Refugee judge: You're not gay, you weren't banging guys at age 14

The BBQ Pit
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In the department of continuing idiocy: Refugee claimant ‘not gay enough’

I don’t even know where to begin with this. He’s not gay because he wasn’t having sex when he was in his mid-teens, fleeing an abusive home, and living with no status in a Seventh Day Adventist group home in Texas?

(In a dour moment, considering that the Conservatives are also trying to raise the age of consent, I mused that one branch of the government is saying teenage sex is bad, and another one is saying it’s required.)

How in the world is he supposed to prove he’s gay, over and above living as an openly gay man and seeking support from the Toronto gay community? Do you think we get issued cards? And what difference does it make? You know what they do in Nicaragua to gay people, or to their allies? They arrest you. They can arrest you for providing safe sex information, for Christ’s sake. And they are trying to increase the penalties.

To me this just brings home again the gaping lacunae in the refugee system. I’ve seen this in a number of other cases, some in my own riding. It used to be that refugee claimants saw two arbiters, and if they disagreed the refugee got the benefit of the doubt. Now they see only one arbiter, who has the final say.

To top it all off, the law says that there is an appeals board, but no such board has been set up. There is currently no appeals process. If you are a refugee, that one arbiter has the right of life and death over you.

And if you’re young, vulnerable, uneducated, homeless, and have a stammer, and if that person is a heterosexist idiot (not an isolated condition among IRB judges), who thinks she can read your Kinsey score over a TV screen from across the country - heaven help you.

(Alvaro has gotten a two-month stay of deportation, and is pleading for Canadians to intervene on his behalf, as he’s appealing directly to Citizenship and Immigration Minister Diane Finley to get a ministerial order granting him refugee status on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. You can write postage-free to the minister or to your MP urging them to support his request; addresses, e-mails, and fax numbers as well as sample letters are on his website.)

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I think his story smells a bit. He seems like a very smart and resourceful man, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he put two and two together and realized he could get a ton of support if he claimed he were gay. Also, by my math he was 19 when he left the U.S., not 14.

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The arbiter said that because he didn’t pursue homosexual relationships when he was in the US (while he was underage and living with Seventh-Day Adventists in Florida – not Texas; it was Catholics in Texas and Adventists in Florida; my mistake), he cannot possibly be gay. Surely you can see how that reasoning is specious. The judge has no reason to disbelieve him when he says he is gay.

And as for “he realized he could get support by claiming to be gay,” you could make that argument literally about any refugee claimant (“she realized she could get support by claiming to have suffered political persecution,” etc., etc.)

You can read his story in more detail on the website started by his supporters, here.

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How did this poor guy end up being judged in Cowgary? He might as well have hied himself right to the heart of an American Religious Right court. Can it be proven that she’s systematically rendered judgements against homosexuals?

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Heaven knows. (What, there aren’t any IRB panels in Toronto??)

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The judge also has no reason to believe him. If Canada wants to (1) let gay Nicaraguans in and (2) keep non-gay Nicaraguans out, then you have to have some standard of proof. If all someone has to do is say they are gay to get in, then what moron isn’t going to claim he is gay?

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Several things:

  1. We don’t want to “let gay Nicaraguans in,” we want to let Nicaraguans in who are fleeing homophobic persecution and are at risk of same should they return.

  2. What standard of proof are you interested in imposing? Gay people aren’t issued cards, you know. Neither are survivors of domestic abuse, political persecution, etc. (“This is to certify we denied the bearer’s civil rights. Signed, the government of Wherevistan.”) Faced with a sworn statement from him, it appears that, on the basis purely of her own prejudices regarding how young gay men behave, she decided he was lying. That is an insufficient basis for finding someone’s story incredible.

  3. Quite frankly, regardless of how I feel in this case, I would gladly err on the side of taking in liars rather than excluding truth-tellers. Not every Nicaraguan decides to leave his family and flee cross-continent on foot at age 12. He obviously had some reason for doing so. And according to the UN, we’re not taking in anywhere near our share of refugees.

  4. As in the OP, I question this entire procedure. Frankly, if this were a criminal trial rather than a refugee hearing, not only would he have the right to ask for an appeal, the judge’s comments alone, leaving aside the merits of the case, would be enough to have the “verdict” thrown out in my opinion.

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What is the difference between this and what I said?

I don’t know, what standard do you think there should be?

I don’t think being gay is the only reason people want to leave Nicaragua, besides that’s not really my point, nor the point of this thread. Canada has decided that some reasons are valid, and some aren’t. Since that is the case there musst be a process of determining who falls under which category.

Which comments were those?

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In addition, it appears that he needs refugee status, not for actually being gay, but for having had to flee his father’s home because he was beaten on the presumption he was gay.

Is Canada’s policy to admit bona fide gay people (presumably card-carrying) but exclude those assaulted as children due to a false perception of their gayitude?

(As to why the hearing was conducted by a Calgary judge, obviously the Conservatives couldn’t find a homophobic immigration judge in Toronto, so they had to teleconference the hearing to where there was one.)

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One is a sexual orientation, and the other is a set of circumstances of persecution that may be brought on by real or perceived sexual orientation.

Well, I’m quite sure they shouldn’t involve saying that someone isn’t gay because he wasn’t getting lots of nasty Seventh-Day Adventist action.

Yes there is, and this judge went through it on a specious basis.

About how because he didn’t have gay sex when he was in the States, he must not be gay, and therefore everything he swore to was a lie. They show complete ignorance of their subject matter and are rooted in the most profound heterosexism, neither of which are acceptable in an IRB judge.

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That’s really just a spurious difference. The end result is exactly what I said, Gay Nicaraguans get in while non-Gay Nicaraguans don’t.

Where did the judge say that?

So what is the standard of proof in Canada?

I didn’t see those comments anywhere.

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Sorry, I didn’t notice I hadn’t included the really good quote from the judge. Quoth the Globe:

In other words, because he didn’t go out and try to land guys in the States, he must not be gay. Because us gays, you know, we’re totally on the prowl all the time, especially when we’re non-status and living in a religious group home.

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Your other words are what you want it to say instead of what it does. All the judge said was that she found the reasons why Mr Orozco’s didn’t pursue a same-sex relationship unconvincing. That doesn’t mean she thinks gays should be trying to screw everything that walks. All it means is that she thinks that the reason Mr Orozco didn’t pursue homosexual relationships is that he is not homosexual.

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CBC:

So she did say that he must not be gay because he didn’t have sex, not that he didn’t have sex because he’s not gay (as she concludes for some other reason).

Besides, even if it were as you had said, what basis would she have for deciding he’s not gay? ESP?

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So, treis, what sort of proof should she be expecting?

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I’d never before noticed your reading comprehension problem; have you had it long?

If someone assaults you because he believes you to be something which he hates, does it matter whether or not you actually were what he believed you to be? If you aren’t really that, should be walk away and allow him to go on assaulting you?

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It would seem that in the case of someone seeking asylum the burden of proof is on them.

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That still doesn’t imply she believes gay men going around screwing anything that walks. I don’t think there is anything wrong with the suspicion she has. It’s a rare thing that a 19 year old, straight or gay, hasn’t experimented sexually. For that matter, do you know if he ever had a girlfriend?

Journals, homosexual relationships, letters, etc.

I think she should be expecting something beyond his word. I don’t think that this is a requirement unique to gayness. A member of a persecuted religion would have to prove that membership, as does a member of a persecuted ethnic group. Why should it be any different for gays?

My reading comprehension is fine, I think it is you that are having difficulty. The comments you and matt_mcl made in regards to my comment don’t grasp the point. The point, again, is that if you want to let in “X” Nicaraguans but not “non-X” Nicaraguans you must have some standard of proof. Otherwise the non-X Nicaraguans will simply claim that they are X and get in.

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Well if he’s gay now, then he was gay then. The only other possible assumption that could be made would be that he ‘turned gay’, which we know is bunk. So he ought not have to ‘prove’ he was gay then. Fact is, he is now and that’s why he fears going back.

And Poly, I believe you’re spot on in your reasoning for it being a Calgary judge. That’s just bizarre.

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Listen, I’m going to say this one more time: there is no way to prove that person X is gay, even if person X is yourself. I have no way to prove that I’m gay, and I never will.

Mercifully, I don’t have to, because I’m not standing in front of a heterosexist refugee judge who’s awash in ridiculous stereotypes.

Here we have someone who laid out his entire life, and the judge said that she did not think that he was gay because he did not have gay relationships when he was in the US. That is not sufficient reason for judging someone not to be gay. That was the only reason that is being presented for which she disbelieved what he had to say, and it’s insufficient.

This is exactly the stereotype I’m talking about. His lack of sexual experience, which is none of the judge’s business anyway, has no bearing on his sexual orientation! Some gay people get into straight marriages and don’t have gay sex at all until much later in life. Some gay people are celibate. Some gay people don’t come out until after they have sex, others come out well before they lose their virginity. And this is all on top of the fact that his living situation was not especially conducive to getting laid.

But this is exactly the distinction I was drawing before: he didn’t just turn up and say “I’m gay and from Nicaragua, let me in.” He is fleeing specific things, to wit, family violence, persecution, etc. He gave a prolonged and involved account of himself, and of the specifics of what he suffered at the hands of his father and what he did to get out of there. And the judge simply said, I don’t think you’re gay to begin with, with no discussion of the merits that his story would have had, had she believed he was gay. You didn’t have sex, therefore you are not gay, therefore nothing you’ve told me is true.