“Nothing stops progress. It stops by itself.” This witty quote from Alexandre Vialatte illustrates the brake that can be created by the accumulation of social advances, especially when they occur in areas that affect identity and privacy. Talk to the LGBTQ+ communities that ended a Pride Month darkened by setbacks that contrasted with the exaltation of the gains of the beginning of this century. And yet, we are talking less about brakes here than about backlashes.
In a file of great depth, The world bluntly asked the question last week: “Are we witnessing a backlash On a large scale, this conservative backlash often observed after progress in minority rights? The answer given from several points around the world is flatly yes. Worse, these setbacks test the elasticity of the social fabric to the point that hatred manages to regain its ease even in public spaces that we thought were immune to such outbreaks of fever.
In Montreal, for example, there is Fred, a Canada Post employee pursued at work by anonymous “Shut up, fags” with a violence as repetitive as it is harmful. In the hope that his ordeal would end, Fred denounced in The Press and at 98.5, these long months of uninhibited harassment. In Paris, it was Antonin, a cyclist who was accosted after a collision that quickly escalated. “Get lost, you dirty faggot,” his interlocutor finally told him, promising that if he saw him again, he would “kick his ass.”
Just anecdotes? If only. A few days ago, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police released a report that shows a sad increase in homophobia in our lands. From 2015 to 2021, the number of hate crimes motivated by hatred of sexual orientation reported by the police increased by 150%. It states that victims of these crimes are three times more likely than other victims of hate to suffer serious violence. They are also the ones who suffer the most serious injuries.
Last May, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights published a report that found “alarming rates of violence” against gay and transgender people in Europe. Younger generations are not immune, it said. In 2019, just under half of LGBTQ+ youth reported being bullied at school; by 2023, the figure had risen to two-thirds.
In our country, speakers took the floor to report a growing phenomenon in Quebec classrooms, namely the verbalization of clear-cut positions claiming values and discourse that are openly sexist, racist, but also homophobic and transphobic. And we’re not talking about all those countries where homosexuality is illegal (59), or even punishable by death (9).
What is not said enough is the extent to which these setbacks are fueled, even hardened, by globalization. The more visible LGBTQ+ communities are in our laws, our cultural productions or our policies, the more threatening they appear to countries that condemn their lifestyles. This is also true for these groups, often religious, if not more conservative, who disapprove of them, even if their country thinks differently and multiplies inclusiveness policies.
The danger is that by making homosexuality a threat to national identities and local cultures, it is reduced to a fad. Exit the universal human right adopted by the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2011. Hello social divide and its deleterious effects on living together and the feeling of security of LGBTQ+ people.
Here, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) expressed concern about the transformation of the collective opposed to health measures into a broader movement called “liberty”, united against the alleged violations of personal freedoms by the Trudeau government. In its report obtained by The Canadian Press, there is also growing opposition to communism, international institutions such as the United Nations and… LGBTQ+ communities. It suggests that these grievances are likely to bring people “to the brink of violence.”
Homophobia as an instrument of social instability is also seen on a macro scale. The LGBTQ+ issue in fact unites the majority of the West’s detractors. In Russia, Senegal or Afghanistan, for example, the issue of LGBTQ+ rights is even a founding element of the conflict of values that opposes them to the West. Last November, the Russian Supreme Court outright banned the “international” LGBTQ+ movement for “extremism.”
What Russia describes as a civilizational conflict is, however, much more than that. It is a battle for equality. A battle that cannot be lost, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights rightly calculates: “If we fail to ensure equality for some, we fail for all.”