On Christianity and Homosexuality

I really wasn’t going to discuss religion on this page, but … a few friends posted on facebook A Teen’s Brave Response to "I’m a ChristianUnless You’re Gay" and as I quietly wiped away the tears this young man’s story inspired, I thought about Kayla and Kylie (not their real names) and felt inspired to write.

Kayla had transferred into my high school, which left her at a social disadvantage for a school where most of our 360 classmates had known each other since fifth grade. Kayla is quiet so while I knew who she was when we graduated, I’m not sure I ever had a real conversation with her in high school. I don’t know when she joined us, but I know she was in my twelfth grade psychology class. I know because over a year later, while attending the same undergraduate, she came out to me. Then she told me a story I hadn’t really remembered. Please keep in mind that this was the mid-1990s, before either Ellen or Rosie had publicly come out of the closet. Mr. M., our psychology teacher, had started our class on whether gay people should be allowed to adopt children by acknowledging that every year this was a difficult subject. Every year, he said, someone would come up to him after class and tell him he was gay, and Mr. M. wanted students to know at the outset that if they needed someone to talk to after this class, he was there. Even while he said this, though, I looked around the classroom and was firmly convinced no one there was gay. Surely, we would know right? I mean, we had been in school together for around seven years, how could we not know something so fundamental about a person? Plus, weren’t gay people supposed to be obviously gay?  Weren’t you supposed to be able to tell they were gay by the clothes they wore or their hairstyles?

Now virtually every person in my hometown would’ve claimed to be some type of a Christian.  We had something like 6 Catholic churches, 2 Methodist churches, a Lutheran, a Seventh Day Adventist, a Presbyterian, and some others thrown in. And those are just the ones I can name off the top of my head. I had been raised in the church and spent most of my high school time – sans a period towards the end when I was an atheist – professing Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. Yet, what came out of my friends’ mouths was shocking.  Sure, my parents didn’t like gay people, but they at least tolerated them.  They recognized they were human.  And if they were human, didn’t they have the same right to love and marriage and children and family as the rest of us did?  I mean, I’m not sure both of my parents believed all of this at the time, but they at least recognized the humanness of gay people and I made the rest of the connection on my own.  My classmates did not.  I was alone in my defense of gay parents.  After (or maybe during?), someone said that I must be gay and I remember replying that if I was, there was no way I would’ve been able to defend myself. I would’ve remained silent and alone.  That might not be true – I’m an emotional extrovert and I can’t imagine I wouldn’t have burst into tears during the debate if it had been that personal.  But it wasn’t personal – it was theoretical.  I was, however, concerned that others would also think I was gay and wanted to be clear that I was not.

When I got to university, I joined InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and a sorority.  I think these two things led Kayla to wait a little longer before telling me she is a lesbian. Or maybe she just needed a little more time before she felt she could tell people from her old life. I was only the second person from my high school to know – Mr. M. was the first.  I vaguely remembered the class; she remembered it in detail. I was the only person who didn’t make her feel like a freak.

I wondered then if my classmates would have said things differently if they knew someone in the class was gay. Would they really have been so harsh in their word choice? Would they really have suggested she was a freak?  That someone was inherently wrong with her? That she would be damaging her children? That she could turn her children gay?  I can’t speak for my high school classmates, but I generally think of them, on the whole, as caring and thoughtful individuals.  Sure, there was some bullying (though thankfully not as bad as what I’ve heard of in other schools, nor as bad as Hollywood portrays in their fake high schools), and high school students can be cruel (myself included; apologies to CL for my ill-spoken and unwarranted words), and there were clearly cliques. But, by the time we graduated high school – and definitely all these years later when we’ve reconnected as adults – my high school classmates seemed to really come to care for one another. As a class, we had faced the deaths of friends, the deaths of parents, illnesses, puberty, prom, and obviously all our first heartbreaks. In the end, we actually wanted to see the others succeed and be happy.  So would my caring classmates – the ones who spent two days celebrating our 10 year high school reunion with more honest conversations than we probably had in all our years of schooling; the ones who still send me encouraging emails or fb messages after a bad day on the PhD; the ones who celebrate each other’s births and weddings and engagements and professional successes – would they have reached out to Kayla if they knew they the pain they had caused her?

Kayla deserved better from our class.  She deserved better even from me because while I may have recognized the humanity for theoretical humans, I hadn’t recognized the pain that someone was suffering in front of me. I had never questioned the stereotypes; I had never sought to know the reality.

Kayla was the first friend to come out to me as gay. A few others had declared bisexuality, and later more would do so.  Generally, each declaration was followed with a simple question: “So, do you think it’s a sin?”  I find being an open Christian leads a lot of people to question me about sin – or to confess their own perceived shortcomings. It also leads to a lot of questions about life, God, and religion.  In law school, girls would tell me, “I used to be a good girl like you, but then I met this one guy and fell in love…” or “I used to be a Christian but then…” or “When I was in eighth grade, I stole…”  or “How can you be a Christian and …”

When the Christian Legal Society adopted national requirements that leaders not be gay, it opened a can of worms within the chapter of which I was then President.  The head of Out & Allies asked me what I was going to do about it.  The chapter decided – after a contentious debate – that we wouldn’t adopt the national guidelines and we would turn in our credentials. When I stepped down as President, though, the new Presidents negotiated our membership with reworded bylaws. It would still exclude gay people from leadership but would also list other sins that were equally bad, like pride and heterosexual sex outside of marriage.  But having been in Christian leadership for over six years by then, I knew I would never be asked about my own sexual purity; I would never be asked to step down because I was too prideful or too arrogant or too … well, anything, really, because I wasn’t gay and I was a Christian. Our Vice President at the time was engaged and no one had once questioned her about her sex life. I dated a high number of men in my 3 years of law school and I was never asked about my sex life.  But if I had been gay, the mere “lusting in my heart” for another woman would have likely disqualified me; I most certainly would have been subjected to routine questioning to ensure I was “pure” enough to be a leader. So I left CLS.  I couldn’t talk about the love of Jesus for every human being while being a part of an organization that automatically created a second-class citizenry.  I retained my Allied status in Out & Allies and today remain proud of the way my life is reflected in my law school accomplishments: member of journals; former President of CLS; Ally; and, yes, my name even hangs on a plaque in a bar across the street from our law school.

I have not always handled my friend’s comings out well.  When a guy I had once dated told me many years later that he had a confession, I expected to hear he had never gotten over me. Instead, he told me was gay. I was initially less than gracious. I had mourned the end of this relationship for years, not understanding what had gone wrong, and his being gay made me feel that the chemistry I had felt was a lie. It also made me angry that he hadn’t told me sooner, thereby explaining what had always felt unexplainable. When I realized I had acted badly, I tried to rectify it, but even then it just ended in my lecturing him about how I didn’t find sexuality something he needed to ‘confess’ to people. After all, I don’t go around ‘confessing’ that I’m a girl or white or anything else that I consider just an intrinsic part of who I am.  Yeah, super gracious. 

I don’t remember exactly what I said to Kylie, a friend who came out to me more than a decade after Kayla did.  I assume I said the same thing I have most of the other times: Thanks for being willing to share that with me. With over a decade of experience, I have found that to be the most honest and most necessary thing to say. I do remember, however, a conversation that came later. A drunk Kylie told me she wished she wasn’t gay.  Perhaps, she said, she really was broken.  And if she wasn’t gay, then she could be honest about who she was with her conservative family. Such sentiments had been repeated to me often over the years.  And then she asked it:  Is it a sin? Do you think I’m sinning? Here’s my answer for Kylie, and for the others who have asked as much to me:

Honestly, I don’t know. But more pertinently: I don’t care.

It’s important for Christians to understand what Kylie was really asking:  Do you think God loves me as I am or do I need to try to be something I inherently don’t think I am or am capable of becoming just to gain His acceptance?  And on this point Christianity is unequivocal: we are all broken somehow, and regardless of where that brokenness comes from or how it manifests itself, God loves us, and in the words of “Bridget Jones,” He loves us just as we are. Unconditional love. Acceptance. Forgiveness for what’s wrong; pride for what’s right. He loves us.

I have heard Biblical scholars who suggest that homosexuality is a sin and Biblical scholars who state that it is not under the new Covenant of Christ. I have had gay friends who are Christians and believe they are sinners and those who think they are not. It is an area I don’t think about very much because I’m not gay. Christ didn’t tell me to worry about whether other people were sinning. He told me to worry about my own sin.  Only when I’ve taken care of my own sins am I to worry about encouraging others not to sin. 

I have a lot of sin in my own life. I’m prideful and arrogant fairly often. I’m envious pretty much daily. I gossip when I should remain silent. I let fear control my responses to too many things. I am gluttonous. I lie, sometimes even to myself, and manipulate people, sometimes including myself. I withhold forgiveness over stupid things. At times, I’m lazy and procrastinate away God’s plans for me. I speak without thinking, and in doing so cause pain. And I reject God’s path regularly as I try to control things I have no control over, reject his call for me to do things I don’t want to do, and too often turn away when I feel He isn’t giving me what I think I deserve.

Quite simply, I am Jonah. 

Jonah, who was asked by God to tell the Ninevites to stop sinning. Jonah who told God he didn’t want to because he hated the Ninevites and he didn’t want them to repent. He wanted God to punish them. Jonah who ran away from God, boarded a boat and thought he could escape God’s calling by crossing the sea. And when Jonah ran from God, he really ran from God. He wasn’t just going from Israel to Turkey. Nineveh is now known as Mosul, Iraq, and Jonah boarded a ship to cross the Mediterranean, meaning the exact opposite direction. When God told Jonah to come back, and then started a storm that resulted in Jonah being tossed into the sea, Jonah was so freaking stubborn that he actually sat inside the belly of a big fish for three days because he didn’t want to do what God wanted him to do. He was hateful and selfish and arrogant and thought he could outlast God.  He was hoping God would blink first.  Talk about stubborn!  And that is me. 

I even talk to God like Jonah talks to God. When Jonah didn’t get his way – because he told the Ninevites to repent and they did, so God didn’t unleash his fury on them – Jonah threw a hissy fit. He actually told God he tried to forestall His grace for the Ninevites and he’d rather die than live after helping them. He sat in the dessert pouting like a child. When God tried to help Jonah understand his grace by using a tree, Jonah just became angrier, telling God he was “so angry I wish I was dead.”  I’m similar in my brutal honesty with God, telling him the other day – in worship! – that I hate the fact that English worship songs use music I’m not familiar with.  Then I realized I had said I hated something about worship and apologized. A few minutes later I was making a joke in prayer because God gave me a worship song where I knew the music but the lyrics were all changed, with the English church singing about how “My King rides a donkey.”  I couldn’t help but joke with the One who brought me all that.

Whether you take the Bible as literal or as part literal, part figurative, or as all fully man-made, you have to admit that it’s not a good sign of your religiousness when the character you relate to the most is Jonah.  Not Elizabeth or Ruth or Mary or the other Mary.  Jonah.  Because I’m pain-in-the-a$$ stubborn.

So I concentrate more on what the Bible says about pride, envy, and forgiveness than I do about homosexuality. I have too much on my own sinful plate to spend time worrying about whether something else I’m not engaged in constitutes sinfulness.  Too many planks in my own eye to be thinking about whether I see a splinter in someone else’s.

And Jesus loves me anyhow. This is something I believe with my whole heart.  And if I believe that with my whole heart – if I believe that in my most selfish, stubborn, unrepentant moments, Jesus loves me – how in the world can I consider myself well placed to hand out judgment to others? How can I possibly know what separates them from a relationship with God when nothing I do separates Him from me? And if I believe God loves each and every person He creates in his image – and I fervently do – than how in the world can I do or say anything less than loving to them?  If God wants a relationship with them – and I believe He does – how can I tell them He would reject who they are? How can I make them feel they are anything less than a reflection of God’s divinity and wondrous hand?

Slippery slope my ... bum.

Thanks to Wess for pointing me to this piece on HuffPo, which makes it clear that the "slippery slope" that comes from preventing a woman's choice in the matter of abortion is actually more like a steep incline.  In the piece, Soraya Chemaly discusses statements by a Georgia Republican State legislator who supports a law that would force pregnant women to carry a fetus to full term or 'natural' birth.  His justification?  Pigs and cows do it.  No, I'm not (and Soroya isn't) making that up and that's not taken out of context.  He said that life gives us many lessons and one of those that he's experienced is delivering stillbirth cows and pigs and it "breaks your heart" when those animals don't make it.  He literally compared women - their bodies, their emotions, and their psychological welfare - to cattle.  Let me give you a hint:  lots of things that we have already tried to put an end to.

By the way, he goes on to talk about a "salt of the Earth kind of [person]" who once said they'd give up all the chickens they use for cock fighting (though I guess they do chicken fighting?) if only Georgia would outlaw abortion.  Because women aren't salt of the Earth, so our opinion matters less and, apparently, we should give up our own ability to make choices logically and with full knowledge and consent just so we can save chickens from the cruelty of cock-fights.  Because those two things should be related.

Being Pro-Choice as a Christian: 8 Reasons

I was originally going to eschew discussing religion (or really anything very personal) on this page. My friend, Nat, however, encouraged me to take a few statements from a facebook discussion to share here. So, I should be upfront: I am a Christian. Yes, a go-to-Church, believe-in-the-Bible Christian. I'm also pro-choice and here are eight reasons why. I know some of them are oft-cited reasons by pro-choice Christians, but Nat assures me others are not.

(1) The belief that life begins at conception is a religious belief, and I am a firm believer that religious beliefs are for the religious believers to follow, not for society to impose on others. Science doesn't determine when life begins; at best, it tells us when a life is viable.  If it did indicate the point of "life", I believe that brain activity would be the standard. But even this is an unclear standard. The brain forms around week 3 of pregnancy (week 5 under scientific standards that apparently take into account 2 extra weeks before conception). The brainstem is fully formed around the end of the second week, and this controls the majority of our non-conscious brain activity. Our conscious brain, though, is the last to form. It is during the third trimester that the fetus learns to "think" and can recognize smells, etc.  So which of these constitutes "brain activity" for the purpose of determining life?  

And brain activity is, of course, not the only option for determining "life." It could be viability - which is much earlier than cerebral thought. It could be at conception. In Jewish law, life appears to begin with the first breath, or perhaps when the baby is more than halfway through the mother's body in the birthing process, and then it is not fully viable until after 30 days.  It appears Jewish teachings suggest abortion may at times be required to save the mother's life or health (including psychological health), or may be permitted if the child will be born with a birth defect.  The truth is, there is no clear Judeo-Christian, let alone all-religious, determination of when life begins.

We recognize that many questions about life and death are religious choices and religious beliefs, and in other aspects of society we honour that recognition.  We allow 7th Day Adventists to refuse life saving treatment - even for children - because their religious convictions require it. Yet, we wouldn't recognize that women have rights to determine the appropriateness of an abortion if they disagree with Catholic and evangelical Christian teachings on whether "life begins at conception"? That's an imposition of religious beliefs where society should not be imposing them.

I honestly don't see a great difference between forcing women to carry children to term in the US and forcing women to wear burkas in Afghanistan. Both stem from religious men telling women - who may or may not be religious - how God wants them to act, especially what God wants them to do with their own bodies, and then forcing them to comply with that dictate. They do not necessarily come from a woman's own belief system or her own choice. That, to me, is not what God calls us to do.

As a Christian, I believe that the Bible sets out rules for our relationship with God, but those rules are meant specifically for those who believe. While those rules may be good and right for any individual or society, they are *intended* for those who choose to believe in God and Jesus. Jesus never called on us to force non-believers to live by our rules; if anything, the Apostle Paul seems to expect the exact opposite. When Jesus told his followers to "teach[] [all nations] to obey everything I have commanded you" he did so only in the context of those nations becoming Christians first.  "[G]o and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰ and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” Once people have accepted Christ's divinity and saving grace, they are to follow Christ. The inverse is not true. The Bible should be followed because of faith, not because of dictation, and anything else has the potential of turning a whole lot of people into Pharisees.

This does not mean that there is no standard of morality for society, but I take a Thomas Aquinas approach to this: not everything that is immoral should be illegal and not everything that is illegal is immoral. To do otherwise is to undermine the very foundation of free religious choice, justifying even the persecution of Christian converts in Islamic societies (because the religious ideology determines whether a crime is worthy of death). A pluralistic and secular society must decide morality not from religious ideology but from what is necessary for the preservation of society. Theft and murder clearly fall in that category; infidelity or religious conversion, for example, do not. Therefore, while I would consider infidelity immoral, the government has no place in enforcing this determination; while the Iranian government considers conversion to the Christian faith immoral, it should not be the state's place to enforce this. 

(2) Society regularly makes determinations as to who lives and who dies, often deferring determination to those closest or most knowledgeable about a situation, but sometimes even that isn't required.  In the case of abortion, society should defer to the mother, who is closest and most knowledgeable about the situation.

We (in the US and as a global society) don't provide universal health care, which often results in people needlessly dying; we have constructed intellectual property rules that allow for pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs without having to distribute them to those who need them, resulting in millions of children dying from preventable and curable diseases; we have the death penalty; we allow family members to remove brain-dead individuals from life support; we allow individuals to sign 'do not resuscitate' forms that dictate when we can and cannot try to save their lives; we allow contraception, which prevents a fertilized egg (and therefore a conceived egg) from implanting; we allow war; we allow people to kill in self-defense, and we allow the use of the death penalty, which is imposed on behalf of society by twelve random individuals selected solely because they have driver's licenses or have registered to vote. And again, we allow 7th Day Adventists to refuse medical treatment because their religious convictions require it. These are just some of the times when society says that a collective on behalf of society or single individuals within society get to determine who lives and who dies - or when or how they die.

God may be pro-life, but our society is not. We regularly assign responsibility for life and death decisions to individuals or segments of the population. Abortion is no different.  We put the choice regarding abortion - which has a myriad of implications for mothers and those who love them - into the hands of those with the best knowledge of the situation and who are most directly impacted by it. This story is a perfect example of the need to give the choice to those closest to the situation. Who gets to decide when the pain of a child is so much that the appropriate medical choice is to allow it to die? The parents. Not society, not a bureaucrat in Austin, but the individual closest to the actual case at hand who is affected in the most unique ways.

(3) As this case demonstrates, there are times in which abortion may be the kinder thing to do for the sake of the child.  This child will never have an opportunity to "believe" in Christ because that requires some level of cognizance. Yes, the child may have proven to be a miracle baby, but the person who should get to decide whether that possibility is worth the pain is the parent. We do this for all types of other medical choices: when should a child's chemotherapy be stopped; when should life-sustaining treatment be stopped; when should feeding tubes be removed. These are all times when we entrust the family to make the judgment about what is kindest, what is most caring, what is most appropriate.

(4) Women disproportionately bear the burden of pregnancy and child-rearing, emotionally, physically, and financially.  Development studies indicate that giving women power over their own reproductive choices is an important step to ensuring economic independence and growth, both of the individual and the society. Countries with comprehensive sex education have better life expectancies, better economic growth, less maternal mortality, and higher levels of education for individual woman and those in her family. Educated and empowered women have a disproportionately greater impact on their communities than their male counterparts. Ensuring women can be educated and empowered requires them to have control over their reproductive rights. Taking choices away from women and providing them to others is not just disrespectful to the autonomy of a woman, but it is harmful to women's health and to society as a whole.

(5) Outlawing abortion has never worked. There is evidence of abortions occurring in Biblical times. If you outlaw it, you simply make it unsafe and expensive. So instead of harming one life - if you believe it to be a life - you harm two. The best we can ever do is to make abortion safe and rare and you don't do that by outlawing it.

‎(6) I believe that if you want to fight against abortion, you should do so in a way that empowers women rather than shames them. The best way to make abortion rare is to take care of societal health in other ways, including universal health care and better options for higher education, ensuring that people know about sexual health and reproductive choices and that when a woman does get pregnant, it does not mean that she'll be unable to experience educational and financial independence. Abortion rates are much lower in countries with universal health care, lower costs for higher education, and better sex education. Empowered women actually means fewer abortions.

If we as a society are going to address the causes of abortions, we need to do so first from a proactive, non-criminalizing way. Provide universal health care, address higher education costs, address maternity leave, provide paternity leave so that women don't bear the only burden of childbirth. If you want to fight against abortion, fight for better poverty-reduction strategies, such as more equal education for children and greater loan assistance for those pursuing higher education. Fight for greater financial assistance for young and unwed mothers, fight for more affordable housing, fight for universal and affordable prenatal care (something, by the way, that Planned Parenthood provides in certain areas for women who would not otherwise get it), fight for greater pay equality between men and women, and fight for more comprehensive sex education for children and teens. This has proven more effective than outlawing abortion and it ensures greater protection for those voiceless and defenseless children once they are born than the current tactic of the GOP legislators around the US.

(7) As we have seen in this election cycle, it is not a particularly far leap to go from abortion rights to government interference in other choices about parenthood. This future interference will inevitably focus first and foremost on persecuting mothers and women. First it was abortion, now it's contraception. A legislator in Wisconsin has presented a bill that would make single parenthood - which is disproportionately a problem for women - child abuse. So, now single women who do get pregnant and choose not to have an abortion are criminals who could lose their child. That's a *great* way to handle the situation. A woman who is abused and leaves her husband - a Biblical ground for divorce - is now also a criminal for taking care of her child.

When we treat women as nothing more than baby-producers and care givers, then these are the natural consequences: women are forced to give up their careers, they are forced to singularly bear the burden of the mistakes of two people (or non-mistakes, as in the case in the story), and they lose their own voice and are forced to adopt the choices made for them by others. Suddenly, maternity leave is not a choice, but a forced determination. Women aren't compensated for that time because it is expected of them and they aren't allowed to return to work because that's no longer their 'place'. Women start to be treated like cattle.

When we treat women like cattle, it leads to things like domestic abuse, rape, incest, FGM, etc. It all becomes slightly more acceptable. I realize it's easy to roll one's eyes at these very real possibilities and suggest this is just an exaggerated slippery slope argument. But those in the human rights world deal with the very real consequences of taking choices from women and empowering men or society to make those choices for women.  I see all of these things stemming from the same belief systems: a woman's principle role in life is not one she chooses but one that society forces upon her. 

(8)  I am not "pro-abortion."  In fact, I know no one who is. I am instead for making abortion safe, legal and rare. I have never had to face the question of whether I would have an abortion, but I believe that coming to this conclusion is a terribly painful process for most women who face this decision. I know a lot of women who as children dreamt about becoming mothers when they grew up; I know none who wanted to have an abortion when they grew up. By nature, pregnancy is what most (but not all!) women desire so when they are considering terminating a pregnancy, it is not an easy decision and it is usually done with consideration of the growing child inside them. I think there is no need for the state to make this decision even more difficult and painful for them.

I find hypocrisy, and even sometimes cruelty, in the anti-choice movement's treatment of abortion. I'm tired of members of the "pro-life" movement in the US claiming to care about children but also stating that we should stop providing international assistance to developing countries.  I'm tired of those same people justifying an unjustifiable war in Iraq.  In 2003, people operating on behalf of the American population started a war that cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, including thousands of Iraqi children. These were children God also knit together in their mothers' wombs; children who were defenseless and voiceless and helpless. Where was the voice of our pro-life movement then? Where is it now for children in Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan who are killed in drone attacks or who are lumped together in the terrifyingly disrespectful term of "collateral damage" for our wars?  Where was the objection based on "every life is sacred" and "every child counts?" In this situation, we didn't even defer to those closest to the situation.  Someone in Washington makes a choice, not knowing whose lives will be terminated.

There are millions of defenseless, voiceless children who will die from poverty around the world because successive generations worth of US Presidents and Congresses have constructed trade and aid policies that actually harm those communities and are likely to ensure their continued impoverishment rather than sustainable growth. There are millions of children who die because our intellectual property laws protect big pharmaceutical companies at the expense of those children's access to medicines. Millions who will be left orphans for the same reason. Millions left without one or both parents - both in the US and outside of it - because of US health policies ranging from a failure to discuss and distribute contraception in AIDS affected countries to a failure to provide universal health care here at home. Children in the US and around the world die because they don't have access to food, medicine, or safe living conditions.  Our girls are sold into sex slavery, advertised regularly on sites like Backpage.com.

We abdicate our rights and responsibilities to fight for life in all these situations and the consequence is that children suffer. It is cruel to the mothers of those Afghan children, those Yemeni children, those Pakistani children, and those American children to treat the unborn as more sacred than the living. Let us give a voice to the voiceless amongst us; defend the defenseless on Earth.  When we have systematically, and as passionately, done that, then we should engage in the questions that we can only truly learn the answer to in Heaven, such as when life begins and what protections should be afforded to the pre-born.

Oh David...

Poor David Cameron.  He really thought he was giving Obama a great British gift.  But instead, he was giving him a Chinese manufactured gift that was just designed and branded in the UK.  Not quite the epitome of British excellence I'm sure DC was going for. Oh well, maybe next time... 

Links for today: my top news stories for today

Since part of the point of this blog is to free up my friend's facebook newsfeeds from my incessant posting, but some of my friends have admitted they principally get their news from my facebook feed, I'm going to occasionally use this blog to collect links I find interesting., interspersed with a little commentary. Here are today's:

• A gunman shot at children attending a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, killing three children and one teacher, and injuring at least one other teenager. It follows similar shootings of North Africans in the same region. It's unclear if they are linked. The BBC says if so, then it's likely a serial killer who has changed their pattern. I can't help but wonder if this isn't an anti-immigration spree similar to that which Norway faced with Anders Behring Breivik.

I'm glad the news media isn't (currently) rushing to judgment on the motive for the shootings, but I can't help but suspect this is a bit of French nationalism run amok. In the four years that I've been in Europe, I've felt a distinct increase in anti-immigration sentiment within the news media. Compared to my first stints in Europe - in 1998 and 2003 - the increase is even more dramatic. Anti-immigrant sentiments used to be passed to me in veiled references, usually with the speaker beginning with "some people in this country" or "it's not unreasonable for people here to feel..." without ever owning their own racism or anti-immigrant position unless I bluntly asked them how they felt. Now, politicians like Nikolas Sarkozy freely talk about the need to ensure France stays French, expelling Roma, promising to get tough on immigrants, and threatening to pull out of the EU visa-free zone if other European states don't get tough on illegal immigration. The Daily Mail makes ridiculous - and often untrue - proclamations about immigration in the UK, and the UK Home Secretary once wrongfully claimed that the immigration courts were so bad that a man wasn't allowed to be repatriated because he owned a cat (the court noted the existence of the cat in a recitation of the facts, but not in a "wow, this judgment hinges on his adoption of a cat" conversation).


In the trickle-down way I find political sentiment works, I am now regularly subjected to taxi drivers and people in coffee shops telling me about how Britain isn't British anymore, Europe isn't European anymore, and all the immigrants should go back to their own country. Except me, of course, because Americans aren't really immigrants, not in the true sense of that word. Plus, I'm such a nice girl, and I'm here studying and contributing to society and all (at least that's what they say until I tell them I'm studying human rights law).
In this climate, it would not be fully surprising to find some French find Sarkozy's position to suggest that anti-immigration sentiment is not only acceptable, but may be patriotic (it definitely gave him an election cycle boost in the polls). It would not be surprising to me to find out that this shooter was on an anti-non-French-French spree to kill all the people "invading" his country who aren't "really really French."
I am not attributing these shootings - if they are even based in anti-immigrant or racist sentiment - to Sarkozy. Even if the shootings were done in the name of French nationalism, responsibility rests solely with the shooter. But, I fear that this may not be the last shooting if European politicians don't pull back on the rhetoric. The fringe element that already feels "under attack" by immigrants may find solace in public statements by politicians and use that as "permission" to undertake actions they may otherwise not feel empowered to commit.

• Fighting in Syria is continuing, as is Russia and China's resistance to any UN intervention. This time the fighting is centred in Damascus, in a "wealthy and well-protected" area of the city. The explanation? “Nobody knows what exactly was going on,” [a local businesswoman] said. “Some say a very important person wanted to defect, but the funniest and most ridiculous version I heard was that a little girl got kidnapped, and the security came to rescue her.” Obviously, there's a discrepancy in how many people were killed, with the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights in London saying 18 members of the Syrian military were killed, while Syria claimed only one was killed in a fight against "terrorists." Every time I read Assad's response to the killings, I'm reminded of how detrimental George W. Bush's "war on terrorism" is in the international community. Tamils in Sri Lanka? All terrorists. Fighters in Syria and Libya? Terrorists. Opposition party in Thailand? Yup, terrorists. Human rights activists and reporters worldwide? Definitely terrorists. Sure, all these countries would still be calling all these opposition workers terrorists, but they wouldn't then be able to point to the US's decade long "war on terror" as proof of their "right" to combat the "terrorists" so strongly. They might even, though unlikely, admit they're subject to Geneva Convention Common Article 3 or Additional Protocol II (though I'm unsure if any of these states are party to APII). But, I digress. Back to Syria. The area at the heart of the fighting yesterday (though there is fighting going on throughout the country, it just flared up in this area yesterday, apparently) is close to significant security installations and the homes of prominent leaders. The fighting is just one indication that Assad's strategy of stopping "protestors from getting into the city" has failed.

• And speaking of the Arab Spring... We should learn the fate of six Zimbabweans who were arrested for watching video of Arab Spring protests later today. Apparently Mugabe doesn't like people watching video that could be instructional in how to peacefully topple an oppressive regime that has been ruling for decades. I can't imagine why.... By the way, am I the only one who loves that CNN threw in a little note about Mugabe's call for elections at the end? As if he's calling for free and fair ones. Cute, CNN.

• I'm highlighting this article on the impact of drone attacks on the US-Pakistan relationship particularly for my flatmate, Rob, as he'll write an essay on the legality of drones in the next few weeks. I'm anticipating many a dinner discussing this issue.

• Most of my friends know that I'm not a conspiracy theorist and generally believe that in the modern age, you can't do a large-scale conspiracies. You can't keep 3,000 US Navy sailors quiet about not really burying Osama bin Laden at sea. You can't keep the entire US national security infrastructure quiet about secretly planning 9-11. You can't get all the GOP officials in Hawaii to agree to cover for Obama being secretly born in Kenya. Seriously, in the age of Wikileaks, how can one believe that all these things are being planned without anything coming to light? JFK being killed by multiple shooters? Maybe. Twitter, facebook, and the entire internets hadn't been created yet. 9/11? No. So, I'm filing the Taliban's conspiracy that there was more than one US soldier involved in the horrific killings of Afghans in the same folder I file every thought I hear on the US planning 9/11, that bin Laden wasn't really buried at sea (or was killed years in advance), and Obama being secretly born in Kenya. I have a military family member and I know how quickly rumours, gossip, and reports spread in the military. If it was more than one shooter, someone from the US military in Afghanistan likely would've spoken up, at least to a family member. After all, it was American personnel who took and exposed the pictures of the abuse at Abu Ghraib. It was American personnel who came forward to tell the real story of how Saddam Hussein was captured. It has been American military lawyers who have led the way in revealing and challenging the legality of treatment at Guantanamo Bay. Does the US have a few asshats in the military? Yes, every organisation has a few. But does everyone fall into that category? No, and generally there will be one or two people brave enough to come forward and tell the truth. A mass conspiracy can't go one for very long. I am sorry to see that the Taliban has decided not to continue "understanding" talks with the US as a result of the killing and the potential (likely?) transfer of suspected Taliban members to the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. I wasn't confident the talks would lead anywhere, but it's generally better to have ongoing negotiations than not.

• On the topic of the Afghanistan killings, I'm a little disturbed by this profile by the NY Times that is trying to make sense of how Robert Bales came to be such a heartless killer. To undercut the "solid guy" reputation Bales apparently has amongst friends and family, the NYT relies on an assault against a woman (fair enough), a car accident that we have no real reason to doubt was caused by falling asleep at the wheel, and "and an accumulation of rejections and disappointments." During law school, as I applied for clerkships and jobs, I could have accumulated a large stack of rejections and disappointments. Would not be evidence of a "darker side" that could have foretold a killing spree. For starters, I don't know how to use a gun, but more importantly, rejection and disappointment isn't a justification for killing people and in most people it doesn't trigger this kind of murder. So while, yes, it's disturbing to me that "Bob" Bales grew up on a street I probably drove down or around while I was doing my J.D., the amount of attention he is receiving and the attempts to justify his "transformation" into a killer seems misplaced to me.

The constant need to "understand" the makings of a killer is normal, and it makes for riveting made-for-TV movies, but I'm disturbed by the constant attention the media gives to figuring out what made someone kill 16 individuals. In many ways, this article reminds me of the immediate aftermath of the Chardon High School killing, when everyone assumed it related to bullying and then it turned out the killer had no reason for killing. He just did. I'm glad psychologists are attempting to determine signs and signals that we can use to identify people at risk of killing, but (a) those are at best hypothesis, not signs and signals that are proven to be present only in would-be or soon-to-be killers; and (b) let's leave it to the psychologists, not the media.
This case raises particular concerns for me as the attention on the killer is coming at the expense of discussing what the results of the killing spree were: who was killed, what was lost for a family or a community? I recognize that some of the consequences have been discussed, but those have tended to focus on what the killing means for the US mission in Afghanistan, rather than what does it mean to the families and communities affected. To my knowledge, NYT hasn't sent someone in to do profiles on the 16 victims killed in Afghanistan. Had they been innocent US citizens, we would know lots of details about how they lived their every day life, what their hopes and dreams were, and who their surviving relatives were. But, since the victims were Afghanis, I've seen little more than a death toll.
We don't know what was lost in that killing. What future leaders were killed? What future hopes? What is the toll of death in these communities? How are they coping and grieving? What processes for healing have begun there? How do *the victims* feel about his being sent to the US for trial? The victims should be the focus, because in humanizing them and in understanding what is lost when violence is let loose, we have a potential to reexamine what the real costs of war are. This wasn't a legitimate act of war, but it is a clear consequence of it, and we need to better recognize and understand those costs before we start bombing anywhere else. NYT - and other media outlets - could do a lot of good by focusing on the victims here rather than the perpetrator.

• East Timor (Timor-Leste) will get a new President once the official vote counting is all done. With over 70% of votes counted, Jose Ramos Horta, is in third place and has bowed out. Ramos Horta won the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize (along with countryman Bishop Ximenes Belo) for his work in "hindering the oppression" of the East Timorese before they gained independence. He was then elected President after East Timor had its independence recognized and restored in 2002. Perhaps most heartening of the story? "Ramos Horta said he was not disappointed and that both men were capable of ensuring peace and stability for the tiny nation, which was his only real concern." If only other leaders could so gracefully accept democratic defeat...

• Two British journalists were freed by Libya. Good news for their families, and the principle of free speech and journalistic protections, but it did remind me of a great piece that I read last week about the way in which foreign correspondents have become bigger than the stories they cover. We are unlikely to remember the names of the victims of the Iraq War, the Syrian resistance, or the Libyan conflict, but we are likely to be able to recall the names of reporters detained or killed in these conflicts. They become the story, rather than a conduit for us to learn. (If anyone knows where it was that I read this comment, please tell me so I can link it.)

• Thinking of the reporters in Libya reminded me to check on the NGO workers subject to at travel ban in Egypt. 43 foreign and Egyptian NGO workers have been charged with violating Egyptian laws regarding the registration of NGOs. They're, of course, pro-democracy NGOs and Egypt did the thing that lots of non-pro-democracy countries do: they require registration from NGOs, don't necessarily decide anything on the application, allow the NGOs to operate all the same, and then they are able to kick the NGO workers out - or arrest them - as soon as they're disgruntled by the work being done. It's a similar pattern to what happens worldwide to human rights defenders, both foreign and domestic. I hadn't heard about their release, but apparently earlier this month the US government allowed funds given to the relevant NGOs to pay for the bail for the US citizens involved. Since the defendants are unlikely to return for trial, the US paid the Egyptian government $330,000 each for the 6 US workers who were otherwise unable to leave the country. Shockingly (see above regarding the use of 'shocking'), there were then protests outside the US Embassy in Cairo aimed at criticizing the US government for funding NGO. I'm sure all the protesters showed up on their own volition.

• The Maoists in India's eastern region responsible for kidnapping two Italian tourists are either really smart or really lucky. It's the first kidnapping of westerners in the region, and as every human rights or humanitarian NGO worker in the world knows, if you're going to kidnap someone, kidnap the Italians. Their government, unlike the UK and US, is willing to negotiate and pay ransoms for the release of Italian citizens. If you're going to kidnap westerners for the first time in a bid to raise awareness and sympathy for your cause, it should probably be the people you can get money for. This way you get the publicity without the dirtiness of actually have to murder people. (This should not be interpreted as encouraging people to kidnap Italians. It is sarcasm. I have many Italian friends and would appreciate it if they all remained un-kidnapped.)

• Last week, Alex de Waal detailed his position on what should actually be done about Joseph Kony. In short: he adopts the six point plan that International Crisis Group set out in January 2006. His scorecard for the international community on these objectives is fairly positive, with only one objective - capturing ICC indictees - ranked as a failure, despite repeated effort. His solution for Invisible Children? Continue what the international community has already been doing and stop advocating simplistic, paternalistic "solutions".

• There's a problem with schools in England illegally excluding "problem" students, sometimes informally. I'm afraid if I just say "shocking" people might not read the sarcasm in there. I would be willing to bet that these exclusions disproportionately affect minorities, including, but not limited to, immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, special needs children, and Irish Travellers or Roma. I'm apparently not the only one who suspects this, as Shadow Education Secretary Stephen Twigg says the same thing in this article. This is not a problem just for the UK - similar issues have arisen in every country I've lived in and in a number of countries I've studied. The only thing truly shocking to me about this report was that a head teacher was willing to admit, on the record, "We will get their parents in and ask them to keep their children at home for the rest of the academic year; otherwise it's permanent exclusion." Hmmm... gotta wonder if this investigation operated on the principles used in the South African Truth & Reconciliation Commission: if you're honest and provide a full account, we will give you immunity. Otherwise, his job should be in serious jeopardy now.

• The UK inquiry into the news media's illegal wiretapping continues, with a retired police officer stating that the media could have hampered police investigations by putting a tail on the police and then picking up the witness and then attempting to lose police surveillance.

• Albemarle County, Virginia Sheriff J.E. “Chip” Harding Calls for an Innocence Commission and a Prosecutorial Misconduct Commission in Virginia. I remember well Joe Deter, Hamilton County (Ohio) Prosecutor (responsible for the county that houses Cincinnati) telling my law school that he understood that there was a "liberal" "fad" surrounding the proclamations of innocence, but he was confident that his office had never prosecuted an innocent person. Of course no one wants to believe they would ever be involved in making a mistake that cost an innocent person days, weeks, months or years of their life for something they didn't do. But ultimately we're human; the justice system is fallible; and we should always be looking for ways to ensure any mistakes we do accidentally make are corrected as quickly as possible. In response to statements like Deter's, Albemarle County, Harding notes “The Innocence Project is about justice ... It’s not just some liberal thing like a lot of people make it out to be.” Harding is calling for the establishment of two commissions in Virginia, one to investigate cases after conviction, and one that would investigate police and prosecutorial misconduct. I wish we had more Sheriffs like this in the US.

• And finally, since pointing out the craziness of the GOP primary is currently one of my favourite past times: when you tell people who speak English that they need to speak English, and that they have no right to / shouldn't embrace their linguistic heritage, they are unlikely to vote for you. So Rick Santorum can chalk this up to another lesson learned on this year's campaign (right after, um, file the forms appropriately so you can appear on all the ballots). Also on the list of things to learn for him? Puerto Rico

ICC Lubanga decision: some initial thoughts.

The ICC found Charles Lubanga guilty, as a co-conspirator, of enlisting children into the internal armed conflict in the DRC. The judgment is as important for what it says about international criminal law procedure as it is for what it says about Lubanga's crimes in the DRC. Two important notes:

• As my friend Nikki noted today, the OTP did not pursue conspiracy charges against Lubanga for ordering the use of rape as a tool of war. Instead, the charges were limited to the solicitation of child soldiers. I haven't followed this case closely - and must admit to not being an expert in international criminal law - so I'm not sure why this decision was made. Was the OTP unable to procure enough evidence? Did they consider the child soldiers issue a more serious crime? Did they want to stay conservative so as to ensure their first trial resulted in a conviction? I'm not sure about any of the answers to any of these questions, but would be interested in my friends who do know commenting below. I think these questions can help define the move forward.

• As my friend Indi pointed out, the Court slams the OTP in the judgment for failing to adequately supervise the investigations, resulting in a mishandling of evidence and the corruption of witness statements so they are no longer reliable. In para 842 (with relevant facts set out earlier), the Court states that "[a] series of witnesses have been called during this trial whose evidence, as a result of the essentially unsupervised actions of three of the principal intermediaries, cannot safely be relied on. The Chamber spent a considerable period of time investigating the circumstances of a substantial number of individuals whose evidence was, at least in part, inaccurate or dishonest. The prosecution’s negligence in failing to verify and scrutinise this material sufficiently before it was introduced led to significant expenditure on the part of the Court. An additional consequence of the lack of proper oversight of the intermediaries is that they were potentially able to take advantage of the witnesses they contacted." The criticism by the Court is therefore two-fold: (a) the OTP's failure to oversee the investigations adequately compromised the evidence, and essentially wasted the Court's time; and (b) the failure also put vulnerable former child soldiers in a position to be manipulated.

Since I don't have any answers for the first issue, I'm going to concentrate on the second. The criticisms of the ICC reflect interesting work done by Nancy Combs, who has concluded that most international criminal trials suffer from deficiencies in evidence and testimony that should call into question their legitimacy and accuracy. Amongst the problems that Combs identifies is that there is not a "smooth flow of questions and answers between counsel and witnesses." While counsel may ask for a detail about the events, the response they receive does not address that question asked, but instead may provide information on another issue or may not provide the court with relevant information at all. There are also contradictions by witnesses, who state one thing early in the process and another later on, or whose testimony overlaps with someone else whose story is vastly different. While Combs recognizes that some of the testimonial inconsistency is a natural consequence of time and memory, the prevalence of inconsistent and unclear testimony is widespread.

Yet, it rarely undermines the prosecution's case. According to Combs, inconsistencies are not always even acknowledged in judgments, and when they are, the inconsistencies are "unquestioningly" attributed to innocent causes. Convictions are then based, sometimes exclusively, on this testimony.

The problematic nature of this international legal precedence is exacerbated when we consider that international tribunals are specifically targeted to states that are unable or unwillling to undertake the process of prosecutions themselves. This is now a hard law requirement under the ICC's complementarity principle, but it was also evident in the choice of the establishment of previous international criminal tribunals and international intervention into transitional states. In a 2009 HRQ article, Laurel Fletcher and others established that prosecutions and international intervention are most likely to happen in states with a weak rule of law, a history of low public confidence in the judicial system, a history of international intervention, and that are new or weak democracies. The international community intervenes in these situations, requires, or highly encourages (to be read euphemistically) the use of prosecutions, sometimes through an international tribunal. Then, it fails to implement standards that we would expect from these states if they are to demonstrate their ability to provide fair and genuine trials. Instead, our international criminal prosectuions come to resemble the type of prosecution we most fear in transitional states: vengeance prosecutions.

The purpose of international criminal law is supposed to be to ensure the perpetrators of international crimes face justice. But justice cannot be had where the judicial process lacks credibility. Prosecutorial misconduct undermines the credibility of the process and harms the ultimate goals of the system: to ensure those who are most culpable are recognized as such and suffer the legitimate and just consequences of their action. If we utilize inadequate or inappropriate testimony or evidence to convict those we "just know" have committed atrocities because "everyone knows their guilty", we have given power to those who claim the ICC is nothing more than "victor's justice" or neo-Colonialism. We have also undermined the purpose of providing international criminal tribunals for states that unable or unwilling to undertake genuine prosecutions on their own because we haven't provided that genuine prosecution.

The international criminal legal system should be a light to those who have little experience with legitimate judicial processes. It should be both a symbol for those who struggle under domestic oppression and a teaching tool for those who seem uncertain about how to effectively implement the rule of law domestically. Currently, though, it does not accomplish this latter purpose and it undermines the former. With the current troubles with testimony, those who struggle with oppression can not hope that one day an , full and credible report of what has occurred will be made. They cannot hope that, like Nuremberg, one day the evidence used for a criminal conviction can also be used as a historical record to show what was known. They aren't provided the promise of learning the "truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth," but rather they are being provided a judgment, order, and ultimately, history, that is based on a compromised system of justice. When the international criminal system is so fundamentally broken, it is difficult to imagine local citizens in contentious States Parties feeling protected and encouraged by the supposed "rule of law." And as a consequence, one of the recognized principle means of reparations in the field of transitional justice - historical acknowledgment - becomes disconnected from the realm of international prosecutions to which they are supposed to be intricately linked.

In the end, this type of misconduct by the OTP - coupled with the international courts' willingness to unquestionably rely on witness testimony - leaves a legacy for weak states that the rule of law is a fallacy and that prosecutions do not need to be fair and honest and transparent. And surely this, in and of itself, undermines the purpose of the ICC.

I'm sure this will be blogged elsewhere in the days to come and I'm looking forward to hearing some solutions or paths forward for the ICC and international criminal law.

A quick and worthy read

I've long loved reading Amanda and Katie and WrongingRights, in part because of how well they do snark. I can't do snark. When I try, I come off asshatty or stupid. But, Amanda and Katie can and do so quite well. Their recent piece in the Atlantic Monthly, though, is not a snark piece but a thoughtful and important answer to the question of why so many in the international human rights and humanitarian fields had an immediate "ick" reaction to Kony 2012, even if they couldn't already put it into words.