The Congress of Colombia has allowed this Wednesday, for the second time in a row, to sink a bill that sought to prohibit sexual conversion therapies for the LGBTIQ+ community. This decision means a refusal to guarantee the rights for this population and, at the same time, confirms the political superpower of the Christian churches and conservative parties, the main opponents of the initiative.
The project, which had successfully passed the first two debates in the House of Representatives, sought to prevent different types of physical or psychological violence from continuing to be legally used in the country to try to change, correct or repress sexual orientation or gender identity to anyone. To this end, it proposed administrative and criminal sanctions for those who carried out or promoted this type of behavior, seen by the UN as a form of torture.
“The Congress of Colombia has never issued a law whose main target population is the LGBTIQ+ community. We have won all the rights thanks to the Constitutional Court, not thanks to Congress that has always evaded those debates,” Carolina Giraldo, representative of the Chamber of the Green party and speaker of the project, says by phone. Giraldo regrets that the First Committee of the Senate has not even discussed the initiative, which had to be approved this Wednesday so that it could continue its course and be endorsed by the plenary session before June 20, when the legislative period ends.
The senators who did not agree with the project managed to modify the agenda to prevent it from being debated, so it ended up shelved due to lack of support and time. Another of the speakers, the senator of the Historical Pact Clara López, regretted the file. “There is a serious setback, the discussion was vetoed. We can’t go back. The individual religious convictions of the congressmen are taking precedence over what the Constitution orders. This affects the LGBTIQ+ population. Many do not want to see it exist, but it exists and is not worth less,” she said when she saw that the project was sinking. The former presidential candidate also insists on the risks to democracy of not prohibiting these practices, which in Colombia have included electroshocks and drowning: “It seems that minorities and women are worth less in this patriarchal society. They manipulated the regulations to prevent it from being discussed. I fear that this is the return to obscurantism, persecution and lack of respect for people’s dignity.”
On the other side is Senator María Fernanda Cabal, from the right-wing Democratic Center, who was one of those who most opposed the project. “I have presented a negative report against the “inconvertible” bill that threatens family autonomy by preventing parents from guiding their children, overriding parental authority and generating regulatory duplicity that erodes legal stability,” he wrote in his account. of X. In addition to her, the green senator Jota Pe Hernández and several senators from the Conservative Party expressed their rejection of the ban. One of the senators of the Conservative Party, Óscar Giraldo, collects his electoral wealth from the ultra-Catholic organization Lazos de amor mariano, to which he belongs and which has practiced the alleged conversion therapies. The YouTuber Hernández is the son of pastors of Christian churches, and part of her political bases come from the movement of the late Santander representative Ángela Hernández, remembered for her ultra-conservative positions and against the LGBTIQ + population.
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Representative Giraldo explains that opponents of the project have included lies among their arguments. “The international movement ‘Don’t mess with my children’ led the campaign to sink the initiative,” says Giraldo. “They managed to convince thousands of people to sign against it, saying that the project was going to make children homosexual and transsexual. “They deceived many people with things that had nothing to do with the project.” She agrees with Senator López that they are facing a fanatical and highly organized sector. “It is in these churches where these therapies are done and they want to continue doing them,” says Giraldo. And she concludes: “Homosexuality came off the list of diseases years ago. There can be no treatments because there is nothing to cure.”
The collapse of the project has fallen like a bucket of cold water on the sector of civil society that promoted it. In recent years, a broad platform was consolidated with LGBTIQ+ organizations—the Grupo Acción y Apoyo Trans (GAAT), Allout, Caribe Afirmativo and Colombia Diversa, among others—and other allies, such as Profamilia, which is dedicated to sexual and reproductive rights. . From civil society, they sought to make visible the testimonies of victims of conversion therapies and counteract the campaigns of opposition organizations, especially those that said that the project sought to persecute churches or convert heterosexuals into homosexuals.
The most complete project
Danne Aro Belmont, executive director of GAAT, says that this project had been informed by the observations of those who opposed it. “I feel proud that we collected a lot of that and it was very complete,” she says by phone. For example, an article had been included that made it clear that the law could not be used to “prohibit or sanction spiritual and religious messages, counseling, guidance or guides that are practiced without using violent means.” However, she values that in the process the impact of practices that were taboo until a few years ago, when she herself suffered them, was made visible. “It is the first bill that goes so far in guaranteeing LGBT rights,” she highlights.
In the middle, the role of Congress in defending the rights of the LGBT population has remained. Wilson Castañeda, director of Caribe Afirmativo, remarks in a telephone conversation that this reminds him of when in the early 2000s they also failed in their attempts to pass an equal marriage law. This right was finally achieved, in 2016, but thanks to a ruling by the Constitutional Court. “The Congress of the Republic has not understood the ethical duty it has to legislate to guarantee the rights of the LGBT population,” laments Castañeda. Nicolás Giraldo, coordinator of Political Change at Profamilia, thinks something similar: “What Colombia has gained today is thanks to the Constitutional Court. Congress has always been a stop in the wheel.”
Although the opponents are right that torture is already criminalized in Colombia, the idea of the bill was to typify the specificities of the violence suffered by the LGBT population. Belmont explains that a more forceful tool is needed to be able to report these cases at Police stations, which do not even keep records of cases of alleged conversion therapies.
However, it should not be interpreted that the victims are unprotected from the sinking. Manuel Páez, professor of Constitutional Law at the Externado University, points out by phone that several rulings of the Constitutional Court prohibit these therapies and establish that principles such as freedom of religion “do not authorize to torture or discriminate against people.” “It would have been wonderful for the law to come out, especially because our legal culture gives more strength and clarity to what comes out of Congress. But it is not that now people can continue to be subjected to atrocities,” he emphasizes. For the lawyer, specialized in LGBT rights, the important thing is to bring more cases to justice and advance in compliance with the Court’s provisions.
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