ABSTRACT

In many countries, female homosexual practice is considered unnatural, abnormal, immoral, horrifying, criminal, or worse. This perception has led governments not only to restrict lesbian rights but also to produce criminal statutes that legitimize the brutal persecution of lesbians, persecution that governments hardly feel obliged to defend. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees all persons the right to marry and found a family, and calls the family a "fundamental group unit of society which is entitled to protection by society and the State". Lesbians are denied their basic right to freedom from torture, punitive psychiatry, arbitrary arrest, and incarceration, their right to have children, and even their basic right to life with hardly a word of public remonstrance. Lesbians and gay men are frequently denied the right to have children through alternative insemination and adoption or to retain custody of biological children. Raids on bars frequented by lesbians or gay men are common practice in many countries.