Treatment of Homosexual Men and Women in the Developing World

Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for spelling out so powerfully and persuasively the scale and horror of the threats faced by many gay people around the world. Noble Lords will be aware that in 1967 it was the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, who spoke in this House to support the decriminalisation of homosexuality in this country, thus making a clear distinction in British law between a moral and a criminal issue.

As noble Lords will now know, no such distinction exists in many parts of the world and, as a result, people are suffering horrendous abuse and even death for being who they are and loving who they love. Many of us have met people who have shared the most disturbing personal stories, including a very small number who have been granted asylum on grounds of sexual orientation in this country.

Others in this debate have rehearsed the ways in which laws criminalising same-sex sexual activity between adults have been repeatedly found in international law to violate fundamental human rights, and this debate serves also to highlight effectively the way in which criminalisation gives rise to persecution. I want, however, to concentrate on the way in which discriminatory interference in the private sexual conduct of consenting adults is an affront to the fundamental Christian values of human dignity, tolerance and equality.

It is of course no secret, as others have made clear, that on the ethics of homosexual practice the churches in general and the Anglican communion bishops in particular are deeply divided, but that cannot and must not be any basis for equivocating on the central issue of equality before the law of all human beings whether heterosexual or homosexual. Further, many of us who are bishops in this country value and treasure our links with particular dioceses around the Anglican communion. We respect and appreciate the different, and often sharply divided, theological approaches which lead to different stances on the ethical issues. But, as the Lambeth Conference of 1998 made clear, there is not and cannot be any place for homophobia in the church, and all are to be welcomed regardless of sexual orientation.

Few have spoken on this issue as unequivocally as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who said in 2010 at the United Nations High-level Panel on Ending Violence and Criminal Sanctions on the Basis of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity:

“All over the world, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are persecuted. They face violence, torture and criminal sanctions because of how they live and who they love. We make them doubt that they too are children of God—and this must be nearly the ultimate blasphemy”.

Indeed, in recent years, successive statements from the leaders of major Christian denominations in the West have made similar points, including perhaps most consistently, those from the Society of Friends, which has stated:

“We affirm the love of God for all people, whatever their sexual orientation, and our conviction that sexuality is an important part of human beings as created by God, so that to reject people on the grounds of their sexual behaviour is a denial of God’s creation”.

The noble Lord, Lord Lexden, has issued a direct challenge in his opening speech. He said that many people the world over are now asking the churches to put their position beyond all doubt, by saying simply and clearly that criminalisation is wrong. I will put my position beyond all doubt—and I know I speak for other Members of this Bench—by stating it in as clear terms as I can. If criminalisation leads, as it evidently does, to gay people concealing their own identity, that must be wrong; if criminalisation leads to many living in fear, that must be wrong; if criminalisation leads to the prospect of persecution, arrest, detention and death, that must be wrong; and if criminalisation means that LGBT people dare not turn to the state when facing hate crimes and violence, that must be wrong too.

It is within the adult lifetime of most of us in this House that the law was changed in this country to decriminalise homosexual acts. However, for our children’s generation, such a state of affairs must feel like ancient history—as appropriate to the moral climate of today’s society in this country as the burning of witches. We must all urgently pursue this journey to a completely new climate in those many countries of the world where same-sex relations are criminal offences. I very much hope that this debate will serve that cause.

EAC Report: Development Aid

Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts

Monday 22nd October 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, I add my thanks to those of this House to the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, for bringing the subject of development aid to our attention. Crucial to the public discussion of this subject is a central question, to which the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, drew attention earlier, about how the debate is framed—the question raised in sharp terms by the report of the Select Committee. Are we, as other noble Lords have said, to spend our time and energy discussing whether to backtrack on the Government’s commitment to 0.7% of GNI or could we move on to engage in what I believe would be a different but more fruitful debate about the effectiveness of our aid spend and the effective scrutiny of that spend?

In August of this year, I spent two weeks in Tanzania visiting our link dioceses of Mount Kilimanjaro and Kiteto. The advantage of visits to churches is that in African culture you travel straight to the heart of local communities; you meet the key leaders in towns and villages; and you see both the hope and despair of populations rarely visited by politicians or even NGOs. You are also brought face to face with unavoidable moral questions, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, suggested. What is the responsibility today and tomorrow for the unrecoverable childhoods of those stricken with curable disease and avoidable malnutrition? How do we calibrate responsibility to these children against our responsibility to the children of our own country? What sort of moral value do we put on the obligation of the United Kingdom to keep its commitments, repeated in recent years at United Nations, G8 and EU summits?

These questions stand in some contrast to the tone of the Select Committee report, which lists the great range of complex issues on which, according to the report, experts are not agreed. The range of disagreements is vast and includes questions about the effectiveness of aid in promoting growth, the forms of aid most appropriate to achieving independence, the best way to channel aid, the relationship between aid and the need for better governance, the relationship between aid and the need to combat corruption, and so on. This list cannot be used as an alibi for reneging on our commitment to a target. Rather, it precisely illustrates my point. If the Government are to wait for consensus among experts on these issues before becoming resolute in standing by their original commitments, we will be left looking indecisive and incoherent in a fundamental area of government policy.

This House can properly feel some pride in what has been achieved through British aid programmes to date. In 2009-10, UK aid ensured that 15 million people had enough food to eat and it provided more than 1.5 million people with clean water. The United Kingdom’s aid helped to build or upgrade 1,500 kilometres of roads, and in 2012 to 2015 it will help more than 77 million people to access financial services. It can be argued that, far from being unaccountable, DfID is one of the most scrutinised departments in Whitehall, with the Independent Commission for Aid Impact and the International Development Select Committee, in addition to the National Audit Office.

If we could move on from the debate about 0.7% of UK income, we could reach the point of discussing other, more fruitful and urgent questions such as the relative merits of microfinance, social entrepreneurship and grass-roots advocacy. It is after all commonplace in other areas of government spending to explore these kinds of questions, so why is the debate about aid not framed in this way? That would allow us to move on to deal with other crucial matters, including how we plan for a future beyond aid, how we tackle global forces that keep people poor, how we address the tax avoidance that creates the huge inequalities that hurt the poorest and most marginalised and how we push for international co-operation to end the tax-haven secrecy that preserves these inequalities.

Our polarised debate seems to assume that aid is often seen as the only source of external funding and that external funding is all there is to development. This is a sterile and erroneous position. Important though aid is, access to markets and technology, especially green technology, is arguably far more important to a country’s strategy for development than any external financial assistance. Aid is but one part of the solution, not the whole solution. I hope that our debate this evening will help us to move on from narrow terms focused on government targets.