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SANTO DOMINGO, June 14, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — The 46th General Assembly of the Organization of American States witnessed mob violence on Sunday as members of the civil society clashed over the issue of men invading women's bathrooms. (Civil society organizations at the OAS are the equivalent of non-governmental organizations at the United Nations.)

Gregory Mertz and Jean Marco Pumarol, two Christian young men participating in the OAS civil society conferences, were assaulted as they sought to protect the privacy of an older woman who was using the bathroom from transvestite men who attempted to enter into the bathroom at the same time.  

“When women and children are threatened, it is the duty of any Christian man to step in and defend them,” Mertz told LifeSiteNews. Mertz was punched in the stomach by one of the transvestite men while the 17-year-old Jean Marco Pumarol was forcefully pushed to the ground.

The incident occurred in the hallway outside of a meeting room where approximately one thousand representatives from different non-profit organizations were listening to OAS officials welcoming the civil society to the annual meeting of the Latin American multilateral body. When the private security staff of the Hotel Catalonia in Santo Domingo refused to intervene to defend the elder woman’s privacy, Mertz and Pumarol stepped in to defend her and were subsequently assaulted. 

Dominican law forbids men from going into women's bathrooms yet hotel staff were under directions of management and the OAS to allow men to use the women's bathrooms in spite of national laws.

The bathroom issue has been aggressively pursued by the OAS and its Secretary General, who recently issued an executive order mandating a radical gender policy at all of the offices of the multilateral organization.  

Members of non-profit organizations were invited to Santo Domingo to participate in a discussion of these and other policies. The roundtable discussions were organized by the OAS based on subject matter, ranging from women's issues, to family and human rights and a special discussion group for LBTI issues. The roundtables were to produce declarations on their specific subject areas that would be presented to the Secretary General of the OAS and different ambassadors, yet participants complained that the at no point was there real interest in their input.

The OAS department of Civil Society reserved the right to assign representatives to specific subject matters upsetting many pro-life and pro-family advocates who were segregated based upon their religious and social views and excluded from the rest of the discussion groups.  The organizers also selected the moderators of each group, placing anti-family activists in key positions.  In a particularly egregious display of ideological bias, the Women's issues group was assigned to be moderated by Catalina Martinez Coral, Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean for the radically pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Rights.  The human rights roundtable was assigned to the Executive Director of CEJIL a pro-abortion human rights firm that specializes in litigation within the inter-American human rights system.  

“The notion that the right to life is a fundamental right was repeatedly dismissed by the moderator simply as a mindless religious belief, while the fictional reproductive rights and special rights of LGBT's were promoted by the moderator Viviana Krsticevic” stated Lianna Rebolledo, a survivor of a violent rape which resulted in her becoming a mother at age 12.

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While chaos descended upon the civil society meetings inside the Hotel Catalonia, outside the Hotel, the Auxiliary Bishop of Santo Domingo, Monsignor Masalles led a peaceful and joyous demonstration of 15,000 people praying, singing, and holding up signs affirming the Dominican Republic's respect for life without exceptions, for the family made up of one man and one woman, and for religious liberty.

“For the past 4-5 years, family and life activists have been ramping up their presence at these multilateral bodies,” stated Carlos Mercader of the International Human Rights Group, “what we are seeing now is that the bureaucrats inside these organizations realize that an informed civil society is not going along with their social experiments so they are trying to shut us out.”

Mercader, pointed to the growing hostility of the OAS towards an increasingly pro-family and pro-life civil society, citing as evidence the fact that for the first time in 46 General Assemblies, the OAS decided to close its doors to civil society participation in the negotiations of documents.

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On Monday night, members of civil society were informed through a late night email that the civil society participation to the General Assembly itself had been shut down, leading some, like Mr. Mercader to compare the Secretary General of the OAS, Luis Almagro, with the despotic leader of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro.  “Maduro and Almagro are one and the same, if they don't get what they want through the democratic process, they have no problem shutting it down.”

To call attention to their exclusion, civil society participants staged a silent protest outside the room where the foreign dignitaries of the OAS — whose central mandate is the promotion of democracy — sat negotiating conventions and treaties behind closed doors.