Gay marriage: Why America is leading the global rainbow divide
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“In places like Georgia and Armenia, the activists can’t talk about human rights. They tell us, ‘People don’t get it, they don’t care, they don’t understand these arguments.’ ”
executive director of ILGA Europe, a major LGBT advocacy group
WASHINGTON—It might be a short road, it might be a longer road, with a few jarring bumps to come. But as the U.S. Supreme Court readies to hear arguments on the question of gay marriage, the ultimate outcome is no longer in doubt.
Equality for all, same-sex or otherwise, will be the marital law of the land. A generation of young Americans, in jaw-dropping numbers, will accept nothing less. And time is on their side.
It is a rare event in the life of any nation, let alone one as culturally riven as this, to change so quickly. But when it comes to marriage equality, the turnaround is astounding — in barely a decade, support has nearly doubled, with 58 per cent of Americans now backing same-sex marriage, according to the latest ABC News/Washington Post survey.
And the demographic clincher: 81 per cent of American adults under 30 back full equality. The opposition, concentrated among seniors, is dying away.
But as Americans drive the issue home, the question of what it means to the bigger world is emerging. The answer? Perhaps not as much as hoped.
“The sheer speed of change in America is astonishing. But translating that into progress elsewhere remains daunting because the very thing that moved Americans — the argument of basic human rights and fairness — tends to backfire in many other parts of the world,” says Evelyne Paradis, executive director of ILGA Europe, a major LGBT advocacy group.
Paradis, a Montrealer, works in partnership with grassroots gay-rights organizations in more than 40 countries, largely against “negative trends” emanating from Russia. She describes a pattern of rising support for homophobic groups throughout the former Soviet Union, aided by overseas outreach from a loose network of Christian evangelical organizations.
“In the past year we’ve really begun to connect the dots. In Ukraine last spring for our Day Against Homophobia, we saw busloads of people arriving for counter-demonstrations, chanting religious slogans and extreme right-wing political slogans from Russia. We see a similar pattern in Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and, of course, in Russia.”
Groups like the U.S.-based Alliance Defending Freedom, says Paradis, have established a foothold in Europe to advocate strongly against abortion and LGBT rights.
“The problem for national LGBT activists is that if they raise the human rights argument that has been so powerful in America, it gets thrown back in their faces — ‘You are just part of the western world, forcing outside values on us,’” she says.
“The human rights argument works — but it works where a culture of human rights has been built over decades and people have slowly gotten used to what the concept of equality means, whether on racism or from a women’s perspective.
“In places like Georgia and Armenia, the activists can’t talk about human rights. They tell us, ‘People don’t get it, they don’t care, they don’t understand these arguments.’
“They have much more success in getting through to people by reclaiming the language of the home country — talking about family, values, tradition and redefining those ideas as empowered national voices, coming from within, rather than from outside. That’s where we see some real hope that attitudes can change for the better.”
The status quo in the Commonwealth, where homosexuality remains illegal in 41 of 54 nations, is a sobering reminder for buoyant U.S. gay-rights activists. Penalties range from the death sentence in parts of Nigeria and Pakistan to 20 years plus flogging in Malaysia. The Middle East, notwithstanding its Arab Spring, remains a danger zone for closeted gays, with the lone exception of Israel.
Much of the global landscape remains unfriendly in the extreme — from Iran, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has flatly denied even the existence of homosexuality, despite reports of executions, to Poland, where former president and Nobel laureate Lech Walesamade international headlines this month upon pronouncing that gay lawmakers should sit “behind the wall.”
Turkey, which offers itself as a model for Arab democracy, this week launched a campaign to retrieve Turkish children who have been adopted by gay couples in Europe, focusing on 9-year-old Yunus, who has lived with his two Dutch foster moms since he was an infant.
But gay-rights campaigners also point to glimmers beyond the grim. In Venezuela, the battle to succeed Hugo Chavez includes this pronouncement from candidate Henrique Capriles: “I believe in a society without exclusion . . . where no one feels excluded by race, creed, social status, sexual orientation.”
And India, where the Bangalore Queer Film Festival celebrated its fifth anniversary last month. And China, where homosexuality was reclassified from crime (until 1997) to mental illness (until 2001) to its present-day status, wherein a group of 200 parents of gays and lesbians wrote an open letter last week demanding their offspring be allowed to legally marry.
But nowhere is the global battleground as heated as Africa, where a widening inter-denominational network of right-wing Christian groups has brought America’s culture war into play, helping to engineer legislation like Uganda’s infamous “Kill the Gays” bill.
Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia, in a new Political Research Associates report titled “Colonizing African Values,” describes a series of new fronts in Africa, with U.S. churches, including the Pat Robertson-founded American Centre for Law & Justice, opening offices in Kenya and Zimbabwe to advance anti-gay theology in the corridors of African power.
Kaoma acknowledges that U.S. Christian activists backed away after an international furor surrounding the first tabling of the 2009 Ugandan anti-homosexuality bill.
“But while these leaders backed off, key institutions of the U.S. Christian Right stepped up their efforts to bring their style of persecuting sexual minorities — and opposing reproductive rights — to the continent,” writes Kaoma.
“Not only are they promoting legislation targeting LGBT people and abortion (a procedure that is already largely illegal), they are contributing to the atmosphere of intolerance that is resulting in ‘instances of harassment, discrimination, persecution, violence and murders committed against individuals because of their sexual orientation or gender identity,’ as Amnesty International has reported.”
The response from U.S. gay-rights activists suggests they have some catching up to do. This week, a U.S. delegation to Uganda led by Kerry Kennedy, niece of JFK and president of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, tabled its concern over harassment of the gay and lesbian community.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, while pledging to investigate claims of violence, expressed concerns of his own, warning that Kennedy’s delegation must respect the confidentiality of sex in traditions and culture.
“In our society, there were a few homosexuals. There was no persecution, no marginalization of these people but they were regarded as deviants. Sex among Africans including homosexuals is confidential,” Museveni said in a statement.
“You have a lot of room in your house, why don’t you go there?”
How much energy American gay-rights activists will expend beyond their borders depends largely on the outcome of the upcoming Supreme Court deliberations.
A sweeping decision to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act would effectively establish a federal right to marriage equity in all 50 states, handing swift, total victory to gay-marriage proponents.
A more limited ruling, meanwhile, could return the battle to the regions, triggering a decade or more of bitter state-by-state battles before marriage equity catches up with surging public support. The latter formula could ensure more years in the wilderness for the Republican party, with a new generation of voters branding the party as “intolerant and anti-modern,” in the words of U.S. political blogger Andrew Sullivan.
The stateside plot has unfolded with more than a few twists. Both Clintons — first Bill, then Hillary — chiming the winds of change to blow down DOMA, a law they themselves created.
And the tragicomic relief of ferociously anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church awakening this month to discover a new gay-rights centre across the street from its Topeka, Kan., headquarters, painted in brilliant rainbow colours.
And the curious case of Michelle Shocked, the Texas troubadour, choosing San Francisco, of all places, to unleash an onstage verbal tirade against gay marriage, calling it the “downfall of civilization.” Sunday’s unexpected rant triggered a social media fury and by Wednesday Shocked found herself with no stages left to play, nearly a dozen upcoming concerts cancelled by the venues themselves.
But nothing quite captured the shifting zeitgeist like Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, Mitt Romney’s old debate coach, who stunned his fellow Republicans with a full-throated endorsement of marriage equity last week, revealing in the same breath that his son Will is gay. That simple fact “prompted me to consider the issue from another perspective,” Portman wrote in The Columbus Dispatch. “That of a dad who wants all three of his kids to lead happy, meaningful lives with the people they love.”
Portman’s declaration baffled many on the right and met with a bashing from many on the left, who labelled his reasoning “selfish.” But the Portman saga, perhaps more than any other, mirrors the million-plus points of light that have shifted so many American attitudes, sister by sister, son by son, brother by brother.
It must all seem like an old movie to Canadians, who have lived these battles before. But therein lies an advantage — and a remarkable opportunity for global involvement — according to some Ottawa watchers.
The argument that Canada is uniquely positioned to do much more on the international front was advanced earlier this month in a policy paper titled “Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights: A Call for Canadian Leadership” for the McLeod Group, an Ottawa think tank.
Lead author Edward Jackson, a public policy expert with Carleton University, told The Star the proposal, while ambitious, speaks to “the very interesting set of conditions where you have every party in Ottawa on the same page when it comes to advocating consistently for LGBT rights.
“We have a very strong foreign minister, John Baird, resolutely opposing institutionalized homophobia. We have a convergence of all parties with great bipartisan potential, an NGO community ready to get involved, together with the development branch, CIDA, whose seasoned staffers are frankly demoralized right now, in many ways.
“You put that together and there’s an excellent chance for Canada to play a leading role and punch above its weight again on the foreign-policy front. We could look more closely at what the Swedes, the Americans and the British have been doing and step up, without a lot of cost, to retarget and reorganize existing capacity, running our foreign policy and foreign aid in a way that could do some really good things.”
Jackson argues for a delicate blend of implicit and explicit Canadian support for global LGBT rights, with tactical use of the public bully pulpit matched up against “quiet, nimble, nuanced, practical work on the ground — the kind of work that governments can do best, without worrying about taking public credit for it.
“This is a long game, but an important game. We’re not saying Canada should do this on its own. But with major partners that know this work . . . the opportunity is there to let our public servants do the good work they trained for at the precise moment it is most needed.”
Mitch Potter’s last World Weekly story was on N.Y. Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
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