JAMAICA: Mat Staver To Headline Event To Keep Homosexuality Criminalized

Miranda Blue writes at Right Wing Watch:

American Religious Right leaders Mat Staver and Judith Reisman are scheduled to be featured speakers at a conference in Jamaica this weekend hosted by a group that has been working to preserve the country’s criminal ban on consensual gay sex. The annual conference, hosted by the Jamaica Coalition for a Healthy Society, will focus on how “[c]ontemporary society has become increasingly hostile to the traditional definitions of marriage and family” and Staver, the head of Liberty Counsel, will discuss “global legal trends impacting the institution of the family.”

JCHS’s conference has drawn prominent American anti-gay activists before. In 2012, two top lawyers for the Alliance Defending Freedom spoke at the conference, one of whom defended Jamaica’s anti-sodomy law, calling homosexuality “harmful not only spiritually and psychologically, but also physically.” Last year, Americans For Truth About Homosexuality’s Peter LaBarbera made an appearance at the conference, urging Jamaicans: “Do not be like us, do not be like Britain, do not sit idly by as so-called ‘LGBT activists’ manipulate words and laws to achieve dominance in your country.”

The Jamaica Observer is calling the conference “an international human rights rally.” Their article begins:

Dr. Judith A Reisman, former consultant to the United States departments of justice, education, health and human services — whose daughter’s life story was made into the 2004 movie Kinsey — will be one of the two international presenters at the International Human Rights Day Conference on Saturday at the Jamaica Conference Centre. The other speaker will be Matthew Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel Action, an international non-profit litigation, education and policy organisation dedicated to advancing religious freedom, sanctity of life and the family. The conference, to be held under the theme ‘International Law, Development and the Family: The Family as a Strategy for Development’, is one of two events being planned to commemorate International Human Rights Day by the Jamaica Coalition for a Healthy Society (JCHS) in collaboration with Jamaica CAUSE

It probably doesn’t matter that Alfred Kinsey died 58 years ago, before Reisman’s daughter was even born, and therefore Kinsey is definitely not her “life story.” But hey, it’s not like Reisman hasn’t made a career out of deranged and debunked claims and lawsuits regarding the work of Alfred Kinsey.