Full title: LGBTQ+ Rights Under Attack - Session 2: Protecting Against Violence and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity: A Global Perspective
This is the second event in the three-part series “LGBTQ+ Rights Under Attack: The Weaponization of Religious Freedom and Free Speech." In this session, "Protecting Against Violence and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity: A Global Perspective," Victor Madrigal-Borloz presented the “Report of the UN Independent Expert on Protection against Violence and Discrimination based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity,” which he released in June 2023 while fulfilling his appointment. In conversation with Susie Hayward, Madrigal-Borloz shared his perspective on the global dynamics and trends related to the assault on LGBTQI+ Rights and Freedom of Religion or Belief and how they are feeding in/out of what’s taking place in the United States.
Speakers:
Victor Madrigal-Borloz, Lecturer on Law and the Eleanor Roosevelt Senior Visiting Researcher at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program
Susie Hayward, Associate Director for the Religious Literacy and the Professions Initiative and former senior advisor for Religion and Inclusive Societies at the U.S. Institute of Peace
Moderator: Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life
Overall Series: After over a decade of steady progress to protect and advance the rights of sexual and gender minorities in the US, a coordinated campaign to halt this progress and even unwind these protections has taken place in state legislatures, courts, and schools across the country. From “bathroom bills” passed to prevent trans people from using the bathroom that matches their gender identity to the illegalization of gender-affirming care for minors to Supreme Court rulings offering constitutional protection for business owners withholding their services to LGBTQ+ people, this legislation is often argued as a matter of religious freedom or free speech. A dominant claim of those pushing back against LGBTQ+ rights is that the accommodation of such legislation requires violating their ability to practice their sincerely held religious beliefs. Religion and Public Life will host a series of three events that engage this vital topic from a variety of angles and perspectives, asking, “What can the academic study of religion and religious literacy work offer to organizers, legal advocates, and other concerned citizens seeking to protect and advance justice in this critical moment for the LGBTQ+ rights movement?”
This event took place on November 16, 2023.
Full transcript:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Protecting against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, a global perspective. November 16, 2023.
DIANE L. MOORE: Welcome. It's lovely to have you all here toward the end of a very busy and full semester. We are--
AUDIENCE: At a discoteque.
DIANE L. MOORE: We are really honored that you're here and honored for the opportunity for this very special conversation. This is the second, in a three part series, that we at Religion and Public Life are sponsoring on attack on LGBTQ rights. The first was earlier this fall where we were focused on looking at the domestic issues here in the US, the legal and domestic questions around LGBTQ rights. And we, tonight, have the opportunity to hear a global perspective.
And so I am happy to-- I'll be moderating this event. My name is Diane-- I'm sorry-- my name is Diane Moore. I am the Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life here at Harvard Divinity School and have the privilege of moderating this conversation. So our special guests are Victor Madrigal-Borloz And he is the independent expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity How's that for a title. It's amazing.
He was appointed by the UN for a six-year term, where he explored these questions in the context of both legal and international legal mandates and questions, as well as, as you'll hear, other cultural and social mandates. So this is an extraordinary achievement.
I would actually really urge you all to have a chance to read-- there's a series of reports, but the last one that was just issued in June of 2023 is actually a work of art and really quite an extraordinary achievement, and represents an immense amount of both work and learning over this six years. So we are so happy to have you with us and really excited to hear your perspectives and your stories.
Our second speaker tonight is well known to all of us here at HDS. It's Susie Hayward, who is the associate director of Religious Literacy and the Professions Initiative at Religion and Public Life. Aside from Susie's time here with us over the last three years, where she's built our certificate in religion and Public Life Program and also been just a wonderful ambassador to the school, prior to her being here, she was an HDS alum and she spent 10 years at the United States Institute for peace on exactly these questions, translating the public understanding of religion in both government and bureaucratic and diplomatic circles.
She's spoken twice, at least twice that I know of, before the Congress on religious freedom, been asked to speak as a religious freedom expert. And so Susie's voice and experience are also incredibly relevant to this tonight's conversation.
So I will turn this over now to Victor who will share his reflections for about 25 minutes, 25, 30 minutes, and then Susie will share some reflections relevant to the specific report on religious freedom and how religious freedom intersects with these questions. And then we'll have a conversation among the three of us here and then we'll open it up for questions. So look forward to a wonderful evening. And can we all give a warm HDS welcome to Victor. Thank you.
VICTOR MADRIGAL-BORLOZ: Thank you very much for those very warm and generous words. I think that one of the difficulties of being appointed an independent expert by the United Nations Human Rights Council is that you're supposed to actually be independent from anybody, civil society and governments and all kind of stakeholders across the board. And that actually makes it a rather lonely task because you never quite know that what you're going to say is going to hit the mark. So hearing those generous words about my report is really very heartwarming. And I thank you very, very warmly.
Thank you for the invitation. It's really very humbling to be here. It's a great honor. And thank, Diane, and thank you, Susie because Susie was one of the persons who actually contributed to the report on religion that was such a fundamental part of the building blocks that I was able to put together in the work that I did during six years as independent expert.
I was appointed to the job in 2017. I began my work in 2018, and it's these days that I actually just concluded my six years with the UN as independent expert. And it's a great time because it's a good time to actually also just let things pause and reflect upon the work carried out during six years and how things come together. So this is the key upon which I'm hoping to talk to you today, is really a reflection on the way in which different topics come together. And of course, I'm hoping to use my report on freedom of religion, religious freedom, as a point of entry.
But one of the messages that I think you will be seeing very clearly is, I think that all of the topics that the mandate ended up working with, whether it was colonialism, whether it was practices of conversion, whether it was issues as technical as data management, they actually always found points of connection one with the other.
Perhaps I can tell you a little bit about the way that the mandate was created because it is relevant to the way and the voice and the type of megaphone that I was able to use during the last six years. The mandate was created as a result of the coordinated demand of a coalition of over 1,500 civil society organizations coming from over 170 countries.
And these organizations began work in the early 2000 in the understanding that the words sexual orientation and gender identity had never been included in official documents of the United Nations. There was not a recognition that these were concepts that would constitute legal language to protect persons from discrimination and violence. In fact, there was an actual rejection of that idea.
Already, in the 1990s, the decade of the great United Nations conferences, the expression was put in some of the documents in Cairo and Beijing, the world and the women conferences of Cairo and Beijing. And in both cases, the expressions were put in between brackets, which in diplomatic language means that it's up for negotiation whether they're taken out, which invariably they were.
And yet, there was always an understanding that sexual orientation and gender identity are indeed factors that create unique exposure to violence and discrimination for persons around the globe. And therefore, as a result of the work of civil society in trying to bring this to light, eventually, the High Commissioner for Human Rights was mandated in 2011 to produce a report on violence and discrimination affecting persons on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
I should say at this point that I always use the acronym LGBT as shorthand. But one of the findings that I actually obtained during the six years as independent expert is that the acronym is not sufficient to cover the many manners and ways in which people identify around the world.
There are vast communities that actually are exposed to violence and discrimination because of their sexual orientation and gender identity who do not identify as trans or gender diverse. There are vast numbers of persons affected by violence because of sexual orientation, real or perceived, who do not identify as lesbian or gay or bisexual. Other axes exist both in ancestral identities and in modern lives of people around the globe.
So I think that it's actually quite telling that when the first report of the High Commissioner came about, following a report on 2015, it was the base of a series of conversations that actually focused more ample than those identities into the notion of sexual orientation and gender identity as categories that should be considered to be protected.
The creation of the mandate was an extraordinary political achievement. It was fought wildly. I don't think I'm using the word lightly when I say that it was fought wildly through five resolutions of the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council at the UN, in which the world was fractured, basically, in two.
One side being the organization of Islamic cooperation states and the states of the African group stating that this is not a concept under international human rights law, and another fraction mainly the Latin American states and the states of Western Europe, actually proclaiming that it should be that this is seen as a point of entry. That dynamic has continued throughout the last six years and continues to exist today within the political bodies of the UN. And we're going to be talking a little bit about what that means.
Eventually, the mandate saw the light it was created, and it was created with the idea that the mandate holder, the creation of this mandate and the appointment of a person is a political acknowledgment of the fact that sexual orientation and gender identity are compulsory points of entry into the analysis of violence and discrimination around the world. And that if those factors are not taken into consideration, not taken as a point of entry, the analysis is incomplete. That's why that political achievement is so extraordinary.
But what this also means in the dynamics in which we work and in which I've been working is that one doesn't limit oneself to looking just at those identities. Because we realize that persons are exposed to experiences of privilege, or in most cases, of violence and discrimination because of the multitude of identities that we all reunite in one body, right?
And so nobody exists in this world only with a sexual orientation and gender identity. We all exist with ethnic origin and nationality, and religious thinkings, and persuasions, and beliefs, socioeconomic status, and many other factors that actually expose us to, again, violence and discrimination. And so the mandate has been working very much on intersectional perspectives to this end.
Since the very beginning - of the mandate, the instruction that I received was that I needed to explore root causes of violence and discrimination. And I always knew that would lead me to two topics that were, in my view, crucial, which it took me six years to get to in a way that was paused and actually, as we say in Spanish, with good letter so that I wouldn't actually muddy my writing.
And one of them is religion and the other one is colonialism. And so those are the two reports that I issued this year, my last year at the mandate. My colleagues say, they're very cheeky and they said that I did that because I couldn't be fired anyway. So it was fine that I would issue them. It's not completely untrue, but it's not completely true either. So it's very much in tune with this world where things are not one thing or the other.
But since the very first moment that I began my work the idea that creating an acknowledgment that people have a right to live free from violence and discrimination based on their sexual orientation and gender identity, the notion that creating and accepting this idea was inextricably linked to a discussion on religious freedom, was present since day one. It was very clear to me when-- during my first country visits, I began to discuss with religious leaders and I saw the points of convergence that we had in the importance of protecting persons, and I also saw the points of divergence that we had.
For example, when I went to Georgia and I discussed the behavior of members of the clergy in the events in which many of them had incited to violence on the International Day against homophobia and transphobia, and I asked the patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church, what was the accountability that had been done in the church? And I was told that there was not such a thing because those persons were exercising their religious freedom.
I also saw it very much reflected in my first thematic inquiries, one of which was on practices of conversion. Where one of my findings was that all around the world, this practice has continued to exist. These are practices that proclaim that LGBT persons, there's something inherently wrong or disordered with them and that it can be cured, and that there can be practices or therapies, as they are wrongly called, that can do that.
My findings also connected the carrying out and the execution of these practices with a series of perpetrating stakeholders, some of which were faith-based organizations. And so those findings came from places as diverse as Australia, Vietnam, Russia. I got cases from Kenya and Nigeria where I got testimonies of starvation being carried out by religious organizations, exorcism being carried out against persons.
In the United Kingdom, recent surveys actually yielded the result that over 51% of the respondents who had been subjected to so-called practices of conversion had indeed been undergoing this treatment within religious organizations. And so there was there a connection that compelled me to carry out these inquiries.
And of course, there was the overarching theme of colonialism and the impact of colonialism in the construction of social mores surrounding sexual orientation and gender identity. Because the mandate had received very early on, and it built a robust body of evidence to the effect that the idea that sexual orientation and gender identity would be at the source of, let's say, state-sanctioned violence and discrimination, is not something that exists everywhere in the world.
And that indeed, around the world, pre-colonial societies had very many different approaches to gender and to sexuality. And that in very many latitudes, it was actually the exercise of colonialism and the imposition of certain rigid structures therein that actually created a policing of sexuality and gender that can be understood to be at the base of this violence and this discrimination. And of course, this came through quite strongly in my report on colonialism, where I actually identified in particular, the Portuguese and the Spanish models of colonization as having relied very significantly in these type of models.
I think by now you may be in a position to imagine that I faced some dilemmas when carrying out this work. One of them was the dilemma that this is a narrative that, throughout all of these testimonies and evidence, appeared to me to be very much on the defensive.
I'm going to try to say it as plainly as I can. It simply appeared to perpetuate the notion that freedom from violence, based on sexual orientation and gender identity, was always contraposed to religious freedom. And that what we were constantly talking about in all of these examples was the idea that we were reacting to the instrumentalization of religious institutionality to oppress persons on the basis of their sexual orientation and gender identity. And I thought that from two angles, this was not necessarily a very conducive narrative to be the only one to be addressed.
And of course, one of them is legal. And that is that religious freedom is one of the most extraordinary achievements in the human rights architecture, and one of the most fundamental protections that persons have to seek happiness in their life, which I believe is one of the fundamental premises of the universal declaration of human rights. And the other one was political, which is that I thought it served badly the idea of developing narratives that were conducive to dialogue and to understanding the way that these rights coexist.
I don't think that it will be too much of a surprise to anybody that after my inquiry on religious freedom and sexual orientation and gender identity, I actually came out with the conclusion that these are rights and series of rights that are completely compatible, one and the other, and that actually coexist quite harmoniously in the avenue of rights. But I needed to get to a space where that would be something that would be the result of an honest inquiry rather than just a wishful thinking on my part.
But if I can put it in a nutshell, the conviction to which I arrived after all of the evidence that I received during the last six years concerning this topic, and then in a very concentrated manner in the process that I led on the particular inquiry that led to this report to which Diane was making reference, is that, essentially, from a legal analysis point of view, both sets of rights are actually based on the same premise, which is the idea that human beings are fundamentally free, and that curtailing that freedom must only be subject to limitations that are well determined within the human rights framework.
And that instead of actually imagining that these sets of rights and freedoms are contraposed, which is a political exercise, actually seeing them as taking a point of departure on the same basis is actually the right construction to do legally and politically. And that's what I recommended that the international community do when I presented this report to the Human Rights Council in June of this year.
I don't think you will be surprised either when you hear that some of them were actually quite pleased and some were not very happy with me I've been accused of actually not understanding life when I said that all religions could actually find it in themselves to be accepting of diversity. And apparently, that didn't fall well on certain latitudes.
But be that as it may, the report that I prepared and what I'm talking to you about, perhaps, more amply is that I really believe that there is a point of confluence, a space in which freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, and belief, and freedom from violence and discrimination, based on any factor, but certainly on sexual orientation and gender identity, intersect. And so what I was very much hoping to do was to find what that space was and what the legal articulation would be in relation to those spaces of freedom.
Now, this relied on a number of understandings that I actually articulate in my report. The first one is this was never meant to be a theological exploration. It was never meant to be a particular taking point of departure in a particular theological understanding of transcendence for example.
It relied on the notion that, from a human rights perspective, religion is not a homogeneous static entity. It's an unfixed paradigm that actually, from a human rights perspective, articulates the freedom, the ability to possess beliefs to change them, to manifest them, to express them. But that doesn't reflect a monolithic understanding of reality. In fact, by definition, religion under a human rights based approach is by nature contested. Because otherwise, we would only have one. And I think that's very clear that that's not the case.
That, by the way, gave me a particular mention by the Pakistani ambassador in the Human Rights Council. That idea that religion is an unfixed paradigm. I was called some very interesting names by the ambassador on the basis of that finding. But that is the key to understanding how one can make this legal understanding function. Because, of course, since that is the case, what we are understanding is spheres of protection of that freedom and not of the defense of a particular ultimate truth that will inevitably confront one with others, right?
And on the other hand, I want it to be equally clear from the legal analysis as to what freedom from violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity is. That's not an article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, right? You don't have article-- you have Article 18 saying religious freedom, but you don't have Article 22 saying, every person is free from discrimination and violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
It's an understanding of the way that non-discrimination clauses within human rights law work, where people are protected from discrimination from a series of factors, including sex and including other factors that include sexual orientation and gender identity. But it's also, and this is very important, it's also the articulation of an international standard of how we understand the different rights, including freedom from torture and right to life and right to freedom from arbitrary detention.
All of those composite of rights actually operate when a person is being targeted because they happen to be or identify as gay or lesbian or trans or any other identity. So in very many ways, what the report also sought to explore was how these two communities actually come together, and how LGBT persons and communities affected by violence and discrimination not only can be seen as always existing in contraposition, if that's a word in English, in contradiction to religious freedom, but actually within notions of religious freedom.
Now, against this understanding, there are three basic arguments that are usually waged and were usually waged against the work that I carried out during the last six years. The first one is to say LGBT persons do not exist in my country. I'm very sorry but your work is not applicable because LGBT persons do not exist in my country.
My last address to the General Assembly only two weeks ago, I tried to look as many state representatives in the eyes and tell them over six years, I am pretty certain that I have spoken to LGBT people coming from every country in the world. And I don't accept that any country can sit there and be seen as a serious player in the international human rights field anymore.
The second one is a bit more nuanced, is the idea that sexual orientation and gender identity only exist in a person's mind. And therefore, because it's a subjective choice or a subjective set of choices, they must yield to any sort of manifestation of religious freedom.
This is the angle that is usually taken by those that propose a re-balancing of rights that say we always need to speak of religious freedom when we speak of the rights of LGBT persons because it's important to know that this balance must exist. I think that is what the previous administration in the United States did when it created the so-called commission on inalienable rights, specifically saying this must be rescued because it's losing the competition against the rights of LGBT persons.
And you have it as well in an institution or a process called the Geneva Consensus, where many countries are coming together to actually have the stated objective that every time that you speak of the rights of LGBT persons, you need to speak of religious freedom because they are seen as contradictory, one and the other.
Of course, I think that the understanding is that as long as we adhere to the International human rights framework, we have the very clear guiding principle that human rights coexist in a frame, where the only limitation that they pose to one another is the non-disjuction of the rights of others, right?
And that in particular religious freedom, and this is an area where I'm not an expert, but Susie is and she's going to be telling us something about that, I'm sure, and so is Diane, in the understanding that no restrictions to religious freedom are ever to aim to intervene the internal conviction of a person, but rather the manifestation of that conviction whenever it raises a threat or reasonably raises a threat to the rights of others or an affectation to the rights of others.
So a lot of what this inquiry then goes on to do is to actually try and understand the different narratives that are created when persons are confronted with specific situations where that conflict is said to exist and the way that this conflict is resolved. One of them is what is known as the concessions related to institutional autonomy that religious denominations actually have and that manifests through the possibility, for example, of not allowing women to serve as priests and examples that are very specific and very obvious to many of you.
There's a discussion there, of course, that is very much related to exercises that transcend the legal and very many times go into the political, and the penetration of political exercises into religious freedom as well. And it's a conversation that I think will continue.
We have evolving international jurisprudence that actually establishes some very clear limits to the way in which this autonomy is to function. One case that is surveyed quite specifically in the report is the case of [INAUDIBLE] in the inter-American system, where a professor was fired from a school because she is a lesbian, because of that reason. Although providing spiritual guidance was not her terms of reference, she was an academic professor of religion. And therefore, there was there the court finding that there was an affectation of her right not to be discriminated.
A different situation is when we have the promotion or the perpetration of violence. These are cases that I got to see a lot in my travels. I already mentioned the case in Georgia where priests from the Orthodox Church were actually seen physically crashing chairs into persons who were participating in the marches of 17 of May.
You also have the case of Ghana where religious organizations have been administering conversion camps, and Ecuador where I received many testimonies of rape, heinously called corrective, in the context of persons that were under the custody of religion organizations, in very many cases, placed there by their families as a way to, quote, unquote, "correct" their sexual orientation.
Other angle of analysis is the criminalization of sexual orientation and gender identity, which in very many countries, you may know that 64 countries still maintain criminalization of same sex intimacy between men, 44, same sex intimacy between women, 32, forms of gender identity.
In a significant number of those countries, the criminalization is actually based on dogmatic interpretations of scripture, Brunei Darussalam, very recently, created the rule of implementation of the criminal code in which gay men are to be stoned to death with stones that are not to be larger than the clenched fist of that person throwing them. That's regulated in a regulation actually issued two years ago.
Or in some cases, not countries but provinces, such as the Aceh province in Indonesia where the Islamic Penal Code has been implemented and is actually on operation. And lesbian women are flogged every fortnight in the marketplace, and the flogging is actually filmed and placed in social media. Other forms of oppression, anti-propaganda legislation created in Russia cites, specifically religious convictions, and the same thing, Kenya, for example.
That's direct discrimination. But then of course, we have the forms of indirect discrimination, which is where the law doesn't appear to actually have those differences. But in the functioning of the law, you actually see immediately the way in which it functions in a discriminatory manner.
One of them is inequality in recognition of family. Only 33 countries recognize same sex marriages under the same kind of premises. And in very many cases, I was able to inventorize 17 cases, over the last six years, countries have legislated on the basis of religious arguments against same sex marriage.
So not only leaving the law silent on the matter, but actually establishing that marriage is to be understood as carried out between a man and a woman. And most recently, because of the bias that trans persons are beginning to see pervasive in every country in the world, now the laws are actually saying a person born biologically a man or a woman.
We then have the religious exemptions, a topic that is analyzed with to some degree in the report. I know that I'm not going very well in time so I'm going to not go too much into detail into it. Safe to-- apart and to say that there is a very clear standard under international human rights law that there has to be a very-- a test of non-discrimination has to be carried out when measures are to be taken to restrict rights and that exemptions are subject, of course, to the prevalence of the rights of others.
How that functions in every case is something that is constantly under judicial scrutiny. And judicial scrutiny is subject to change, particularly in contexts where courts are penetrated by political processes. And I think that you can place in that light, the very many discussions that are currently still undergoing before the United States courts, and in many cases before-- well, not in many cases, but in several cases before the Supreme Court itself, in which standards are being changed by the Supreme Court on the basis of understandings that one could reasonably attach to variations in the politics of the court.
And so the question in this respect that an analyst, from a human rights based perspective, raises is, to what extent is the system providing enough guarantees of non-detrimental reliance, for example, of rights that have been considered and understood when it is possible that these interpretations can change?
And I think we're beginning to see this as also a phenomenon that is existing very much around the world. Many questions, I think, come out from the examination of these issues. International human rights law bodies, United Nations treaty bodies have recognized the figure of conscientious objection only when attached to military processes.
But when similar figures have been put forth by states in specific cases, there is a very strenuous standard where states that actually allow a person to withdraw from a particular process need to ensure that services of the same quality, of comparable nature are equally accessible, equally affordable, equally available to persons. And I believe that it's very, very, very difficult to imagine a situation where that is to be complied with a 100% of the cases.
This is two angles of the analysis. Those are two angles of the analysis. I'm not a Native English speaker so sometimes I backpedal. But I wanted to mention, just for a few minutes, the third angle that was very important for me in this report, which is the ability of LGBT persons to see themselves as persons as existing within the space of religious freedom.
I was mentioning that one of the big aspirations that I had with this report was to try and imagine whether there were other angles of analysis rather than these very constructive legal analysis of only limitations. And to me, it was very important to also try to question the narratives that typically appear to place those that are fighting against human rights of LGBT persons as coming always from the high moral ground, as always coming from the ground of defending family, as always coming from the ground of defending morals.
And I was very much hoping to create some repository of knowledge that would give us an idea of the way in which religions are actually developing inclusive frameworks. And to my delight, the very rich knowledge base of this report, which by the way, it's published in my, well, in the web page of the independent expert. It's no longer my page. It's his page now. It's published there. And I really invite you to go to that very rich repository of knowledge that actually proves, in my view, how every religious denomination could be imagined to be one where inclusive spaces are being created.
And again, this was not meant as a theological exercise where I would be weighing on the ultimate truth of notions of transcendence and others. I always say that my business is people's rights not people's souls. However, I actually found that in the very rich repository of knowledge, there were coalitions of religions. They were dissidents within religious denominations. They were new branches that were created. They were humanist approaches to spirituality that came strongly to inform the possibility that this approach actually brings to a complete harmonization of rights.
In there, of course, we also included a very healthy repertoire of pre-colonial and Indigenous conceptions of spirituality, in which it is very clear that an exercise of challenging colonial structures could also be one of bringing to value Indigenous ways of looking at spirituality and understanding inclusion.
My report on colonialism invited to a healthy examination of colonial structures within two parameters. One, that almost every Indigenous organization that I consulted for that report insisted very intently that I should make the point that Indigenous existences should never be unduly romanticized. That this is just an examination that needs to be carried out on the basis of international human rights approaches because that is a base that Indigenous peoples also recognize.
But the other one, recognizing a dilemma that I think it's a lot more for theologists and divinity scholars to solve. So I leave it. But I very much interested in this, which is the extent to which we need to recognize that every culture around the world, I think every culture, if we just put aside the non-contacted peoples in the Amazon, I think every culture in the world is the result of cultural syncretism, and probably of the geological exercise through which layer after layer of sediment has been deposited in the creation of a collective consciousness.
I speak Spanish because of a colonial exercise, and I have a particular cosmo-vision because of a particular experience. And although I believe that a healthy examination of all of these structures, and that includes religion, there needs to be an understanding that great many populations around the world consider that they were illuminated in the exposition to particular religious thinking.
And so one of the, it's not a dilemma, but one of the pending tasks that I saw coming from this report and my report on colonialism was what mechanisms and, I don't know, maybe safeguards is the right word, should be put in place when carrying out these exercises of questioning. And I have two working theories there, but they're not very well tested. But my gut feeling is that freedom, individual freedom has a big role to play, and the respect for individual freedom has a big role to play in relation to that.
And the second one is the understanding that this is a discussion that needs to be respectful of the fact that the universal human rights framework is, in my view, the very best working theory that we have to constitute a framework of examination of these structures. So that's what I can leave with you. And I know we're going to have a conversation now, but I'm very thankful for the time that you gave me and very much looking forward to the conversation that will ensue. Thank you.
SUSIE HAYWARD: Thanks. [INAUDIBLE] here first.
VICTOR MADRIGAL-BORLOZ: Sure.
SUSIE HAYWARD: Thank you so much, Victor. I'm just going to say a few things and then I'm going to get us to the conversation, because I know we want to get to story time here too and hear about some of your experiences around the world. I just want to say, I am so appreciative of Victor's incredible work in his mandate generally, but also the ways in which he approached consideration of religion and religious freedom in the June report, but more broadly in many of his reports. Because as he says, they all speak to and build on one another.
Taking seriously the spiritual life and needs of queer folks and the needs to protect them from forms of spiritual violence, including religious stigmatization, expulsion from religious life, or actions that prevent queer or queer affirming allies from creating and sustaining religious communities in life. So precisely as he said, putting queer folks back into religious life as religious beings and affirming that within international law and international politics even more importantly perhaps.
So what he's done with his report on religious freedom that was released in June is not just to advance LGBTQ rights in this way, but it's also helped to ensure that religious freedom itself is being understood, defended, and advanced in a way that is necessary and important. It's too far in that sense.
And I'm speaking as somebody who thinks more-- I think about both, I think about all, but I think about religious freedom is, sort of, where I'm grounded. And I think your report was not just a contribution in extending and protecting violence and discrimination for sexual and gender minorities, but also a report that helps to extend and push back against particular interpretations and political actions around religious freedom that are problematic.
My work is, as Diane mentioned, my work prior to coming to Harvard and to some extent while I've been here has been in the world of US foreign policy, diplomacy, and peace-building with a focus on religious literacy and religious engagement. So as a result, I've sometimes found myself in the midst of International Religious Freedom Advocacy. International Religious Freedom Advocacy is how it's framed in the US, in the UN, Europe, and many other places. It's freedom of religion or belief. And I go back and forth a little bit. So excuse me if I do so here.
But I found myself in the midst of these discussions. And it's from this experience of operating within the space of International Religious Freedom Advocacy, particularly in DC, that I can say that what Victor has offered here is critical. Because suffice it to say that religious freedom needs of sexual and gender minorities.
And just as an aside, I often say sexual and gender minorities rather than LGBTQI. And we can debate all of the acronyms, but I often prefer to say as SGM or sexual and gender minority because I think it highlights necessarily the minority status of a lot of the folks whom we're talking about, and links it to other forms of repression against minority communities, including religious minorities, including racial and ethnic minorities and so on.
And I think that can be helpful as well with respect to some of the politics of religious freedom in DC to make those linkages between the oppression that sexual and gender minority faces and other minorities. Because they're often driven by the same kinds of interests and the same kinds of agendas with similar kinds of consequences. And so helping to highlight that can help ensure that they're not seen as in contestation with each other, LGBT rights and the rights of religious minorities or ethnic minorities or racial minorities, for which there is a great deal more advocacy and support often in DC.
So suffice it to say that religious freedom needs of sexual and gender minorities are often not a meaningful part of these advocacy discussions in DC or in mainstream International Religious Freedom Advocacy by state and non-state actors to the contrary. So in speaking to that, I want to name two trends because we wanted to talk a little bit tonight and in this series about the trends we're seeing, both domestically and globally, with respect to the assault on sexual and gender minority rights.
So I want to name two trends that I've seen in the global community with respect to this assault. And I hope we'll speak more about them in conversation together. So first is the robust and, I think, increased and increasingly sophisticated use of frameworks of human rights and the language of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism to make the case for discrimination against queer folks as part of this assault, right?
So religious freedom, obviously, is the one that's most often used as the central element of human rights discourse that's drawn on in this assault or pushback that we also hear referenced to free speech. And I'm sure Victor can name others, human rights that are drawn on in order to justify violence or discrimination against queer folks.
And when it comes to religious freedom, there's a lot about which one can raise concerns, at a very fundamental level, about the notion of religious freedom itself. So first, International Religious Freedom Advocacy has tended to focus on particular religions over others, example being that Christianity and Islam often get particular attention versus Indigenous religions and spiritualities are often the most ignored in this space. Or is sometimes used in a way that is perceived to be about defending religion itself as opposed to defending individuals. And Victor spoke to this some as well.
So we sometimes see this happen precisely when it comes to queer and women's rights. We hear Christianity is under assault often in this country or that we need to defend God, as if God needs to be defended. But of course, defend religion or defend God in what form? Who's God? Because the students in our program can attest, and as Victor named in his report, religions are always internally diverse. They always change over time, like law does, as you were speaking to.
And one religion or tradition or culture is drawn on by state actors or other actors to legitimate violence or discrimination. What they're doing is they're lifting up and legitimating one particular interpretation of a religion. They're lifting up that one interpretation over another as authoritative.
So what you have is the government or a powerful actor saying this is the normative, the pure, the authoritative interpretation of religion over another, which of course, goes against the law if not the principles of-- or the principles if not the law of religious freedom or freedom of religion or belief itself.
The principles of FoRB ascribe that governments shouldn't be in the business of legitimating one religious interpretation over another. They should be, like Victor saying, I'm not a theologian and I'm not in the business of doing theology. Or at the very least, I can speak to the US government because, of course, there are different state structures with respect to the role that religion plays and whether the government does or does not officially endorse a particular religion, in which case religious freedom laws are used to ensure that even those who don't ascribe to the government's official religion still have protections in those spaces.
But speaking for the US government, where we do have a more strict code of separation between religion and state in our establishment clause of the Constitution, that in this case, there is no government interpretation of a religion that is considered legitimate over any other.
And I should hasten to say that this exclusion to a state actor or government authorities lifting up one form of religious interpretation as authoritative, as what religions say about XYZ queer rights in this case, goes for progressive religious interpretations as well, which is what Victor was speaking to, right? It's not in the business of governments either to be necessarily endorsing interpretation of religion that is queer affirming as the one interpretation of religion that is authoritative.
The scholars, Winifred Sullivan and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, would go so far as to say that having governments define what constitutes religion and what doesn't is a big problem in the first instance and undermines the entire FoRB project. Well, I don't necessarily take that to the extreme some do in saying that the notion of religious freedom should be jettisoned entirely.
I do think that these critical questions are necessary to ensure that the ways in which FoRB is defined, applied, and defended is just and wildly, to use the term you used earlier, wildly inclusive. And I think Victor's report assists in that process of ensuring that FoRB is being understood and interpreted legally and politically in ways that are far more inclusive than they often have been historically in this country.
Further, with respect to the instrumentalization of the language of anti-colonialism, here I'm going to share an anecdote. So as Diane mentioned, I testified on the Hill about religious freedom in July. It was actually just a couple of weeks after your report in June came out. So I was able to give him a shout out in my testimony.
But one of my co-panelists on that panel said that the US government going into other countries, we were specifically talking about Uganda, the US government going into other countries to advocate for sexual and gender minorities or for LGBTQI rights to push back against their laws criminalizing queer folks, that that was an act of Western imperialism. So this is the language of anti-imperialism that's being used. He was advocating that we shouldn't be going in and telling other countries that their laws are wrong and that they need to ascribe by our norms with respect to gender.
Well, here's where Victor's last report helps to illuminate, that was on colonialism, helps to illuminate how problematic that argument is and that it demonstrates how, prior to colonialism in many places, including in African countries, among Native American and First Nations, people in Asia, et cetera, there often existed far more normative gender fluidity and sexual diversity. And indeed, those who we might define today as queer were sometimes believed to have access to particular spiritual powers as a result of their status. And so held religious positions as well within their communities.
Not to romanticize the past because obviously, there was diversity and it's not a monolithic picture of how sexuality and gender was understood then as well. But in any case, it was the process of colonialism that often affirmed a particular binary notion of gender and particular understandings of sexuality that then shaped the laws within those countries.
Even after the process of secular-- or so-called secularization, where it wasn't necessarily affirmed within particular religious understandings of sexuality and gender, those norms, but it got reframed within language, secular language, that nonetheless had the same consequences of regulating gender and sexual relations in particular ways.
So again, this is just to give another example of the ways in which Victor's report on colonialism's legacies is an assist for those of us who are operating within the religious freedom space to ensure means of helping to push back against some of the ways in which this human rights language is being weaponized within that space in order to advance a particular understanding of religious freedom that is narrow.
The second trend I just want to lift up briefly that I hope will speak to a little bit more in our conversation, is the global dynamics of authoritarianism that we're seeing worldwide, and the push back against democracy and the effect that it's having on sexual and gender minorities in particular.
So this summer, I was involved in a faculty seminar at the Institute of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim studies that brought together activists and scholars with knowledge of forms of exclusionary, often nationalist or religious supremacist governance worldwide and the various movements or trends that we're seeing within that.
And one of the things-- we were looking at cases from within the US, to Brazil, to India, to Turkey, to Russia, beyond. So it was a real vast array of countries that we were looking at where we were seeing some of these trends of what some people refer to as religious nationalism.
What I would refer to as supremacist forms and exclusionary forms of nationalism that sometimes get framed in ways where religion is central, sometimes ways in which nationalism, ethnicity, or race is central, but nonetheless share these common factors of defining the nation in a particular way that is exclusionary and that benefits some communities over others.
And what was striking, as we looked across these different cases, was the collusion and networking between these governments and their domestic enablers and allies. They share, as I'm sure you've all seen, a lot of very similar tactics, a lot of very similar language, a lot of similar strategies. And that's not by coincidence. There's a lot of folks going back and forth between these countries.
But from the angle of religion, what's really interesting is that, and religious freedom, is that they might be diverse countries that have different religious majorities, and are articulating a vision of religion in the state, and what is authoritative religion that can be very distinct from one another.
So we have Modi, in India, who's reflecting forms of Hindu nationalism. And Modi is no friends to Muslims or to Christians within his context. Similarly, of course, we have former presidents Bolsonaro in Brazil and Trump here in the US who are no friends to religious minorities, non-Christian minorities in these contexts, just as Erdogan or Putin. They couldn't be accused of being friendly to religious minorities in Turkey or Russia.
And yet, these leaders in their enablers do rally together against a shared minority group, which is sexual and gender minorities, and women. And you see these bizarre bedfellows coming together on this issue of religious freedom despite the fact that they're not going to apply religious freedom in their countries in ways that would protect each other's, religious brethren or sisters or siblings.
But rather in a way that is colluding together over issues of restrictions for sexual and gender minorities. Sometimes because of particular interests in that, with respect to the larger groups that are colluding around it or supporting it, but oftentimes driven by larger political interests related to centralization and power. And so it's ironic to see the use of religious freedom being used by these strange bedfellows as they come together in this concerted attack that fuels some of what we're seeing as the current assault on LGBT, rights?
But of course, it's a very selective understanding and application of religious freedom that, again, is not about individual rights often. And at the end of the day, the human rights language is very much rooted in the freedom of the individual, the freedom of the individual to be protected from violence and access to happiness and meaning and so on.
That's just a little bit more grist for the mill for us as we think about Victor's reports and their contributions, but also what they have to offer the world right now in these trends that we're seeing right now and how best to respond to them. So let's move to conversation.
DIANE L. MOORE: So we are always up against time restrictions. So I have just two questions I want to pose, Victor, and then we will open up questions to the audience. And you can choose one or the other, or neither to respond to. Yeah, we have choices.
So the first question I wanted to ask is that you were so prescient and wise and recognizing right away that you wanted to break this binary of religious freedom and freedom for queer expression. I'm going to use queer very broadly here. So when you then-- so completely appropriate, and your challenge to the monolithic understandings of religion, recognizing that those play out because of power not because of truths of internal diversities of religion.
So when you then conclude your report and speak about the power of how there are many within religious traditions, out of those religious traditions fighting for LGBTQ rights, queer rights, I'm just wondering, can you share some stories about how you discovered that and what played out?
So that's my first question. The next question I have is actually a question that is conceptual, that I'm sure you've encountered, which is that it's absolutely appropriate within religious freedom frames not to claim that state should not be trying to dictate which religion or which interpretation of religion.
Yet, a pushback, which I'm sure you heard, by more conservative religious traditions will say that, actually, the state is imposing a particular constraint or theological interpretation when you privilege human rights within religious freedom frames because human rights then will require a representation of diversity within religions, which many communities, religious conservative communities, will say that actually does violate my interpretation of religion. So those are two-- Yeah. There you go.
VICTOR MADRIGAL-BORLOZ: I think I'll answer the first one and then I'll have an attempt to part of the second one. But I'm also sure that Susie has something to say in relation to that. I don't really remember what this ended up in the report. Reports of the UN are really cruel. You only have 10,700 words, and if you go words over that, an editor just chops them. And they decide, so actually, you need to really cut a lot. So I don't know if this made it to the report or not.
But what I wanted to share with you, and this is what it boils down to, when one is in a position of having a job like that, what it boils down to is there are many people that I talk to, as I was traveling around the world, who had experienced violations of different kinds. And after a while of having a conversation, people go, or they may go to whatever is really important to them.
And in many of those conversations, it ended up being that the experience that people would ended up conveying to me was the fact that since their very early childhood, they would have been told that spirituality was denied to them. That because of the fact that they were different, whatever the axis of identity was, lesbian, gay, or any other, trans, Moshe Hijra, whatever axis, that they had been convinced very early on that spirituality was denied to them. Essentially, that they were denied transcendence.
And I always immediately thought to myself, well, a person who is not transcendent, is in transcendent, then you're nothing. And that's the message that people were receiving, is that they were nothing in the big scheme of things. And I thought that was very cruel. And I think that one of the pending tasks that I had after this report was an examination of damage that people suffer based on exclusion from the enormity of human exploration that is spirituality and what this does to a person.
And one particular person, a friend of mine, who we were talking about this in the context of the preparation of the report, he grew up Catholic in a particularly conservative setting. And he told me the earliest memories that I have when I was a child was, the first one is that I was taught that only honest people were good, and the second one was that I needed to lie in order to be who I was. And so the basic lessons that he got was that he was condemned to be a bad person.
And I think that's why this report is important, is, well, I don't know if the report is important, but working on this topic is important, is because it is an area that transcends so clearly the boundaries of only law to speak of a space where people do some of the most essential things that they do, which is explore spirituality.
So that's, I think-- and I have a little anecdote. I was in Peru very recently and I was invited by the trans community in Lima I don't know how many of you will have had the possibility of being there. But it's a very excluded community, typically, on average, very poor. I left school very early.
There's a vibrant trans community. And I was invited to one of the neighborhoods where they lead their lives. And I've known many of them for many years. And in one of the places, they said, Oh, you should come and you should see actually our Virgin. And I was like, Oh, you have a Virgin. And it turns out that there is a particular place where there is a Virgin, it's called the Virgin of the Puerta, the Virgin of the door, which is a Virgin that is adored by the trans women of Lima.
And very much in tune with what that brings with it, it's a Virgin that owns 600 pairs of shoes because, of course, shoes are very important. And being there, I actually was quite taken by how beautiful it was that people would not have been alienated of the possibility-- because I know that this was going beyond in very many ways to this.
As to the pushback and to the argumentation, cultural relativism is the most important argument that is discussed in the halls of the UN. So the second that we talk about this, there is a whole resolution and a whole series of resolutions of religious organizations. And I can cite a few. The Vatican policy on gender, for example. And he and she, he created them-- he created them, which basically opposes the notion and establishes that human rights should not penetrate the idea of this reserve.
But the Vienna declaration, we're celebrating 30 years of the Vienna declaration, acknowledged the importance of reading context through cultural realities and contexts while very clearly establishing the principle. And this is what I consider a robust consensus. That relativities cannot actually negate the rights of persons.
And I don't want to be too abstract about this because it just makes me sound too dogmatic. What I have done for the last six years was to place in front of the international community, the evidence as to why this limits must exist. It is the evidence of women being raped because they're lesbians. It's the evidence of young men being subjected to mistreatment and torture because they're gay. There's the evidence of horrifying amputations to which trans persons are subjected in many countries to obtain legal recognition of their gender identity.
And my question is, what element in cultural relativism makes it desirable to subject that kind of physical and psychological suffering on a person? I go back to the fact that the human rights standard provides the answer to that. Now, again, this is not dogmatic and it's not discursive. I will place the evidence before you as to what this means in terms of pain, physical and psychological. And the question is, what is there on the other side? And if it's a discussion that we can have, but I need evidence on the other side. And I don't think that there's any. But I don't know, Susie, say what you think.
SUSIE HAYWARD: I mean, in answer to your second question, Diane, just pulling from your own method of religious literacy, right? Is that what you were setting me up for? But one-- I'm going to treat it like that-- one might make-- certain actors might make the argument that our religion says that there's a normative understanding of our religion is that there aren't other legitimate religious understandings. That's a theological statement. That's a devotional statement, right?
The reality is that there are always going to be other people within that same context, within that same religious tradition, who are going to have a different interpretation. And so I think, just like you point to the evidence of these actions of violence, as religion scholars, we point to the evidence of, that might be your devotional statement that they're not legitimate, but the reality is there are multiple interpretations and understandings and practices and lived realities.
And again, it is not the role of government to be affirming one over another or to be repressing or allowing for violence against any other interpretation or practice of that religion, unless it is inciting violence against others, right? There are limitations to that if it is causing harm to others.
DIANE L. MOORE: Great. It really was not a setup because the reason I wanted to ask is this way that I was, and I really appreciate both of your comments, because I think this language about religious freedom gets used in this way. And I'm really grateful. So it's really, really saying that you are challenging the conflation of theological assertion of truth with the reality of diverse religious expressions. And that reality has to be continually pressed to challenge the normative assumption that the loudest theological voice equals the truth about a religious tradition.
Let's open it up to questions. I have just one other quick comment. I wanted to say that you infer in your report, and I just want to say that I'm also grateful for it, that there are, aside from just individuals reclaiming spirituality, which you so beautifully articulated, I just want to say, in every quarter of this globe, there are people acting out of actually the religious tradition that hegemonically is challenging the rights of queer people. That there are pockets within those communities where those rights are being preserved and fought for.
And so it doesn't have to be outside of a religious community. It just is another dimension of diversity within the religious community. And my plea for all of us is to look for those communities. They're there. We don't look for them because we do assume often, what your report does not do, which I'm so grateful for, we assume that, by definition, religious communities and freedom of religion expression is going to be anti-queer. Well, being anti-queer rights. Because those are the largest, often most embedded voices. So I just wanted to say.
SUSIE HAYWARD: Can I just add something on to that really important point, which is that Victor does an incredible job highlighting the religious freedom rights of queer folks to be able to live and practice their religions in ways that are in tune with their conscience and that affirm their dignity and so on.
But it's also about ensuring that religious freedom is being extended to the dissidents within the hegemonic religious traditions who may or may not be queer themselves, right, but who are interpreting their religious traditions, practicing their religious traditions in ways that may go against the orthodoxy or the interests of power brokers, political power brokers, theological power brokers, what have you.
And too often, religious freedom, politically, the way that it gets advocated for the way that it gets defended and the way that it gets interpreted by a lot of the folks who are kind of central within the religious freedom advocacy world is not affirming those dissidents, is being used in order to reinforce the sort of Orthodox or hegemonic understanding of religion.
DIANE L. MOORE: I think, here in the US, that's a really perfect example of that, which the religious left is really trumped now, sorry for the language, by a very strong and very politically powerful White religious Christian nationalism. Let's open it up for-- I'm going to just ask for maybe three questions that we can pose because we're right at the hour. But let's just hear your questions and then, and if you could make sure to be as brief as possible with your questions, that would be helpful, and then we'll see what is most relevant for your response.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. Let me quickly ask my question and then say a couple of sentences to contextualize it. My question is, maybe the challenge is the secularization of the human rights movement in terms of-- because the human rights movement, the human rights discourse is a very minimalist and dry discourse and I doubt that it can change minds and hearts. And I think there's something fundamentally wrong about lawyers coming to religious leaders and telling them how to treat neighbors.
And going back in the past, the human rights movement wasn't secularized. And secularized not in the sense of state religion separation, but it's secularization of society. And I wonder if religious leaders-- a future in which religious leaders are in the forefront of human rights movements is one in which you can have a successful advocacy for LGBTQ rights, because you can preach about love, but you can't really litigate love into people. Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Just a shout out to DIna who really is instrumental in creating this entite series both conceptually.
AUDIENCE: I don't need an applause, but thank you so much. Thank you so much for all three of you being here. I'm a dual degree student with the Law School and the Divinity School. So this is very interesting to me. I am curious. One of the things I've been looking into is transgender identity and gender affirming care being an expression of religious freedom for some people. And so I'm looking at that in the context of the United States.
And so I think you've already touched on that a bit, but if you could articulate if that surfaced in the report a little bit more. And if you have time to mention how you see parallels between what's happening in the United States in your report, that would be great. But we also don't have that much time, so
DIANE L. MOORE: Do we have one more question?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, it was a little bit touched on, but I'm from the Netherlands and there you see a lot of the opposite rhetoric where the Dutch identity very much identifies with queer rights. And so that is often used then as a way to target religion, Christianity and Islamophobia. So it's used as, Oh, well, these religions are anti-queer so they are anti-Dutch. So they're not compatible in a Dutch secular society. So I guess just wondering how you see, in your report, secularism play into this discussion and complicate that binary a little bit.
SUSIE HAYWARD: Thank you.
VICTOR MADRIGAL-BORLOZ: Indeed when you said, I think, that there's something wrong about lawyers, I thought you were going to stop there. I was going to say I take issue with that as a principle, but then you say coming and telling. I mean, this is a conversation that will need to continue because there's many angles in relation to it. One of the things that I found extraordinary in the six years that I carried out my work is the number of coalitions of persons of faith, including religious authorities that actually are working in the human rights space.
And I particularly worked with, I'm going to cite them because they are a powerful coalition, is the global interfaith network, gene SOGI, which is a coalition of, I think, over 800 religious denominations that work on inclusive approaches. And they are the ones that take the argument from a theological perspective, right? They're the ones that are saying the scripture doesn't necessarily say what you say. And that's the argument that I will have, right?
Now, having said that, I think that there's two assumptions in the question that you raised that hopefully are going to change over time. One of them is, of course, that there's going to be less lawyers and more interdisciplinary approaches to human rights advocacy, right?
And we see that diversity, of course, very much happening all around the world, which means that it's not only-- legal language is one type of interpretation that is not necessary but it's not the only one. My report on colonialism was almost essentially anthropological in its approach, and this report on religion was almost solely sociological in its perspective. So I think that that's part.
And the other thing is, of course, the more people see themselves as spiritual people, the more they're going to be talking about languages that are appealing from that perspective. But I think that, and I don't have evidence that is scientific on this, but I think around the world, there is a very big proportion of LGBT people that have seen themselves alienated from religion and church and spirituality. And therefore, they don't go to that space. They refuse to go to that space and they see that space as antagonistic. So I think that that's the processes where I would see bridging that.
Dina, is it OK that I mentioned the three and then-- I think that there's two angles to what you're saying, equally interesting and rich of analysis, both of them. I mentioned the Vatican specific policy on gender identity, and he and she, he created them, which is a policy, I would like to say that it's 500 years old, but it's actually seven years old or something like that, in which the Vatican establishes that sex is immutable and that gender identity is an invention of ideology.
I know that doctrine well because I actually had to relate to it in my reports on legal recognition of gender identity. I think that the point becomes an extremely difficult point to litigate from a theological, devotional perspective when specific policies are created to state the canonic law in relation to the existence of particular persons, right? I think that policy was created in relation to the existence of trans persons.
I think then it becomes very, very difficult to navigate in that space, which is why I haven't, although I relate to it from that angle. And I'd like to hear-- I'm not familiar enough. I couldn't go that deep in how many religious denominations and institutionalities are issuing specific statements concerning the non-existence or the-- but I think that that would be a particular angle of analysis that would be really important.
But I would like to just mention another one that, to me, is quite fascinating. And I hope you will forgive me extrapolating. This came to me by a scholar of the name of Mary Ann case of the University of Chicago. You may know her. And she was in a meeting that I convened at some point many years ago. And she was talking about the existence of trans persons and the ability to recognize that a spirit can dissociate itself from the limitation of the human body.
And it immediately occurred to me that this is very much what trans persons are. And so I've asked a lot of trans persons, how does it resonate with them that they constitute the most clear example that the human spirit or soul can actually exist in a body that is not subject to the limitations of sex assigned at birth? That it really is this spiritual transcendence over the flesh.
And apparently, this is the most telling demonstration that doctrines by Benedict II, actually, which is the transcendence of the soul over the flesh. And so I think that there may be something there to explore that is actually quite interesting, and maybe it will take us to unsuspected places. Again, it won't be me because I don't speak that language, but I think that there's something interesting there.
I always think of the Netherlands as one of the examples where I think the respect for the human rights of LGBT persons is as close as we have seen it in a human project, as becoming a nonpartisan project, right? Everywhere in the world, a particular party owns the rights of LGBT people and a particular party or others own the agenda against those human rights. I don't need to go too far away.
I think the Netherlands is one of those examples where I think, pretty much across the board, you have that conviction. But I think that this proves the fact that positive figures under international human rights law concepts, religious freedom being one of them, freedom from discrimination and violence being another one, they can be instrumentalized for whatever.
Because we recognize that religion is not this fixed paradigm because we recognize the importance of freedom of religion, the worst mistake that I could have done was to actually say that my report was going to be a case against religion being harmonized. Because I recognize the importance of religion in the pursuit of happiness or spirituality, let's say, right?
But of course, we can instrumentalize religion and we can instrumentalize-- and I will express an opinion that I wasn't able to express as independent expert. But I'm exercising my newfound freedom now, liberation. I'm not a big fan of putting the rainbow flag everywhere. I like the rainbow flag, but i prefer people over flags, right? And so when the rainbow flag is used as a way to actually provoke, for example, that to me is not necessarily the most conducive way of doing things. This is very personal. I couldn't have said that as independent expert.
But the reason why I say this is that in the last strategy by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, one of the action points of the strategy is that a competition is being called to create a symbol that is as compelling as the rainbow flag to counter, this is the result of a meeting held in Jeddah in December, to counter the rainbow flag. I think that we should resist the instrumentalization of narratives and languages, and actually go to the essence of what we're trying to achieve, which is respect of rights for all.
So you will find me fighting against Islamophobia anywhere. And you will find me denouncing when the rights of LGBT persons are being used for that. A 100%.
DIANE L. MOORE: OK, well, so you are a brilliant lawyer and that's been really clearly demonstrated. She's also a beautiful and brilliant writer, which I really do commend these reports. But I think in this last conversation, I think you've got a budding theological trajectory here that we might pull you into Harvard Divinity School yet in a more permanent way. Can we please give both Victor and Susie round of applause.
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SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2023, president and fellows of Harvard College.