Guatemala City, Guatemala, Oct 4, 2007 / 08:55 am
In a letter sent to the Guatemalan Congress, the organization, Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged legislators to vote against the “Protection for Marriage and Family Act.”
The law would establish that the “family essentially originates, exclusively, from the conjugal union between a man and a woman, … in harmony with its essence, its purity, its nature, its reason of being, its values and original meaning...”
HRW urged the legislators to oppose the law due to its exclusion of single-parent families, divorced parents, and many unmarried heterosexual couples, as well as many indigenous family structures.
Juliana Cano Nieto, researcher in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights program at Human Rights Watch, said, “The aim of this bill is to strip certain partners, parents, and children of rights and recognition all families deserve.”