The Global Backlash Against Gay Rights. How Homophobia Became a Political Tool
By Omar G. Encarnación
No revolution worth its salt comes without pushback. The fight for gay rights—widely regarded as “the fastest of all civil rights movements” (over a short period of time, 20 nations have come to recognize same-sex marriage and an additional 15 now allow same-sex civil unions)—is no exception. A shooting rampage last June at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, by a terrorist who had expressed loathing for the LGBT community, was the deadliest assault ever on the American gay community and attests to the viciousness of this pushback. But that was only one incident. In recent years, there has been a global backlash against gay rights that runs from the United States, through many parts of the global South, to Russia and other parts of the post–Communist world.
The opposition to gay rights comes in two strains and reflects what the Pew Research Center has called “the global divide on homosexuality.” In Western Europe and the Americas, home to the world’s most democratically advanced states and the largest and most sophisticated gay rights movements, the gay backlash takes the form of a counter-revolution designed to intimidate the gay community and roll back gains in gay rights. Across Africa, the Middle East, and much of the post–Communist world, the parts of the globe where democracy, civil society, and human rights are either in short supply or struggling, the gay backlash consists of a “preemptive strike” meant to stop the gay rights movement before it can gain its footing. This involves passing legislation that criminalizes or re-criminalizes homosexuality and that bans the promotion of homosexuality. Both strains, however, serve to fuel anti-gay violence and discrimination, and have exposed the political, rather than cultural nature of the backlash.
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS
In Europe, there have been massive protests against same-sex marriage, especially in Catholic-majority countries. In May 2005, some 500,000 anti-gay protestors jammed the streets of Madrid to protest Spain’s same-sex marriage law. They were, of course, opposed to extending marriage to gay couples, but what truly mobilized them was that Spain’s same-sex marriage law was the first one in the world to put same-sex couples on the same legal footing as heterosexual couples: allowing for gay adoptions and access to reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization. Over the course of 2013, France’s “marriage for everyone bill,” which replaced a civil unions law that bestowed on same-sex couples most of the benefits of marriage, prompted more than a million people to take to the streets of Paris to oppose the bill. The protests were for the most part peaceful, but at least one demonstration in May 2013 turned violent, forcing the police to use tear gas and batons to disperse demonstrators.
Across Latin America, the gay backlash has been felt most profoundly in Brazil, where the highest court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage in 2011. Since then, Brazilian legislators have retaliated with a plethora of anti-gay bills that call for redefining the family to exclude homosexual couples, for establishing a national day of “heterosexual pride,” and for banning “Christ-phobia,” or the desecration of Christian symbols. The ban targets the provocative floats mixing religious imagery and sexuality typical of Brazilian gay pride parades. Although these bills don’t really stand much chance of ever becoming law (for one thing, they are of dubious constitutionality), they contribute to the homophobic culture that underpins Brazil’s massive problem with gay killings. According to the Group Gay da Bahia, Brazil’s oldest and most respected gay rights organization, since the mid-1980s, when Brazil became a full democracy, more than 3,000 LGBT people have been murdered. Brazilian gay activists have taken to refer to this wave of gay killings as the “Homocaust.”
It is in the United States, however, where, along with liberal democracy, the strongest backlash against gay rights can be found. We can count three distinct waves. The first began immediately after the rise of the gay liberation movement in the 1970s and entailed nothing short of moral panic. Its most dramatic manifestation was country singer Anita Bryant’s “Save the Children” campaign, which succeeded in overturning an anti-discrimination ordinance enacted in Dade County, Florida, by depicting homosexuals as pedophiles. A second wave of backlash crashed in the late 1990s. Between 1998 and 2012, some 30 states enacted constitutional bans on same-sex marriage. By far the cruelest and most diminishing of these state bans was Proposition 8, which in 2008 overturned California’s same-sex marriage law. Among many other tactics, Prop 8 proponents compared the fight against gay marriage “to the battle against Hitler” and urged Californians “not to stand quietly and accept what happened in Germany.” To add insult to injury, Prop 8 threw into legal limbo thousands of same-sex marriages.
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https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2017-05-02/global-backlash-against-gay-rights
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