“What Rights Don’t You People Already Have?”
Currents
There appears to be a great deal of confusion when it comes to the subject of LGBT rights in the liberal West. This confusion stems both from people who believe that any concern about LGBT rights is hysterical and entitled, and also from those who believe that LGBT rights exist on a razor’s edge of being taken away forever (or simply don’t exist despite contrary evidence). These two camps tend to fall neatly along opposing ideological lines, but their objections boil down to the same question: “What rights?”
The “what rights?” question sometimes comes from far-left extremists who deny all past progress and believe that LGBT people are on the precipice of being rounded up or hunted down. More often, though, the question comes from religious conservatives and other right-wing critics every time someone so much as invokes LGBT rights: “What rights don’t you people already have?” It’s a question directed at Queer Majority on an almost daily basis and one that commonly crops up across the Internet. As always, the reality is more complex than such simplistic sentiments. The truth is that the West has come very far in its liberal pursuit of equal protections under the law for LGBT people — and that’s not something to be taken lightly, or for granted, nor assumed to automatically last forever.
On the one hand, both versions of the “what rights?” argument seem reasonable on their face. After all, Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, and the Respect for Marriage Act helped protect it in 2022. Gender identity and sexual orientation were added to the list of protected classes in 2020 under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, effectively preventing workplace discrimination against LGBT employees on both federal and state levels. In other words, what more rights are needed? What more could LGBT agitators want? To fully understand the issue, it’s not sufficient simply to establish that LGBT people currently have rights on the books. We must also take into account the efforts to repeal, blunt, or curtail those rights.
In recent years, there’s been a deluge of anti-LGBT legislation filed in the US — in fact, there were nearly 240 bills in 2022 alone. What more could LGBT people want? Well, what about Justice Clarence Thomas’s comments in 2022 about “reconsidering” the Obergefell same-sex marriage ruling? As Emma Green wrote in The Atlantic in 2019, the Obergefell decision left behind “a legal mess”, as with any right established more or less solely on the basis of a court ruling. And the Respect for Marriage Act, while certainly better than nothing, fell far short of legislatively enshrining same-sex marriage rights nationwide. What’s more, as I have previously covered in Queer Majority, there is a backlash against sexual freedom underway, with support for same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage seeing its first drop in many years.
Those asking “what rights?” are simply looking at things the wrong way. It’s definitely true that being gay or bi in 2024 is vastly easier and safer than in, say, 1980 — to speak nothing of the HIV/AIDS crisis that added to the stresses back then. But the circumstances LGBT people enjoy today were never a foregone conclusion. True, the rights secured were hard-won and have only strengthened in the last decade, but it is important to remember that rights do not always last forever. Progress is not destiny, and history does not end. Laws can be repealed, rulings can be struck down, and advances can be reversed. Iran was once a country on the rise, then the Revolution set them back. So was Afghanistan, until the Taliban took over in 1996 and then again in 2021.
Closer to home for Americans was the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. While a court ruling is not the same thing as a legislated right, Roe was, in effect, the strongest defense of a woman’s right to make decisions about her own pregnancy and it was indeed taken away. However, the ability for women to get abortions in the United States, while by no means safe or universal, still exists in many states, some of which have adopted “safe haven” status for women unlucky enough to live in states with anti-abortion laws. And a woman’s right to choose remains the majority opinion across the country. The possibility of future legislation — again, a much better guarantee of someone’s rights than a court ruling, something Ruth Bader Ginsberg made very clear — has not gone anywhere. Even if the unthinkable happened and LGBT legal protections and same-sex marriage were completely gutted at the federal level, many states would immediately push back.
To see both how potentially precarious and fortunate LGBT people are in the United States, it helps to look at the rest of the world. The US is hardly alone in recognizing same-sex marriage rights, with 36 countries, including those as varied as the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Finland, Taiwan, and Costa Rica. However, there are also plenty of countries where such rights do not exist.
Russia has been particularly hostile toward its LGBT citizens. The Putin government began its crusade against what it calls “gay propaganda” in 2013 with its “For the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating a Denial of Traditional Family Values” law. These policies were only strengthened in 2020 when the Russian government passed legislation outright banning same-sex marriage. Hungary, under the authoritarian Viktor Orban, has also censored LGBT expression. Tellingly, prominent regressive voices on the American right, such as Steve Bannon and the influential CPAC conference, see Russia and Hungary’s crusade against LGBT rights as a template the West should follow.
Of course, Russia and Hungary are far from alone. The two most populous countries in the world — China and India — do not prohibit same-sex relationships, but LGBT are denied same-sex marriage rights and legal protections from discrimination. Things are even worse in most of the Muslim world, with more than 25 countries in which homosexual behavior is illegal and 10 — Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen, Brunei, Mauritania, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the UAE, and Qatar — in which it’s punishable with the death penalty. Most bizarrely, the Iranian government’s anti-gay animus is so intense that the government officially approves of gender reassignment surgery because a trans woman is seen as more acceptable than a homosexual man. This is not to say that life is easy for trans Iranians by any stretch, but it shows how topsy-turvy the world of LGBT rights can be outside of Western liberal norms. A lack of LGBT rights isn’t merely a feature of theocratic and authoritarian states, either. In fact, there are developed countries known for greater social and cultural openness that do not offer the same protections for LGBT rights as the United States, such as Japan and Ukraine.
None of this is to say that every non-Western nation is repressive, bigoted, and beyond the pale. It is more to demonstrate how bad things can be when you don’t have the legal protections LGBT people have in the West. This is a point not missed by LGBT people living outside of America. As the poster child for the “free world”, the United States is in a unique position to serve as an example the rest of the world looks to.
In this way, American or Western critics who ask “What rights?” are not only taking their own rights and personal liberties for granted, they can’t seem to see anything that isn’t right in front of their faces. The world is far bigger than the West, and the freedoms we have are not particularly common — though they should be. No, that doesn’t mean we should impose our culture in an act of flagrant imperialism a la “bringing democracy to Iraq”, but rather through demonstrating our liberal virtues in a way that other cultures teetering on the edge of acceptance can emulate. The trends we set and progress we enjoy can foster cultural vibe shifts, apply social pressure that exposes countries with anti-LGBT governments as regressive and backward, and, most importantly, support international activists — up to and including providing them asylum when need be.
Of course, we would be remiss if we overlooked the fact that many in the “what rights?” crowd are acting in ideologically motivated bad faith. Far-left activists have every incentive to deny past progress, as it’s difficult to demonize liberal values, tear down Western institutions, and recruit new revolutionaries while admitting that society is far more tolerant, safe, and free than it used to be. It’s also rather inconvenient for the “post-colonial” worldview that blames homophobia and other social ills around the world on Western imperialism to acknowledge how sterling the liberal West’s LGBT rights look in comparison to non-Western countries. Easier just to pretend the West has never improved.
Meanwhile, regressives on the cultural right, who opposed LGBT rights before they were enacted and wish for them to be repealed, have a vested interest in portraying this fight as being over and done with. Vigilantly guarded rights are rights that cannot be taken away. A state of complacency, however, creates the necessary opening from which right-wing populists can “take back the country.”
This is why it’s vital to grasp both the strengths and the vulnerabilities of LGBT rights in the West. We can best shore up our own protections and help others achieve them if we have a nuanced understanding that acknowledges past progress without taking it for granted. In doing so, we can avoid the childish doom-and-gloom pessimism so common among social justice activists while also reminding critics that laws and rights, however popular, are never truly set in stone and thus require vigilance. That is both the blessing and the curse of democracy — voters get to decide, which means voters can also change their minds. Once people understand both sides of this coin, they’ll realize that in order to secure and spread LGBT rights, the question of “what rights?” shouldn’t need to be asked by anyone.
Published Oct 30, 2024
