Monday 13 June 2016

Queering Paradigms conference, Day 2

Second day of the “Queering Paradigms” conference on LGBT issues on the Cayman Islands and beyond, it went on from 0900 to 1730 hours. Here my notes for day two.

One avenue to promote LGBT rights is to use the courts to fight specific case of discrimination, abuse of power and violations of the human rights. Since legislative approaches rely on what majorities want, these tend to fail in scenarios as the Jamaican one. With the homophobia being high (around 80 percent of the population in Jamaica thinks homosexuality is wrong, and public demonstrations against LGBT is extended, and not uncommonly yield attacks and murders) there is no way the legislation can be challenged from a purely legislative approach.

So it works better to take cases and fight them in the court system. Approaches as taking to the court the 'murders songs' (songs that openly call for the murder of the LGBT), the ban on the immigration of homosexuals (as in Belize and Trinidad and Tobago) or the reluctance of TV stations to air messages promoting tolerance, are better avenues.

Even if the cases are lost, they are played in the long term as 'losing forward', opening jurisprudence and legal avenues for newer cases.

In the Cayman Islands, the rejection of the gay culture and scene creates special raising practices that aim for boys to become promiscuous with girls, and have children out of wedlock, as in a way to prevent them from 'becoming gay'. This creates a particular child sexual abuse scene, in which older women are socially allowed to initiate boys.

In Africa, homosexuality is taken as a sign of Westernisation/foreignness, constructed as a perceived "if you don't accept homosexuality, you are primitive." So when different foreign aid types were conditioned to the improvement of the human rights levels for the LGBT population, the overall situation worsened for the latter.

In Russia, things rolled in a somewhat similar fashion. Historical alternation between acceptance and repression was the rule, and in modern times, acceptance started with the Perestroika, and the epitome took place in the early 2000s. By then, the persistence of the Russian pop duo TATU created/was the consequence of an atmosphere of widespread acceptance.

However, by the mid 2000s, Russia has become the focal point of the (surprise surprise!) USA anti LGBT activist Scott Lively, whom toured Russia in 2006 and 2007. A quote from his Letter to the Hungarian People is revealing: " I can't point to any country in the world, except perhaps Russia, which has taken the very important and frankly necessary step of criminalizing homosexual propaganda to protect the society from being homosexualized. This was one of my recommendations to Russian leaders in my 50-city tour on the former Soviet Union in 2006 and 2007 [...] Homo-fascism is a form of extreme left-wing regressive radicalism which seeks to establish rigid authoritarian controls over all public discourse and government policies regarding sexual norms." He also postulated that the next phase of a 'Culture War' was for the USA and Russia to unite in the fight against homo-fascism/pink swastika/global gay agenda to save mankind from extinction.

This created the scenario for a catastrophe, that was joined by the challenge posed by rapidly shrinking Russian population, that yielded a movement to promote family values, boost marriage and thus birthrate, and to stigmatise divorce. The economic crisis made synergy with this take, with the rise of the Russian Orthodox Church and overall growing religiosity, the restriction on independent media which narrowed the information avenues available. The LGBT became, of course, the scapegoat. And when the harassment on the LGBT people was responded with a boycott from the Western powers, things got (as in Ghana) worse.

To finish, I attach the most iconic picture of the exchange. The very religious lady on the picture, with a very lively and humorous speech, shared her thoughts: "Even if my church wants, I cannot accept discrimination and hate, it is not what the Lord would want". Below the picture, a video with her sound, kind words.



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