN and
international rights of the child, see Buss (2000).
51 Candi Cushman, ‘A World of Difference’, Citizen Magazine: A Web-Site of Focus
on the Family, 2002, http://www.family.org (accessed 5 June 2002). See also
Hamm (1995: 143), who, in a post-Beijing analysis, writes: ‘The battle of words
will continue. Words have meaning and those that control the definitions can
use words as they want.’ The phrase ‘gender agenda’ comes from O’Leary (2001).
52 See, for example, Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, ‘Pro-lifers Poised
for Greatest Victory to Date at UN’, Friday Fax 4 (26): 15 June 2001, reproduced
in World Family Policy Center News, 19 June 2001; Concerned Women for
America, ‘Beijing ò5: Why You Should be Concerned’, 29 February 2000 (on file
with author); Moloney (1999).
53 See, for example, Kathryn Balmforth, n. 8; Austin Ruse, ‘UN Skirmishes in War on
Family: The Hague Forum Marred by Questionable Procedures and Controversial
Results’, Population Research Review 9 (2): February/March 1990, http://www.
pop.org search PRI Review archive (accessed 26 January 2004); Real Women
of Canada, ‘Canada’s Duplicity at the UN’, Reality, March/April 1999, http://
www.realwomenca.com (accessed 7 September 2000); Reid (1999); Wright (1999).
54 Balmforth, n. 8; Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, ‘UN Commission
on Status of Women Is Suspended Amid Chaos’, Friday Fax 6 (13): 21 March
2003; Terry Phillips, ‘Diplomatic Scrap at U.N. over Women’s Treaty’, Family
News in Focus (Focus on the Family): 17 March 2003, http://www.family.org/
cforum/fnif/news/A0025168.html (accessed 18 March 2003); Bilmore (2001).
55 Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, ‘Pro-lifers Poised for Greatest Victory
to Date at UN’, Friday Fax 4 (26): 15 June 2001.
56 Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, ‘Pro-lifers Poised for Greatest Victory
to Date at UN’, Friday Fax 4 (26): 15 June 2001. The story was also picked up by
Focus on the Family, see Cushman, n. 51. See also Austin Ruse, newsletter ‘ProAbortion
Fundamentalists Expose UN Strategy’, 21 June 2001 (on file with
author).
57 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, Fourth World Conference on Women,
Beijing, China, 4–15 September 1995, Chapter V, Adoption of the Beijing Declaration
and Platform for Action, UN Doc. DPI/1766/Wom (1996), paragraph 11
(referred to as ‘Reservations and Interpretative Statements’).
58 Nicole Winfield, ‘Vatican to Publish Dictionary of Buzzwords like Gender,
Reproductive Rights’, Associated Press Worldstream, 22 January 2003,
http://www.lexisnexis.com (accessed 11 February 2003).
59 Quoted in Nicole Winfield, ‘Vatican to Publish Dictionary of Buzzwords like
Gender, Reproductive Rights’.
60 See, for example, John Paul II, Address to Mrs. Gertrude Mongella, 1995, on file
with author.
61 See, for example, Reservations and Interpretative Statements, paragraph 11, n. 57.
–––––––––––––––––– Doris E. Buss/Finding the homosexual in women’s rights 279
62 For a discussion of the Vatican’s theory of complementarity, and its positions at
Beijing more generally, see Buss (1998).
63 Reservations and Interpretative Statements, paragraph 11, above n. 57.
64 See, for example, Hamm (1995); Wilkins and Balmforth (2001); James Dobson,
Focus on the Family Newsletter, August 1995, on file with author; Catholic Family
and Human Rights Institute, ‘Radical Theorists and Policy Makers Promote Idea
of ‘‘Five Genders’’ ’, Friday Fax 4 (18): 20 April 2001.
65 Some CR UN publications, such as Wilkins and Balmforth (2001), directly credit
Fausto-Sterling, while others simply portray the five genders argument as a
feminist truth and hence a CR UN revelation about what feminists are really up to.
66 Dobson, n. 65.
67 Dobson, n. 65.
68 Concerned Women for America, n. 52, ‘Beijing ò5: Why You Should Be
Concerned’.
69 Catherine Hurlburt, n. 40. ‘The Good Ol’ Girls’ Club’.
70 For a discussion of CR theological and political views of the UN, see Buss and
Herman (2003: ch. 3).
71 Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, ‘Pro-Family groups claim victory
on UN AIDS Declaration’, Friday Fax 4 (28): 29 June 2001.
Acknowledgement
Many thanks to following friends and colleagues who read earlier drafts of
this article: Davina Cooper, Brettel Dawson, Didi Herman, Sari Kouvo, Surya
Munro and the anonymous reviewers for IFJP. This article also benefited from
the comments and support received when I presented it at the Feminisms and
Fundamentalisms workshop, Cornell University Law School, and the Gender,
Sexuality and Law II Conference, Keele University, UK.
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