The United Nations Human Rights Office has released a new publication, Born Free and Equal, that outlines core legal obligations that countries have for their LGBT people. The guide is built around five core expectations: protect people from homophobic violence, prevent torture, decriminalize homosexuality, prohibit discrimination, and safeguard LGBT people’s freedoms of expression, association, and peaceful assembly. The full list includes many policies that even the United States does not have in place:

• Protect people from homophobic and transphobic violence.
• Include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected characteristics in hate crime laws.
• Establish effective systems to record and report hate-motivated acts of violence.
• Ensure effective investigation and prosecution of perpetrators and redress for victims of such violence.
• Asylum laws and policies should recognize that persecution on account of one’s sexual orientation or gender identity may be a valid basis for an asylum claim.

• Prevent the torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of LGBT persons in detention by prohibiting and punishing such acts and ensuring that victims are provided with redress.
• Investigate all acts of mistreatment by State agents and bring those responsible to justice.
• Provide appropriate training to law enforcement officers and ensure effective monitoring of places of detention.

• Repeal laws criminalizing homosexuality, including all laws that prohibit private sexual conduct between consenting adults of the same sex.
• Ensure that individuals are not arrested or detained on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity, and are not subjected to baseless and degrading physical examinations intended to determine their sexual orientation.

• Prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
• Enact comprehensive laws that include sexual orientation and gender identity as prohibited grounds of discrimination. In particular, ensure non-discriminatory access to basic services, including in the context of employment and health care.
• Provide education and training to prevent discrimination and stigmatization of LGBT and intersex people.

• Safeguard freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly for LGBT and intersex people. Any limitations on these rights must be compatible with international law and must not be discriminatory.
• Protect individuals who exercise their rights to freedom of expression, association and freedom of assembly from acts of violence and intimidation by private parties.

Last December, the UN Human Rights Council released a report about the extensive rates of LGBT persecution across the globe. Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon has called for an end to this discrimination.

Jeff Johnston, Focus on the Family

On Friday, while many anti-gay conservatives were at the Values Voters Summit, Focus on the Family posted an interview with its resident “ex-gay,” Jeff Johnston. Johnston reiterated some of the boldest lies about homosexuality, explaining that there are “a variety of roads into” it, such as molestation, parents’ divorce, and trouble conforming to gender roles, but that “God has a number of ways” to bring people out of it:

JOHNSTON: There is evidence for a variety of roads into homosexuality, just as God has a number of ways of bringing people out of homosexuality. There are some factors that seem to be more significant in people struggling with same-sex attractions. One of the things we know about homosexuality is that guys who struggle have been molested three times more often than men in the general male population. You could see how that could be a factor in leading to homosexuality, because it would cause a boy to question his masculinity, to be unsure about his sexual identity, questioning, “Am I am man? Am I gay? What does this say about me that this happened to me?” So it raises all sorts of questions in a little boy’s mind.

Parents’ divorce can be factor, and the personality of the child, too. If you have a shy, introverted, quiet boy who doesn’t necessarily fit into a rough-and-tumble world, he can have a harder time embracing his masculinity. If there are problems in the parental relationship, that can affect a kid.

A girl who rejects her femininity could grow up longing for what she already has inside her. I know several women whose dads treated them like little boys — they wanted a boy and they treated them like boys, so these girls became very masculine. But they’re still longing for that femininity. Some women reject femininity because they see women being weak or passive or abused; some women, and men too, have turned to homosexuality for political reasons or out of rebellion against societal norms.

Johnston goes on to explain that God can transform people, and the Church should reach out to help those who are suffering depression because they are gay.

None of these ideas have any validity in science. Though the origins of any individual’s sexual orientation is informed by complex mix of biological and environmental factors, nothing can shape a person’s identity in the way Johnston describes. If anything, the reverse conclusion is true — young people who might happen to be gay would be more vulnerable to faulty Christian teachings if they’ve been victimized and sought counseling in some way. Indeed, the motivation behind Johnston’s interview is to encourage the group’s followers to reach out to such victims.

By spreading harmful lies about the experience of gays and lesbians and promoting ineffective, traumatizing therapies to try to correct them, Focus on the Family is trying to diminish the reality of inequality lived by gays and lesbians everywhere. To those who don’t try to conform to these teachings, they offer no support whatsoever. (HT: Good As You.)

Though Mitt Romney did not join his running mate Paul Ryan and other Congressional Republicans at this weekend’s Values Voters Summit, he did address the conference through a prerecorded video. In it, he personally thanked Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council for their “leadership” and for bringing people together to discuss “vital issues.” He went on to reiterate his anti-choice and anti-gay positions, borrowing a Rick Santorum talking point suggesting that liberal social policies contribute to poverty:

ROMNEY: We will uphold the sanctity of life, not abandon or ignore it. And we will defend marriage, not try to redefine it. We need a President who understands that we will not have a strong economy unless we have strong communities and strong families. This isn’t conjecture or some quaint belief, it’s evidenced by a Brookings Institution study that Rick Santorum brought to my attention some time ago. For those who graduate from high school, get a full-time job, and wait until they’re 21 until they marry and then have their first child, the probability that they will be poor is 2 percent, but if those things are absent, the probability of becoming poor is 76 percent. In short, culture matters, and as President, I’ll protect our culture and preserve the values of hard work, personal responsibility, family, and faith.

Watch his full address:

Unlike the America Romney imagines, same-sex families are a part of communities all across this country, and they would benefit from marriage just like other families.

During his presidential campaign during the Republican primaries, Santorum regularly made claims about poverty to defend his socially conservative positions. In January, he claimed that President Obama was de-emphasizing abstinence-only sex education because he “wants people to be in poverty,” despite the fact that such programs are ineffective at preventing teen pregnancy. Santorum also told audiences that kids are better off with a parent in jail than with same-sex parents, conflating the experience of abandoned mothers to the “fatherless” families of lesbian couples.

If Romney wants to cite data when he speaks on social issues — particularly as his campaign prepares to emphasize them more — he should probably consider using information that actually informs his positions, rather than relying on the conjecture of his party’s extremists like Santorum.