http://equalitymatters.org/blog/201105240010

It isn't just California and Prop 8. Sharon Slater who is a Mormon and head of the "Arizona-based Family Watch International (FWI) hosted “26 UN delegates from 23 different countries” at a policy forum in January that provided “expert presentations” and policy briefings about “how to better protect and promote the family and family values at the UN,” according to an FWI newsletter written by the organization’s president, Sharon Slater.

"“The list of governments represented read like a geography lesson, as diplomats from countries around the globe-including from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Caribbean Islands-met in Gilbert in January,” trumpeted an article that has since been removed from the website of the Arizona Beehive, a publication that serves Arizona’s Mormon population.

"Slater’s newsletter characterizes the presentations at the meeting as providing information on “how the UN system is being manipulated by sexual rights activists to promote the sexual agenda” and adds that “the institution of the family is being undermined by these efforts.”

"According to invitations distributed to attendees and obtained by Equality Matters the two-day session included briefings by lawyers on family policy issues dealt with by the UN’s Third Committee ­­­– the social, humanitarian, and cultural affairs committee – and those addressed by subsidiary bodies of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), including the Commissions on the Status of Women, Sustainable Development, and Population and Development.

"“Delegates will be provided with current research, statistics, and resources on a number of sensitive family issues that will be negotiated at upcoming UN conferences in 2011,” says the invitation.

"Presumably, “family issues” would include matters like the vote last November in which a bloc of 79 countries, led by the African Group in the UN General Assembly, removed “sexual orientation” from a UN resolution that condemned extrajudicial and arbitrary executions of certain vulnerable minorities. The U.S. Mission reintroduced the language and successfully restored “sexual orientation” to the resolution the following month.

"As Slater told the Arizona Beehive, “Of grave concern to the UN delegates, were recent attempts by developed countries, with the United States taking the lead, to pressure developing countries to change their laws and policies to accept and promote a number of controversial sexual rights. The delegates said they urgently needed the scientific information we presented regarding sexual orientation and homosexuality, as these are emerging issues in UN policymaking.”

"FWI’s forum answered that call by including a testimonial provided by “a patient” (as Slater puts it) who allegedly transformed her or his sexual orientation through reparative therapy – exactly the type of misinformation that is often touted by those who support criminalizing homosexuality in places like Africa and the Middle East.

"“One of the most moving presentations,” Slater writes of the conference, “was the personal testimony of a patient who is successfully reorienting from homosexuality to heterosexuality. For many of these diplomats, this was their first exposure to the scientific and clinical evidence that proves homosexuality is not genetically determined and fixed like skin color or race and that in many cases, individuals who experience same-sex attraction can be helped by therapy.”

"While the right-wing rhetoric is perhaps unsurprising, what’s most fascinating and unsettling about Slater is her access to international leaders who have key roles in African countries such as Uganda – relationships that were originally fueled by the American push to export religious zealotry as the HIV/AIDS epidemic spread across the continent."

I should note that "reparative therapy" has been discredited by the APA. They have called the form of therapy potentially harmful to the patient. That any organization would present it to third world UN leaders as anything other than harmful is unconscionable.

But there is more:
http://qsaltlake.com/2011/05/27/prominent-mormon-has-ties-to-uganda%E2%80%99s-kill-the-gays-pastor/

"Prominent Mormon Has Ties to Uganda’s ‘Kill the Gays’ Pastor"

"Family Watch International lists Martin Ssempa as their African coordinator, describing him as an “internationally renowned family activist.” That evidently is code for the fact Ssempa, an evangelical minster, is a vocal supporter of Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill, which makes homosexual activity punishable by life in prison and, in some cases, death."

Quite a twist on Family First: Your family comes first unless they are gay - then, Kill 'Em!!

One would think that being alive would be the basic requirement for entering "reparative therapy."

Chalk another one up for the morgbots.

Thanks to the Mormon Temple. In such a circumstance, killing gays would save time and effort spent on reparative therapy as well as provide names for temple work.

Seriously, repartive therapy can hardly be considered a new treatment and the latest scientific research supports a physiological basis for homosexuality, not a psychological one, as well as exonerates same sex partners as parents from previously held biases. The "current research" they provided to UN delagates would have to be old at best and most likely discredited by the APA.

I remember watching a Vanguard episode that talked about Ssempa. He is just disgusting. The idea of killing people over sexual views is just ridiculous. If the Mormon community as a whole started to support this lunatic I'm pretty sure they'd have even more people leaving their ranks. And quickly.

Mormons and CEDAW, the Istanbul "miracle" and other examples of LDS hatemongering and homophobia at the United Nations.

Check this out:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jack-huberman/screwing-up-america-richa_b_26069.html

Many American Christians hold Muslims in contempt in part because of 9/11 but primarily because they are Muslims and not Christians. How interesting that their mutual hatred of homosexuals would bring them together to form an alliance. It is something to remember when Christians criticize Islam and Mulims.

"Presumably, “family issues” would include matters like the vote last November in which a bloc of 79 countries, led by the African Group in the UN General Assembly, removed “sexual orientation” from a UN resolution that condemned extrajudicial and arbitrary executions of certain vulnerable minorities"

We're going to kill you because Jesus loves you. Why don't you understand? What a disgusting mindset.

"Last year, for instance, she worked with delegations from Iran, Syrian...”

Well, the good thing is birds of a feather flock together, or so the saying goes. By keeping company such as this they'll quickly fade from legitimacy. Granted, I don't know how seriously these 'delegations' are taken, so any legitimacy they have surely won't last long.

I hate to burst your bubble that they will go away, but I don't think it will happen any time soon. I am sad to say I was an active part of this and other ultra conservative organizations when I was a TBM. I traveled to Geneva and NYC to the UN on several occasions in order to lobby 'on behalf of the family' and gave several presentations to delegations - mine were on international adoption and reform of foster care. (Ugh makes me a throw up a little in my mouth some of the crap I believed). But these NGO's have been in bed with the Muslim countries from the get go.

They are also well funded - by wealthy Mormons as well as other wealthy conservatives. When I was an active participant, I paid my own way for everything I did as did most, if not all of the people there.

You would be surprised who is funding them - or maybe you wouldn't.

And organizations?

That must have been an expensive conference @ at Least $750 a delegate.

The $750 per delegate was just for transportation. They were provided with housing, food, and entertainment.

I assume the organization also paid several mormon lawyers and homophobes to give presentations.

Note that the organization provided literature, CDs full of "research," videos, and other take-home items that would also add to the cost.

They probably didn't dare to hold the event in an LDS Church building, so they would have had to pay to rent a venue.

I'm not saying they will go away, just that people will eventually stop listening to them. Much like Westboro Baptist, they're not going anywhere anytime soon, but nobody really listens to them.

Unfortunately her involvement with Muslim countries gives her a large audience to preach to, an audience that won't be leaving us anytime soon. But that will eventually cost her any legitimacy she has, she's a fundamentalist and the number of people inclined to that disposition is declining.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/31/2011 08:52PM by Strykary.

Sharon Slater is exporting not just homophobia, but anti-woman rhetoric, and abstinence-only programs (programs that don't work).

Here's a story that mentions Slater> It appeared in the Mormon Times in 2010:
http://www.mormontimes.com/article/1246/Susan-Roylance-Motherhood-celebrated-at-the-UN?s_cid=search_queue&utm_source=search_queue

And here she is, as a "Family Defender," holding court in Utah:
http://www.mormontimes.com/article/15868/Family-defender-holding-Utah-events-this-week?s_cid=search_queue&utm_source=search_queue

Excerpt:
"Slater and her husband, Greg, who are members of the Gilbert 9th Ward, teach the Gilbert Arizona Val Vista Stake's parenting class called "Strengthening the Family." They have four birth children and recently adopted three siblings from Africa whose parents both died of AIDs."

"Sharon Slater founded and now serves as the volunteer president of Family Watch International. Since its inception, Family Watch has grown to have supporters in more than 170 countries and was recently asked to serve as a consultant to three different voting blocs at the U.N."

Regarding her new book, "Stand for the Family: A Call to Responsible Citizens Everywhere," Slater said: "I wanted the book to be a gathering tool to bring together people throughout the world. So far, the response has been gratifying, and we are seeing tremendous success."

"She added, "Because of the interest in the initial review copies, 'Stand for the Family' is now being translated into Spanish and orders are coming in from all over the United States, the U.K., Mexico and the Netherlands."

"Slater said that in reading the book, many people are shocked to learn what is being done behind closed doors to undermine the family. At the same time, readers are happy to learn what they can do and pleased to have tools they need to protect their families and the institution of the family."

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Slater's connection to the kill-the-gays promoters in Uganda is truly stomach-turning.

I have a feeling she's blithely unaware of the evil she's doing.

She's all about promoting lies and half-truths concerning homosexuality. How did this woman get an inside track to bigwigs at the U.N.?

Cause the Netherlands are all about homosexual discrimination. I don't understand the brainwashing it takes to make someone hate a group of people this much.

She would seem to fall in to that group of people who believe that the magic of their - and ONLY their - God can save eveyone if they would only believe the right things. No need to distribute condoms in third world countries where HIV is rampant because God can cure AIDS if those infected would only believe. So what does she do? She fights to prevent condom distribution thus contributing to the spread of the disease - the one that orphaned her 3 adopted kids.

But ... people just shouldn't have sex outside of marriage. If they didn't, then there would be no problems with STD's and condoms would be unnecessary (even though the world is ballooning astronomically). It's unrealistic and silly thinking. Too bad she has the ear and the contibutions of so many.

If you click through to the "invitation" (click-through is located in the text of the article at Equality Matters -- first link in the original post), you'll see Slater and her ilk offering transportation costs of $750 per delegate to the conference she held in Arizona.

They're paying foreign delegates to travel to Arizona, putting them up and feeding them, and touting the 6-hour drive to Disneyland. To get all the freebies, the delegates had to listen to "scientific" presentations that claimed homosexuality was an illness and that it can be cured by reparative therapy.

I wish I had a list of the "lawyers" and "scientists" who presented the information. Should be lots of mormon names in there. I'm betting on Dallin Oaks.

She has been lobbying at the UN for more than a decade. She has the ear of conservative countries and a lot of funding. It is not difficult for an NGO to get special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) status as a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) at the United Nations. Once approved she has a pass into the UN anywhere and pretty much for any conference. The more NGO's they can create, the more passes they get per conf (usually about 4 to 6 per org). So they are in bed with Catholic Family Services, Worldwide Organization for Women, United Families International, The Family Foundation, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and numerous others. They are VERY organized. This is not a one NGO party. There are many, many orgs all working together for the same goal. You would be amazed.

bigred, this means that no one vets the accuracy of the "research" and "findings" that Sharon Slater presents to delegates at the United Nations.

And no vets the efficacy of programs like abstinence-only.

All it takes is money and religious fervor to buy the votes of delegates?

There are numerous studies done on the subjects at hand, however, I do believe that the stats are skewed. They are not an uneducated bunch, they are very, very intelligent. They use studies done at BYU, by Catholic services, and numerous other orgs that seem reputable. The guides they have developed for delegates is vast. I have a copy of it.

Incidentally BYU has reps they send to every UN conf and they have conferences at BYU which they invite and pay for (in many cases) UN delegates to attend. The Reps from BYU have pretty deep pockets. Once while I was there, I created a whole buffet for the delegates on BYU's dime.

A new shtick in Doha? (sp?)

bigred, you wrote: "There are numerous studies done on the subjects at hand, however, I do believe that the stats are skewed. They are not an uneducated bunch, they are very, very intelligent. They use studies done at BYU, by Catholic services, and numerous other orgs that seem reputable. The guides they have developed for delegates is vast. I have a copy of it."

Would you be willing to get your copy of the "vast" compilation of studies that are being handed out to U.N. delegates to someone like PZ Myers? If so, or if you want to discuss this, please send email to me: laststand [at] me [dot] com. PZ has the expertise to take down that house of cards.

The studies in that compilation are not science, but pseudoscience. "Very intelligent" people have hobbled their intelligence, have put their ability to discriminate between facts and confirmation bias aside. The "research" represented "rests exclusively on the misuse of statistics and on the most elementary social science sins—portraying correlations as though they were causes, ignoring mediating factors, and treating small, overlapping differences as gross and absolute...."

For example: Sharon Slater sites a “US study released in 2008” – which was actually a report authored by Benjamin Scafidi for the antigay think-tank The Institute for American Values – Slater said the “breakdown of the family” was costing American taxpayers “a staggering $112 billion every year.”

That's bogus. Let's reveal the stats and the research for what they are, tunnel vision at best, and lying at worst.

I am particularly appalled by Sharon Slater's decade-long fight for abstinence-only programs in Africa.

Yes, this makes her partially responsible for the deaths of the parents of the African children she adopted. The parents died of AIDs.

I guess that's one method of bringing children into the mormon church.

From the article at Equality Matters:

"Sharon Slater stands at the intersection between the war on gender equity and the effort to stymie LGBT rights – advancing her crusade against the international 'assault' on the family. She is the quintessential portrait of a religious fundamentalist who got her start doing the abstinence-only work that thrived during the Bush years and has parlayed the international connections she made during that time into helping to spread her corrosive homophobic views abroad."

Not sure I'd agree with that statement. She supports such programs, but the aids problem was wide spread long before she got involved. They do have some evidence that their program 'Stay Alive' has a positive effect. However, if it was coupled with condom use and further education it would be much more so IMO.

These NGO's have been using Uganda as an example of success for more than a decade and I find it interesting that they have said nothing of how effective it has been in Kenya o- where it was next introduced or any other countries where it has been introduced. I believe Nigeria is among them. It is tragic the lack of education amongst so many of the African nation peoples. It was true that men believed they could be cured of aids if they had sex with a virgin and would rape them and pass the disease along.

Numerous Middle Eastern and African countries are aligned with these groups. Several of them are at a disadvantage since they are not part of something like the E.U. which votes as a block.

Sharon Slater is not letting mere facts get in her way. If the facts look like they might get in her way, she just ignores them, or applies her confirmation bias to misinterpret them:

"The reasons for Uganda’s success in lowering HIV prevalence are the subject of much debate, but the fact that condom use by single women aged 15–24 almost doubled between 1995 and 2000/2001, according to UNAIDS, is a behavioral indicator that many public health experts consider to be at least as important as the fact that more women in that age group delayed sexual intercourse or abstained entirely. And one study by researchers at Columbia and Johns Hopkins Universities found that increased condom use along with the premature death rates of those infected in the 90s had a greater impact on Uganda’s declining infection rate than either abstinence or fidelity."

"But religious conservatives like Slater were sure to attribute the victory exclusively to Uganda’s abstinence-only initiatives."

“There is clear evidence that abstinence programs are successful,” Slater wrote in a 2008 newsletter for Family Watch International. “Uganda is the classic example. It is the only African country that has significantly reduced its infection rate. In 2002, I invited the First Lady of Uganda, Janet Museveni, to give the keynote speech at a conference I chaired for UN delegates to discuss the reason for this success. She made it clear that Uganda’s success was due to the promotion of abstinence before marriage and fidelity in marriage and NOT the use of condoms.”

--------
So condoms work to prevent AIds. Distribution of condoms and education about condom use works. Slater ran a program that left condoms out of the picture ... then she claimed credit for reducing the infection rate of HIV/AIDS in the population.

Slater is like a virus, infecting Janet Museveni and others.

Here's an excellent example of Sharon Slater's use of bogus "research" to push her mormonish views to the world:

"Through her efforts in HIV/AIDS prevention, Slater took an active role at the UN that she has continued to leverage more recently. Last year, for instance, she worked with delegations from Iran, Syrian, Nigeria, Qatar and Saint Lucia to cosponsor a meeting at one of the main convention halls on “Recognizing the Critical Role of Mothers in Society.”

The meeting, which sounds rather innocuous, commenced during a two-hour break in the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) – the UN’s principal global policy-making body dedicated to promoting gender equality and the advancement of women. Slater used the opportunity to relay to CSW participants her view of how women’s rights have contributed to the disintegration of the family and indeed ravaged the foundations of society altogether.

She was introduced with distinction by the Syrian ambassador, who said Slater had been “very active in the deliberations of our meetings.”

Slater proceeded to spin her cautionary tale about female empowerment by harkening back to what most women’s rights activists view as the groundbreaking Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action adopted 15 years earlier by the Fourth World Conference on Women.

“The women’s rights movement since Beijing has opened many important and much needed opportunities for women,” she said on March 8 of 2010, International Women’s Day. “But in women’s search for gender equality, in some cases, the pendulum has swung too far. When the quest for women’s rights begins to devalue the role of mothers and contributes to family breakdown, not only do men and children lose, but women and girls lose too.”

Slater then added information about how costly the push for women’s rights can be. Citing what she referred to simply as a “US study released in 2008” – which was actually a report authored by Benjamin Scafidi for the antigay think-tank The Institute for American Values – Slater said the “breakdown of the family” was costing American taxpayers “a staggering $112 billion every year.”
----------

Except that the "research" is not credible, Ms. Slater! It's like she's still fighting the mormon anti-ERA war as well. The Institute for American Values is a laughing stock.

See
http://www.utne.com/Politics/Fretting-About-Fatherlessness-American-Nuclear-Family.aspx

"They are using the apparently objective language of social science to preach a sermon that we used to hear mainly in the fire-and-brimstone tones of the religious right."

"However well intentioned and appealing, most of the claims made by family values crusaders are blatantly false as well as destructive. As a sociologist, I can attest that there is absolutely no consensus among social scientists on family values, on the superiority of the heterosexual nuclear family, or on the supposed evil effects of fatherlessness. In fact, the best research and the most careful, best-regarded researchers, among them Andrew Cherlin at Johns Hopkins University, confirm that the quality of our family relationships and resources is far more important than gender or structure. The claim that intact two-parent families are inherently superior rests exclusively on the misuse of statistics and on the most elementary social science sins—portraying correlations as though they were causes, ignoring mediating factors, and treating small, overlapping differences as gross and absolute...."

bigred I was also at the UN and at several of Sharon's events--perhaps it is why I am an exmo at exmo now. The cognitive dissonance of listening to other delegates at the UN was more than my brain could handle...this led me to take a long hard look at my other beliefs and the rest is history. I spent a lot of money traveling around, promoting family values--then I went back to school and got a graduate degree in global studies--paradigm shift hardly describes where I am today--my only consolation is that there are forces more educated and powerful in the UN running things and Family Watch is still on the fringes of what goes on there.

I wonder if we were there at the same time. Maybe I know you???

He was one of the most commonly present reps of BYU at the conferences at the UN.

Richard Wilkins shows up in an article written in February, 2008 by Kathryn Joyce. http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2008/02/19/missing-the-right-babies

The article begins with a discussion of Christian-right "profamily" activists trying to put more juice into their "demographic winter" meme. This is a theory (thinly-veiled racism really) that white Europeans are not producing enough babies, and this is coupled with white "Western" couples also not making enough babies. They're not obeying the "be fruitful and multiply" commandment. Therefore, I guess the human population is going to crash and/or become a tide of black and brown babies.

Long story short, the Richard Wilkins and Sharon Slaters of the world are also into this apocalyptic view. It's a way to combine racism with homophobia and anti-feminism. In their warped way of thinking, homosexuals don't reproduce and feminist women are not reproducing enough.

Excerpts below:

The interdenominational alliance of Mormon, Catholic and evangelical "profamily" advocates, as well as the token link between this pan-Christian front and a handful of Orthodox Jewish and Muslim representatives, is the hallmark of Carlson's work, whether with the Howard Center, the Family First Foundation--of which he is also a director--or as secretary and co-founder of the World Congress of Families (WCF), an international, interfaith profamily conference. Carlson's influence is largely behind-the-scenes, writing policy for ultra-right Senator Sam Brownback and Representative Lee Terry of Nebraska and, increasingly, spreading his "natural family" ideal through theories of a looming population crisis facing the West.

The WCF is just one channel for this goal: a locus for heavyweight US conservative actors such as the Heritage Foundation, the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America and James Dobson's Focus on the Family--a Who's Who of the American Christian right--to network with representatives from the Vatican, conservative Christians from developing nations and a smattering of Muslim groups seeking allies to fight gay and women's rights at the United Nations. The result is the spread of US culture-war tactics across the globe, from the Czech Republic to Qatar--where right-wing Mormon activist and WCF co-founder Richard Wilkins has found enough common cause with Muslim fundamentalists to build the Doha International Institute for Family Studies and Development.

To expand the discussion about retired BYU Prof, Richard Wilkins, he retired (in 2009, I think) from his job as law professor at BYU to give more time to the World Family Policy Center in Doha (home base for the WFPC is BYU in Utah, where the organization is owned by the LDS Church).

Wilkins has been missing from BYU for years anyway, since he's been spending all his time forming alliances with the worst homophobes in the Islamic community,in the Catholic community, and among evangelical Christians.

He started as early as 1996, where he gave a speech at a UN Habitat conference that was successful in defining marriage as between husband and wife, and in removing references to abortion -- the so-called "Istanbul Miracle" of pro-family activists.

In 2004, Wilkins helped organize a conference in Doha that included Cardinal Alfonso Trujillo (famous for the anti-condom campaign); the Malaysian prime minister who jailed a deputy for alleged homosexuality and who attributed 9/11 to the Jews; and Sheiky Uysuf Al-Quaradawi, an Islamic scholar that approves wife beating and recommends the death penalty for sodomy. Quaradawi has visited the Vatican as a guest of the Pope.

Wilkins and cohorts brought conservatives together from all over the world. They got a pro-family, anti-women's rights resolution approved by the UN one week after the conference ended.

Wilkins now has a physical structure in Qatar, loads of money, and loads of support from ultra-conservatives like the Sutherland Institute, The Family, the Vatican, anti-gay/anti-women's-rights Islamists, etc.

The Qatar facility ties in with the overall plan to set up alliances with powerful men all over the world, especially in countries where conservative social agendas can be put on steroids with American money (and sometimes with Arab money) -- as in Uganda, in the Czech Republic, in Poland, in Romania, and in Qatar.

It is Sharon Slater that has been really active in making alliances with anti-gay and anti-woman forces in Iran, Syria, and Nigeria.

It looks to me like they're finding like minds and banding together to ruin any progress made in Africa and the ME.

Had him in one of my classes, knew him through one of his best friends. He was fairly openminded in the undergrad days, before he was accepted to Law School.

After he got his law degree he clerked for Rex Lee, the Reagan-era Solicitor General. It was also where he befriended Samuel Alito, current Supreme Court justice.

Wilkins went on to coach Mike Lee, Rex's son, in his version of constitutional law and helped him prepare for his run for the U.S. Senate.

Wilkins was described to me by one of his law school students, as "the most closeted gay man I've ever seen." This jibes with stories from his high school days.

Wilkins was also, ironically, a fixture in the Hale Theater scene in Salt Lake and Provo for years for his portrayal of Ebeneser Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. His "Istanbul Miracle" was partly attributed to his bearded state when he appeared at the UN--he was in a stage production of Fiddler on the Roof, playing Tevye.

All of Wilkins' degrees were obtained at BYU and all of his teaching was at BYU. A man of great potential, he squandered it in his role as the church's international ambassador of homophobia.