Gay Rights vs. Human Rights

by Dr. Scott Lively

In 1997 while I was studying for my Juris Doctor at Trinity Law School I traveled to France with my young family for the summer program of the International Institute of Human Rights. On the way we stopped in England, where I shared with my wife and sons, 11 and 13, the rare privilege of viewing one of the three remaining originals of the Magna Charta, which was on display at Salisbury Cathedral. We then spent the remainder of the summer in Strasbourg where I received a Certificate in Human Rights, which provided the foundation for additional studies in this specialty of law.

In 2007, I earned a Doctor of Theology from the School of Bible Theology of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God in part based upon further studies of human rights.

Upon the strength of these degrees, I authored the Riga Declaration on Religious Freedom, Family Values and Human Rights, December 9, 2007 in Riga, Latvia, which directly challenges the inclusion of homosexual practices in the category of human rights.

Humanity shares roughly four thousand years of written human rights law, beginning with the Code of Hammurabi in approximately 1789BC to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Along the path of history, other major milestones have advanced and refined the concept of human rights: the Hebrew Torah in approximately 1400BC, the Charter of Human Rights of King Cyrus the Great in approximately 539BC, the Christian Bible of approximately 60 AD, the Magna Charta of 1215AD, the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 and the Declaration of Independence of 1776.

Reading these documents one is struck by the continuity of several basic themes, central among them the protection religious freedom and family values. Equally striking in today’s context is the total absence of protection for homosexual practice or identity. Rather, we find express condemnation of homosexuality in several documents, and implied hostility to it through the remainder. Indeed, the most reasonable assumption of human rights jurisprudence is that so called “gay rights� are the antithesis of genuine human rights because they both undermine the sexual order on which family values depend, and contradict the fundamental tenets of the major world religions.

One need look no further than England for the proof of this assertion. The first principle of England’s Magna Charta is “The English church must be free.� This principle stood firmly as a pillar of the world’s human right law for nearly 800 years, but is now defeated and discarded.

What argument carries such weight that it could topple the Magna Charta after eight centuries? It is the claimed right to sodomy, with less than fifty years of infancy as a human rights doctrine.

Consider the magnitude of what our generation is witnessing. Neither the four millennia of legal precedent, nor the opinions of the vast majority of the people of the world, nor the power or the authority of the worlds religions across the globe, nor the painful lessons of secular history of the consequences of sexual perversion to civilizations have proved sufficient to stop a relatively tiny group of sodomites from taking the reins of Western power and creating new rights for themselves at the world’s expense.

It is insanity, and I am afraid that it may be terminal. When the “right� to spread sexual disease and dysfunction supersedes the right to discourage such things in the courtrooms and legislatures of the world’s ruling powers their end is likely near.