Nice Human Rights Women photos
Some cool human rights women images:
Human Rights Commission – coddlers of homosexual deviants (Proposition 8 victory orgy)
Image by skinnylawyer
Or so says this protest banner, part of a silent homophobic protest by North Korean defectors in front of a building next to Seoul City Hall. This building is home to United Nations High Commission for Refugee’s South Korean offices, as well as the South Korean government’s Human Rights Commission.
The Human Rights Commission issues recommendations in favor of improving human rights for everyone in South Korea, including foreign laborers, women, and of course, LGBTs. Its nonbinding recommendations often form the basis for new human rights laws that get enacted via the standard lawmaking process; already by this point, discrimination on basis of sexual orientation had become illegal in principle.
The North Koreans’ gripe is that the Commission is coddling homosexuality, a "disease that will destroy the moral fabric of South Korea’s society," rather than giving a damn about human rights in North Korea. (Sadly, North Korea is not the Human Rights Commission’s jurisdiction – that is the jurisdiction of Ministry of Unification for direct North Korean contact, and Ministry of Foreign Affairs for international efforts.) The protesters demand the resignation of the entire Commission.
North Korean refugees are not ready for freedom when they leave home and come to South Korea. Too often, they replace the predictability of their former personality cult with the predictability of South Korea’s own far-right authoritarians, their religion (evangelical Christianity), and their masters (US Christian Right and Republican Party). And I know too well that all of them would love to make homosexuality a criminal, if not capital, offense. Traditional Confucian social order is inherently incompatible with homosexuality, and under the far-right military dictatorships of the past, while there were no anti-sodomy laws, general indecency laws severely punished LGBTs.
South Korea’s homophobes are very heartened that President Lee Myung-bak and the ruling Grand National Party are by their side. They were even more heartened by the development the previous week in the US State of California, home to many Korean-Americans, where a voter initiative, strongly supported by the said Korean-Americans (and illegally funded by South Korean far right), re-banned gay marriages. Despite protests like this, and documented extreme homophobia within North Korea where homosexuality is considered to be a corruption of the decadent Western capitalists, the said Korean-Americans are too happy to claim that homosexuality is North Korea’s way of corrupting South Korea’s morally upright society.
In South Korea, aside from these far-right groups and North Korean refugees, homophobia is usually a function of one’s age and generation. While it is generally accepted that personal moral objections can be raised to homosexuality, it is considered unacceptable to use that personal objection to codify discrimination into law, as Korean-Americans had just done in California. And I thought most South Koreans under 40 seemed to be even more LGBT-friendly than Americans of similar age.
Most Americans are surprised to hear from me that homophobia is not the value of the average South Korean, and in turn, most South Koreans were surprised to hear from me that their brothers and sisters in Los Angeles were so proud to take civil rights away from an entire demographic.
Women’s Work
Image by The Advocacy Project
Gender Equity Training in Nepal: 18 women and 7 men from local civic societies attended a Gender Equity Training in June 2010. In this image, a Tharu woman explains the daily tasks of women from sunrise to sunset. The men similarly explained how they spend their day. All participants learned that the division of labor is unequal, with women performing the onus of work. Backward Society Education, a local human rights NGO that advocates for the rehabilitation of former bonded laborers in southwest Nepal, coordinated the two-day training in Tulsipur, Nepal.
Photo by Adrienne Henck, 2010 Peace Fellow
