Re: No, the choice of 'Men and Women' is too specific in the context - Edit 1
Before modification by Isaac at 10/08/2010 03:48:43 PM
Well it isn't techinically legally binding on an international level anyway. At the moment. But wait a few years and my point will stand. 
Not even a technicality, it's not a treaty and was never meant to be binding, I don't think that if it were a treaty it would have a snowballs chance in hell of being ratified, even with the normal senate exceptions and declarations tacked on to treaties.
Well it is arguable that the US is committing a whole series of violations, but Article 5 is the most blatent, 16 to follow it up. It never says that men and women have to be married to a member of the oppisite gender and though the choice of words may initially seem to provide fot that on further analysis it would at the very least permit homosexual marriage, at the most ensure it. I'm actually doing a campaign at my high school to get the UDHR integrated into the social studies curriculum, I think it is a major problem that so few people know or care about it.
The problem is lots of people go around declaring what something means, so courts decide, and I don't think you have made the case that the US and 181 of 192 other countries are not in violation of article 16.
Just because a vast majority of nations are committing a violation of the UDHR doesn't mean that it isn't a violation. Perhaps the ICJ needs to step and and make a judicial ruling on this, but until then I will hold that the UDHR provides for homosexual marriage.
If it makes you feel better go ahead
The ICJ is not likely to rule more liberally than the European Court on Human Rights, which ruled there was no violation of human rights about a month ago on a gay marriage case arising in Austria. If most countries don't allow gay marriage though, that doesn't mean it's right or wrong, but it does mean the current consensus of opinion is that it isn't a right, and naysayers are well advised to remember that 'on the international stage' the US has far more liberal laws on homosexuality than most countries. But whether it does or doesn't call it a right or allow gay marriage, it's basically tilting at windmills since it has no legal power and was designed not to have legal power. Our courts regular borrowing foreign judicial rulings as examples, they do not cite them as having legal power. The UHDR, while considerably more ethical than human rights laws of say, China, have no more legal weight in the US.