In 2022, the CEDAW Committee issued an Individual Communication concerning Rosanna Flamer-Caldera, a lesbian woman, human rights defender, and Executive Director of the only organization in Sri Lanka advocating for the rights of the entire lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex community. To date, the CEDAW Committee has received extensive criticisms concerning its neglect of women from diverse gender identities and sexual orientations. In this Communication, the Committee found that Sri Lanka's criminalization of consensual same-sex relations among women violates Articles 2, 5, 15, and 16 of the Convention. Importantly, the Committee makes clear that non-heterosexual relations fall within the right to marriage and family relations, enshrined in the Convention. With numerous States Parties in the region retaining criminalization, this article analyses the implications of this decision for States Parties in Asia and grapples with the question, “Is this Communication ground-breaking?” and if so, how.

In many African societies, gender roles and sexuality are intensely scrutinized, policed, and often enforced. Frequently, this situation results in perceived deviations being characterized in very strong terms. Many Africans across religious and denominational boundaries seem united in their opposition and criticism of same-sex relationships. In the twenty-first century, criminalization of same-sex relationships has witnessed an uptick across the continent. In Nigeria, same-sex union was criminalized in 2014, an act that witnessed massive support from Protestant, especially Pentecostal, Christian communities. Prominent Pentecostal leaders spearheaded the campaign in support and defense of the anti-gay laws in the country. Reasoned opposition to a practice based on religious faith, doctrine, and scriptural prescriptions is an integral aspect of the protection for the practice of religion. However, there is a palpable tension in the debates around rights to free sexual expression as a fundamental element of legally protected human rights and the equally constitutionally embedded right to religious practice, expression, and exercise. At what point, therefore, does the respect for the free exercise of religion and religious expression come into conflict with the respect for, and protection of, minority rights such as claimed rights to sexual expression such as many LGBTQI persons are increasingly contesting? Framed differently, is the verbal and non-verbal promotion of hatred, violence, indignity, and insult or giving offence to a segment of the population based on sexual orientation a part of free religious expression? How do the Pentecostal arguments against same-sex relations in Nigeria approximate to hate speech, defined as a verbal attack on a person or group of persons based on their attributes such as gender and sexual orientation, religion, or ethnicity? To analyze these and related issues, this essay examines the arguments used by the leader of the largest Pentecostal organization in Nigeria—and by far, the most important Pentecostal voice in the country—in the wake of the legal prohibition of homosexuality in Nigeria in 2014.

Article 534 of the Lebanese Penal Code, effectively, criminalizes homosexual practices. Most commentators have claimed that its existence in modern Lebanon is a “colonial relic,” specifically of the French Mandate, 1920–1946. But since 1791, French penal codes have not criminalized same-sex relations. I argue, instead, that Article 534 was the product of native religious, legal, and moral thinking among the Maronites, reinforced by the Thomistic and post-Tridentine moral theology taught in Lebanon by the Jesuit missions. Thomistic and post-Tridentine moral theology classified same-sex relations as worthy of condemnation as “unnatural acts”—the same language used in Article 534. Therefore, as a product of Lebanese political and religious sectarianism, Article 534 is a specific case of a congenial collaboration of Jesuit moral theology and a conservative Maronite ethical and legal koine.

This article surveys the evolution of the Catholic Church's official response to same-sex relations over the last two centuries. While the church has not altered its condemnation of same-sex relations, the justifications it offers for this negative judgment have shifted substantially, and they have moved, especially recently, in a direction that makes possible the acceptance of same-sex relations at some future—and perhaps not too-distant—date. This article explores the manualist tradition of the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries; twentieth-century developments in canon law; and the period of retrenchment and reaction under popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Its final section looks at developments under Pope Francis. It closes by considering the way the church's teaching shifted over the course of its history—penance and the forgiveness of sins; anti-Semitism; and the sin against natural-law of taking interest on a loan (usury). It proposes that we might witness the church undergo a similar shift on same-sex relations.