Human rights in relation to homosexuals

In citizenship I was set the task of writing an essay on how our understating of human rights has changed since 1945 in relation to gay people.
Pre 1945 being gay was highly criminalised around the world mainly due to the colonial influence of the British empire. The world health organisation also classed it as being a mental illness. Like every human rights issue the UDHR was what got the ball rolling in world reform.
Despite being the ones to cause it to be criminalised worldwide the UK were one of the first to legalise same sex relations. The era of disco and free love was a time of mass change, many of those in the world of celebrity 'came out'. It was in 2001 that same sex relationships were held in some regards as equal to those as a 'normal' relationship as the age of consent was lowered from 21 to that of the same as 'straight' couples. In 2005 gay people were given even more equality with the introduction of civil partnerships and now the legislation is being written up to legalise gay marriage.
What really amazed me was the perception of gay people around the world. Steven Fry's documentary 'out there' really opened my mind. Politician are so incredibly short sited when it comes to this take the Ugandan politician who said that gay rape is wrong and punishable but when a man rapes a woman it is not because it is done the right way. What the hell!!!! And then you have doctors in America providing repairative therapy to 'cure gayness' yes because you can cure someone of who they love. Oh and then there is Brazil who has a statistic of a gay person is murdered every 36 hours. But once again there is a stupid politician blocking an anti homophobia law because according to him most of those murders are done by ex partners. And then we come to Russia. Do i really need to go into how stupid their human rights reversal is. I have said it before and will say it again, how the hell can one of the world leaders take such a step backwards and re-criminalise homosexuality.
In this world gay people are not the issue it is the horrible homophobes who pollute this world with their discrimination. Attitudes have to change and what Steven Fry's documentary showed me was that politicians have to rethink their attitudes to this issue and then the people may also do the same.
But as always
Love Hayley Beth xxx

Human Rights

In citizenship at the moment we have been focusing on human rights and it is shocking to discover how many countries disregard human rights. I am currently doing a project on case studies that show examples of where human rights have been denied, protected and enjoyed. When researching for the human rights denied part I was shocked to see how much human rights are disregarded. I mostly think of human rights being disregarded in LEDC's such as Burma but to discover developed countries such as Russia are massive culprits of ignoring human rights. One big case study would be the imprisonment of punk rock band Pussy Riot, they were not only prevented from exercising their right to freedom of speech (article 19 UDHR) but were then subject to an incredibly unfair trial (article 10 UDHR). Another human right that Russia has ignored in legislation is the right to be free to be who you are by outlawing the freedom to acknowledge yourself as being gay (article 2 UDHR) and this was made even more shocking when Russian athlete 

Yelena Isinbayeva defended the laws saying “If we allow to promote and do all this stuff on the street, we are afraid about our nation because we consider ourselves like normal, standard people...We just live with boys with woman, woman with boys. Everything must be fine. It comes from history. We never had any problems, these problems in Russia, and we don’t want to have any in the future.” at the athletic world championships in Moscow.

This is wrong for a supposedly developed country, they should be leading the rest of the world by example by promoting human rights not disregarding them and treating your citizens like they are nothing. the definition of human rights is: Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, whatever our nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language, or any other status. We are all equally entitled to our human rights without discrimination. These rights are all interrelated, interdependent and indivisible.

Every one is entitled to them. If you are human you should be treated like one. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is called universal because that is what it should be Universal and Universal means everybody and everything.