The EuroPride march route has been officially banned by Serbian police following mass anti-LGBTQ+ protests.
The event, which takes place in a different European city each year, was due to take place in Belgrade on Saturday (17 September) as part of Serbia’s bid for membership to the European Union.
But the event found itself under increasing scrutiny by religious and anti-LGBTQ+ protestors, including a march led by clergy from the Serbian Orthodox Church, who used rhetoric about “saving children” and “protecting family values” to push their hateful message.
Now, several weeks after Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić said the event would be postponed indefinitely due to vague suggestions of “security concerns”, Serbian police officially announced a ban on the route of the EuroPride march on Tuesday (13 September).
Thousands of people marched against Belgrade hosting EuroPride. (Oliver Bunic/Getty)
In a statement from the European Parliament’s Intergroup on LGBTI Rights, several of the 145 MEPs who signed a letter to Serbian leadershipcondemning their postponement of events and urging the government to maintain their promise of EuroPride have spoken out against the announcement.
“We regret the decision taken by the Serbian police to ban the route of the EuroPride march, LGBTI Intergroup co-chair Terry Reintke MEP (Greens-EFA) said.
“We have been in constant contact in the last weeks with the Serbian authorities calling for political willingness in finding a solution that ensures all demonstrators’ security.
“We insist that all efforts must be employed to find a compromise solution.”
After president Vučić’s postponement in August, the European Pride Organisers Association (EPOA) president Kristine Garina said at the time he could not “cancel someone else’s event”.
She said banning the march would violate Serbia’s commitment to the European Convention of Human Rights, which is important to follow when applying for an EU membership.
It’s unclear whether this ban will affect negotiations at this time.
Serbia has been attempting to join the union since 2009, but has hit several roadblocks involving human rights violations. Its history of banning Pride parades initially received criticism from official human rights organisations, including a march in the early 2000s that become violent after anti-LGBTQ+ protestors breached the proceedings.
But after several peaceful Serbian Pride parades went off without a hitch, EuroPride had allowed Belgrade the opportunity to be considered for hosting the 2022 event, which it eventually accepted.
In a letter to the EPOA, former prime minister Ana Brnabić wrote that the government was ready to “ensuring the full respect of human rights” and promised to help the Belgrade Pride organising team create a “safe and successful” EuroPride event.
Fellow co-chair of the LGBTI Intergroup Marc Angel MEP (S&D Group) said: “We have urged authorities to liaise, to negotiate and to agree on a compromise, which to this point was clear – a shorter, secure route, enshrining the principles of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression.
“We repeat – these rights must be ensured for those defending them and we maintain trust that a solution will be found. We urge authorities to put all focus on a credible solution to be proposed to the organisers.”
The Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services (DPHHS) has just adopted a rule change forbidding transgender people from changing the gender listed on their birth certificates.
The rule change is just the latest in an ongoing legal battle between the DPHHS, the state’s Republican-led legislature, and trans Montanans seeking government documents that display their correct gender identities.
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The DPHHS’ new rule says that a person’s sex listed on a birth certificate can now only be changed if it was incorrectly entered by a “data entry error” or if “the sex of the individual was misidentified on the original certificate and the department receives a correction affidavit and supporting documents, … including a copy of the results of chromosomal, molecular, karyotypic, DNA, or genetic testing that identify the sex of the individual.”
The DPHHS implemented this rule five months after a state judge issued a ruling blocking a state law requiring state residents to undergo a non-specified “surgical procedure” before they could change the gender listed on their birth certificates.
Montana’s Republican-led legislature passed this law, S.B. 280, in April 2021. Previous to the law, the DPHHS said that transgender residents could change the gender marker on their birth certificates if they were intersex, had undergone “a gender transition,” or had a certified court order indicating that their gender had been changed.
In July 2021, two transgender state residents sued the state’s Gov. Greg Gianforte (R), DPHHS, and its director, claiming that S.B. 280 had made it virtually impossible for them to change their birth certificates, thus violating their constitutional right to privacy and due process.
“Denying me an accurate birth certificate places me at risk of embarrassment or even violence every time I am required to present my birth certificate because it incorrectly identifies me as male,” said Amelia Marquez, one of the plaintiffs and a trans woman, in a statement.
S.B. 280 also made it impossible for many trans people to get a corrected birth certificate because such surgery is too expensive for many people, not all trans people want or need gender-affirming genital surgery, and many are not good candidates for it for medical reasons.
The state disagreed and said that S.B. 280 was necessary to maintain accurate birth records.
However, in April 2022, state Judge Michael Moses said that the law’s requirement of an unspecified surgical procedure made it impossible for anyone to follow. The judge then issued a temporary injunction against S.B. 280, essentially blocking it from going into effect.
But the state chapter of the ACLU says that Montana government officials have done nothing to comply with the judge’s order. For instance, a gender change form that DPHHS removed from its website after S.B. 280 was passed still hasn’t returned to the website.
“The fact that the state refuses to revert to the previous processes evidences its lack of respect for the judiciary and utter disregard for the transgender Montanans who seek to have a birth certificate that accurately indicates what they know their sex to be,” the ACLU said in their statement. “If the state continues to violate the preliminary injunction, we will have no choice but to seek relief from the court.”
Montana passed several other anti-LGBTQ laws in 2021, including a ban on transgender girls participating in school sports. The state also passed a law requiring schools to give 48-hours notice to parents if they are going to discuss LGBTQ people.
In July, a 35-year-old Black man from the Washington, D.C. area went from experiencing Covid-like symptoms to watching his body be overtaken by the aggravating, blistering boils of monkeypox. And yet, as he endured the agony and uncertainty that came with the disease, he said he had other, more pressing concerns.
The man, who asked to remain anonymous because of concerns related to the stigma associated with the disease, said he was alarmed by how difficult it was to find information on monkeypox and his doctor’s seeming dismissal of his concerns about his symptoms.
He said his case is an example of the concerning public health response to monkeypox, and, for the Black population in particular, follows a historical pattern of medical malfeasance and shortcomings.
The man said when he visited urgent care in early July, the doctor didn’t appear to take him seriously. “I asked if she was up on the latest CDC guidelines on monkeypox and she wasn’t,” he recalled. “So, she had to call the CDC to even get approval to administer me a test. She went on about how it would take an hour of paperwork and other stuff, so most doctors weren’t excited about giving the tests.”
The man, who is gay, said, “it was like a repeat performance” of some of the issues that came with the Covid pandemic, when Black people in many parts of the country had less access to treatment and vaccines, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now with monkeypox, health care officials face the challenge of effectively communicating information about the spread of the outbreak without stigmatizing gay men. Public health officials interviewed by NBC News said managing that balance is critical to gaining public confidence to offset the intense mistrust of the medical establishment in the Black community. The poor response by health officials, the disparities in the vaccine rollout and the stigma associated with monkeypox have contributed to men questioning how the virus is spread — despite the data, experts say.
Data from the CDC found that, through July 22, 99% of cases were among men, 94% of whom reported recent sexual contact with males. The World Health Organization added that 98.7% of confirmed cases globally are in males, with 97.2% of those men reporting that they had sex with other men.
Black men across the country have been hit especially hard by the outbreak. Although Blacks make up roughly 12% of the population, they make up 38% of the most recent monkeypox cases, according to the CDC. In Atlanta, 71% of people with the infection, which can cause painful and irritating skin lesions, are Black men who have sex with men and about two-thirds of those men have HIV, according to the Georgia Health Department.
In North Carolina, one of the few states reporting on the monkeypox spread, 70% of those infected are Black men, with nearly all of the cases affecting men who have sex with men. However, only 24% of the vaccines in the state have gone to Black North Carolinians.
Those numbers worry Black gay men, as well as public health experts like Dr. Jayne Morgan, director of Piedmont HealthCare in Atlanta who hosts educational podcasts on monkeypox. She said the messaging has to be clear about who is at risk of contracting monkeypox and what preventive measures are available, all while being careful not to stigmatize specific groups of people.
Dr. Jayne Morgan.Courtesy Dr. Jayne Morgan
“We have the tools and enough information to stem this tide,” Dr. Morgan told NBC News. “Public health, like Covid, is about behavior. Monkeypox is being driven by behavior. And so behavior can also drive it in the opposite direction also.”
The 35-year-old D.C. resident, who no longer has monkeypox symptoms, called it “dangerous.”
David J. Johns, the executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, a civil rights organization committed to empowering the Black LGBTQ community and people living with HIV/AIDS, said the attention monkeypox is receiving now is happening only because non-Black people are also impacted.
“The sad reality is that monkeypox isn’t new,” Johns said, adding that it has existed in Africa since the 1970s. “But because privileged white men from Western societies — in particular America — are now being impacted by something that otherwise only impacted disposable Africans, there is a now shift in the way that people are thinking about and talking about and are responding to a virus that has been impacting people for a lot longer than we otherwise want to acknowledge.”
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Difficulty in being diagnosed and treated
The man from the D.C. area said that after a weekend of activities and attending “a crowded party” on July 10, he woke up the next day, “not feeling my best.” He was fatigued and had a fever of 102 and had trouble focusing. He left work early, believing he had contracted Covid.
He took a home test that came back negative. A test at urgent care confirmed he did not have the coronavirus. His fever eventually broke but he had a throbbing headache for days. And he said he experienced “rectal discomfort” and his blood pressure was elevated. Several days later, he began to feel better — but he noticed bumps on his face and arms.
After some resistance, the doctor finally swabbed the blisters on his face and wrists and sent him home with 800 milligrams of ibuprofen and a prescription for his anal pain. At his residence, he said he isolated himself in the attic. In the morning, he woke up to extreme throat soreness. He returned to urgent care, where the doctor again had to call the CDC to see how to treat him since he had been tested positive for monkeypox.
The physician was advised by the CDC to administer an antibiotic shot, which alleviated some of the throat pain. Meanwhile, the sores spread to other parts of his body — arms, legs, in particular.
But “it was kind of shocking,” he said, that his issues were not immediately addressed. He added he was given eight different numbers to call for assistance. “They dragged their feet the entire time.”
The man said he gave a list of the friends he had been in close contact with to the health department for contact tracing. He had already advised them to seek medical attention by the time the health department contacted them two weeks later. “And when they finally got someone, they were basically forced to say they had sex in order to get the vaccine,” he added, noting that his friends felt pressured to say they had sexual contact with him — even when some didn’t — in order to get immediate attention from health care professionals.
“When we talk about high-risk communities, we’re really talking about people who are sort of disaffected from the health care system,” Morgan said. “Stigma and discrimination for people in the LBGTQ community are already very high. And then if you add the Black race on top of that, and you have in monkeypox the same as we did with Covid — the black population is always the most vulnerable because we have the least resources, the least outreach and the most discrimination and stigma.”
In Los Angeles earlier in July, another Black man who also asked to remain anonymous because of the stigma associated with having the virus, outlined nearly identical concerns as the man in metro D.C. He, too, said he believed he didn’t contract the disease through sex. When symptoms occurred, he said he had difficulty finding a place that tested for monkeypox. And when he did locate a health center in downtown Los Angeles, the staff was “suited and booted as if I had a contagion,” he said, referring to the protective gear they wore.
Meanwhile, the disparity in those who have contracted monkeypox and those who have access to vaccines is glaring. While Black people account for about a third of monkeypox cases in the U.S., about 10% of vaccines have been administered to the group, according to the CDC.
The vaccine distribution disparities come as Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the head of the CDC, acknowledgedthat the agency must make drastic changes to respond better and faster to public health emergencies, following missteps during the Covid pandemic.
“We have learned less than nothing from Covid,” Stella Safo, a primary care physician at Mount Sinai who specializes in HIV treatment and is the founder of Just Equity for Health, told STAT News. “We’ve gone backwards.”
Dr. Tyeese Gaines.Courtesy Dr. Tyeese Gaines
Dr. Tyeese Gaines, a physician who practices emergency medicine in Illinois and New Jersey, said the more than two years of being on alert from the coronavirus pandemic has created “panic fatigue,” exasperating people to the point where they are less apt to protect themselves against monkeypox.
“We needed to tell people the reality of Covid-19,” Gaines said. “But eventually people just don’t want to hear it anymore. Some people say: ‘Oh, wow, there’s another scary virus. Let me be safer.’ But there’s still a subset of people whose response to fear is not to become more conservative or to follow whatever the rules are, but actually to act like it doesn’t exist and do the opposite.”
On Friday night, police were called to the scene of a stabbing outside popular Long Beach, California gay bar, the Mineshaft. Two men were attacked, and one has died.
The perpetrator is still at large.
The bar’s co-owner, Jeff Darling, said that around 11:30pm two patrons were standing outside the bar when an unidentified individual rode up on a bicycle. According to witnesses, an argument ensued. The incident escalated with the rider pulling a knife and stabbing both patrons in the chest. The attacker fled the scene.
Police arrived soon after and administered aid. The two victims were taken by ambulance to a local hospital, where one of the men, 28-year-old Christopher Finley of Long Beach, died of his injuries Saturday morning.
Finley was a “semi-frequent” regular at the bar, Darling told the Long Beach Post.
According to Darling, the man on the bicycle never entered the Mineshaft, but the “small argument” out front escalated into a stabbing when the two victims tried to get him to move along.
“After they were stabbed, they ended up in our doorway,” Darling said. “It appears to be a horrible random act.”
Just five minutes before the attack, Darling said, a customer was ejected for brandishing a taser. Police detained the man but did not arrest him.
“The investigation to determine his involvement, if any, is ongoing,” Long Beach Police spokesperson Allison Gallagher said.
According to LBPD, the motive for the stabbings remains under investigation and as such is not currently being investigated as a hate crime.
Darling called the incident a “very traumatic thing” and said he was planning a vigil for Finley and the other stabbing victim. He expressed his condolences and solidarity with the community in a post to Facebook.
“This is such a tragedy and I am deeply saddened by this senseless violence. My heart goes out to the loved ones of the person that lost his life and the family and friends of the person still hospitalized. Love will bring our neighborhood together and not let violence win. We have always wanted the Mineshaft to be a safe place in the community but this serves as a message that tragedy can strike at any time. Make sure to let those around you know that you Love them.”
Divisions over LGBTQ-related policies have flared recently at several religious colleges in the United States. On Monday, there was a dramatic new turn at one of the most rancorous battlegrounds — Seattle Pacific University.
A group of students, faculty and staff at the Christian university sued leaders of the board of trustees for refusing to scrap an employment policy barring people in same-sex relationships from full-time jobs at SPU. The 16 plaintiffs say the trustees’ stance — widely opposed on campus — is a breach of their fiduciary duties that threatens to harm SPU’s reputation, worsen enrollment difficulties and possibly jeopardize its future.
The lawsuit, filed in Washington State Superior Court, requests that the defendants — including the university’s interim president, Pete Menjares — be removed from their positions. It asks that economic damages, in an amount to be determined at a jury trial, be paid to anyone harmed by the LGBTQ hiring policy.
“This case is about six men who act as if they, and the educational institution they are charged to protect, are above the law,” the lawsuit says. “While these men are powerful, they are not above the law… They must be held to account for their illegal and reckless conduct.”
In addition to Menjares, the defendants are board chair Dean Kato; trustees Matthew Whitehead, Mark Mason and Mike Quinn, and former trustee Michael McKee. Whitehead and Mason are leaders of the Free Methodist Church, a denomination whose teachings do not recognize same-sex marriage and which founded SPU in 1891.
There was no immediate response to the lawsuit from SPU, though its communications office acknowledged receiving a query from The Associated Press and said a reply was in the works.
SPU’s LGBTQ-related employment policy has been a source of bitter division on the campus over the past two years. One catalyst was a lawsuit filed against SPU in January 2021 by Jeaux Rinedahl, an adjunct professor who alleged he was denied a full-time, tenured position because he was gay.
That lawsuit eventually was settled out of court, but it intensified criticism of the hiring. Through surveys and petitions, it’s clear that large majorities of the faculty and student body oppose the policy, yet a majority of the trustees reaffirmed it in May — triggering resignations by other trustees and protests by students that included a prolonged sit-in at the school’s administrative offices.
At SPU’s graduation on June 12, dozens of students protested by handing gay-pride flags to Menjares, rather than shake his hand, as they received diplomas.
Kato, the trustees’ chair, responded to the protests with a firm defense of the hiring policy.
“We acknowledge there is disagreement among people of faith on the topic of sexuality and identity,” Kato’s wrote to student activists. “But after careful and prayerful deliberation, we believe these longstanding employee expectations are consistent with the University’s mission and Statement of Faith that reflect a traditional view on biblical marriage and sexuality.”
In June, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson notified SPU that his office was investigating “possible discriminatory employment policies and practices” at the school. SPU was asked to provide details on hiring and firing policies related to individuals’ sexual orientation and involvement in a same-sex marriage or relationship.
On July 27, SPU filed a federal court lawsuit against Ferguson, contending that his investigation violated the university’s right to religious freedom.
“Seattle Pacific has asked a federal district court to step in and protect its freedom to choose employees on the basis of religion, free from government interference or intimidation,” the school said in a statement.
Ferguson responded two days later, declaring that his office “respects the religious views of all Washingtonians” but chiding SPU for resorting to litigation.
“The lawsuit demonstrates that the University believes it is above the law to such an extraordinary degree that it is shielded from answering basic questions from my office regarding the University’s compliance with state law,” Ferguson said.
Dust off your bow ties, polish your pumps, & tease those bands for “A Queer Night to Remember”!
Remember your prom? Here is your chance to have a fun night out, with that person you really wanted to attend your prom with, get dressed up, and dance all night at our 2nd Chance Prom. There will be a cash bar, photo booth, and raffle prizes! A Sonoma County Pride benefit. Due to venue capacity limits no tickets will be sold at the door.
When Joseph Kibbe attended the first Boise Pride Festival in 1989, he and about two dozen other participants wore paper bags over their heads to hide their faces from potentially violent onlookers.
At the first festival parade two years later, Kibbe and his friends were greeted by protesters with nooses in front of the Statehouse.
“Boise was a very different place back then — it was not a safe time to be LGBTQIA,” he said.
Still, for Kibbe — then a junior high student who faced frequent beatings at school, now the vice principal of the Boise Pride Festival board — the event was the one place where he felt like part of a community.
“I could come and be who I wanted to be here, who I actually was,” Kibbe said on Friday, just a few hours before this year’s festival was set to begin. “That was a huge morale booster, and why I’m so passionate about what we’re doing today.”
But this year, a roughly half-hour program on the three-day-long festival schedule called “Drag Kids” has prompted a wave of political pressure and anonymous threats.
Festival organizers envisioned a short performance where kids could put on sparkly dresses and lip-sync to songs like Kelly Clarkson’s “People Like Us” on stage. But others, including Idaho Republican Party Chairwoman Dorothy Moon, expected a lurid scene where children would “engage in sexual performances with adult entertainers.”
The event garnered national attention from far-right websites and podcasts, and by Tuesday organizers realized this wasn’t the “normal” amount of opposition, said festival president Michael Dale.
“The sexualization of children is wrong, full stop,” the Idaho GOP wrote on Twitter. “Idaho rejects the imposition of adult sexuality & adult sexual appetites on children.”
Moon and the Idaho GOP sent out statements directing constituents to ask the festival’s corporate sponsors to pull support. A few did, at least partly — removing their logos from festival fencing and canceling plans for booths. The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare announced it was pulling $38,000 in funding along with resources focused on tobacco-cessation and HIV/AIDS prevention.
A conservative pastor from California began rallying like-minded congregations, asking members to tell the Ada County Sheriff to arrest any festival organizer who “contributes to the delinquency of minors.” A group known for armed protests told followers to show up Sunday.
Others, though, rallied to support Boise Pride. Four Democratic state lawmakers pledged their own financial support, and released a joint statement criticizing what they called “the false, dangerous claims from Idaho GOP Chair Dorothy Moon that stoke violence.” New business sponsors stepped up to fill vacancies.
But the political maelstrom was growing more intense by the hour, and five kids were stuck in the middle. Riley Burrows, a full-time drag entertainer from Boise who was co-producing the Drag Kids event, began getting death threats on social media.
“It’s: ‘We’re going to show up at this festival,’ ‘We’re coming after you,’ ‘I hope you know you have a target on your back,’ and ‘You’re going to be found in a tree,’” Burrows said. “It’s gotten so repetitive.”
On Thursday afternoon, festival organizers made the decision to postpone the kids’ performance.
“We wanted to ask these kids first and foremost, because it affects them, and their confidence and their lives. And they still wanted to do it,” Dale said, fighting back tears. “But it came to be an issue of their health, their wellbeing, and that of the festival-goers.”
Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric has been increasing in Idaho and around the U.S. in recent months, and earlier this year 31 members of a white supremacist group were arrested outside of a northern Idaho Pride event for allegedly planning to riot. The Boise Pride organizers have been working with Boise Police to boost security since the northern Idaho arrests in June.
None of the five young performers are new to drag shows. The youngest is 10, and was inspired by watching her mom get ready to perform.
“She really wanted to copy me and just do the makeup and have fun with it,” said Harley Innocent, who goes by her stage name. Innocent is one of many cisgender women who participate in drag, sometimes referred to as “AFAB” or “Assigned Female At Birth Queens.”
Her daughter’s first performance was in 2019, in the rural Idaho town of Emmett. She loved it, Innocent said.
“She was really looking forward to being able to do it on the Pride main stage — it was a big opportunity for her to share her talent.”
Innocent says her daughter does a “porcelain doll” makeup look, wears a wig and chooses a song that fits her mood.
It’s similar to a glitzy beauty pageant, Innocent said, but more laid back. “In drag you don’t have to be perfect. We’re just trying to have fun and welcome them to this art form.”
Burrows, the Drag Kids co-producer, said the kids are just having fun on stage in pretty outfits.
“It’s like if you were to send your kid to a school of dance, and the performance theme was rainbows — big tutus, bows and fun hair.”
That’s different from an adult drag show, which can have heavier themes, more revealing costumes and be geared toward more mature audiences, Burrows said: “It’s like the difference between a kid’s TV show and an adult TV show.”
Youth performances can give kids a sense of belonging, he said, adding that “it’s not scary to be gay when you’re surrounded by love and acceptance.”
There’s a lot more support available for LGBTQ kids today, said Kibbe, but it was still heartbreaking to tell them the event was being postponed until organizers could find a safer, more supportive venue.
The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily allowed an Orthodox Jewish university in New York to deny official recognition to an LGBTQ student group, the latest in a series of decisions in favor of religious rights.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a brief order granted an emergency request made by Yeshiva University, which claims that recognizing the group would be contrary to its sincere religious beliefs. Sotomayor has responsibility for emergency applications arising from New York.
The dispute is the latest clash between religious rights and LGBTQ rights to reach the high court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority.
Friday’s decision puts on hold a decision by a New York state judge, who ruled in June that the university was bound by the New York City Human Rights Law, which bars discrimination based on sexual orientation. The university argues that it is a religious institution and therefore should be exempted from the law. Requiring it to endorse the group would be a “clear violation” of its rights under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which protects the free exercise of religion, the university argues. Sotomayor said the lower court ruling would remain on hold “pending further order” of the Supreme Court, suggesting the court could issue a more detailed order in the coming days.
“Yeshiva shouldn’t have been forced to go all the way to the Supreme Court to receive such a commonsense ruling in favor of its First Amendment rights. We are grateful that Justice Sotomayor stepped in to protect Yeshiva’s religious liberty in this case,” said Eric Baxter, a lawyer at the religious liberty legal advocacy group Becket, which is representing Yeshiva.
The Pride Alliance group, which first sought recognition in 2019, sued in April 2021, saying the university was required to grant its request because it is a place of public accommodation that is covered by the anti-discrimination law.
Katherine Rosenfeld, a lawyer for Pride Alliance, said Friday that the group “remains committed to creating a space space for LGBTQ students” on campus and would await final action from the Supreme Court.
Yeshiva, which describes itself in court papers as “a deeply religious Jewish university,” has said that officials concluded after consulting with Jewish religious scholars that an official LGBTQ club would be inconsistent with its religious values. The university was founded in 1897 for religious purposes and says it maintains that character even as it expanded its educational scope to include secular programs.
The New York City anti-discrimination law includes an exemption for religious organizations, but Manhattan-based Judge Lynn Kotler concluded that Yeshiva did not meet the relevant criteria.
Pride Alliance, joined by four individual plaintiffs, said in its response that the university’s request was premature and questioned whether there was an emergency that warranted Supreme Court intervention. All the university would be required to do if the judge’s order was allowed to go into effect is provide the group access to the same facilities that 87 other groups already receive, the group’s lawyers said.
Kotler’s ruling “does not touch the university’s well-established right to express to all students its sincerely held beliefs,” the lawyers said in court papers. They noted that a LGBTQ club has existed within the university’s law school for decades and that the university’s student bill of rights says that the New York human rights law applies to students.
Members of Pride Alliance have said that they are planning events backing LGBTQ rights for the coming weeks, including some timed around Jewish holidays.
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority has strongly backed religious rights in recent cases, including several in its last term that ended in June. Among those rulings, the court ruled in favor of a high school football coach who led prayers on the field after games, sparking concerns from school officials that his actions could be viewed as government endorsement of religion as prohibited under the First Amendment.
The court, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, has also weighed several cases pitting LGBTQ rights against religious rights, ruling in 2021 in favor of a Catholic Church-affiliated agency that Philadelphia had barred from participating in its foster care services because the group refused to place children with same-sex couples. In 2018, the court ruled in favor of a conservative Christian baker in Colorado who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.
Along similar lines, the justices are set to hear oral arguments this fall in a case involving a web designer from Colorado who wants the court to rule that, based on her evangelical Christian beliefs, she does not have to design wedding websites for same-sex couples. The court is currently on its summer recess, with the new term set to start in October.
In the last three decades, protections for LGBT people’s rights have advanced rapidly in many countries and regions. However, rising populist authoritarianism poses a significant threat to this progress because abolishing sexual freedom is often at the heart of repressive political projects. The progress and backsliding in my home country, Colombia, illustrates the process of using democracy to erode rights.
In 2016, Colombia seemed like a legislative paradise for LGBT people. That year, a pinnacle of legislative success was a Constitutional Court ruling that secured a range of family rights for same-sex couples, including marriage and adoption, and protection of LGBT students in schools. But toward the end of the year, there was another exceptional event. In an effort to end a brutal, decades-long armed conflict, the Andean country held a plebiscite on a peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas. Unexpectedly, a small majority of 50.2 percent rejected the agreement after a bitter and polarizing campaign.
A key issue that mobilized the “no” electorate was the moral panic generated by the inclusion of gender, women rights, and LGBT-related provisions in the peace agreement, including a definition of gender and the explicit recognition of these populations as victims of the armed conflict. Extremist groups decried these provisions as imposing a “gender ideology,” tapping into a recent controversy about gender and sexuality education in schools.
Following the suicide of a queer student who had experienced severe bullying and discrimination in school, the Constitutional Court directed the government to carry out an existing law detailing measures to protect LGBT students from discrimination and to recognize diversity in sexual orientation and gender identity as a principle of comprehensive sexuality education. Conservative groups attacked this decision as imposing “gender ideology” on children, and social media became a battleground where the fate of Colombia’s peace was intertwined with the fate of LGBT people.
Many Colombians followed the conservative groups’ reasoning and conflated the peace agreement and the Court’s decision, believing the peace deal itself advanced “gender ideology” through gender and LGBT inclusive provisions. Again, social media—this time coupled with ballots—was the site of this mobilization. Political actors disseminated outrageous falsehoods regarding the peace agreement on social media networks, including WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter, all of which impacted the public perception of the plebiscite. Notably, several fueled the idea that if the peace agreement were approved, “gender ideology” would be included in the Constitution and society would be “homosexualized.”
This juxtaposition between success in court and the mobilization of anti-LGBT sentiment on the streets left me questioning the efficacy of using law reform as a primary strategy to advance LGBT rights. Six years after the rejection of the peace agreement referendum, I can see that what happened in Colombia was not an isolated incident; instead, it has now formed an integral part of a new authoritarian playbook that manipulates democratic institutions to undermine the rights of women and LGBT people.
Anti-LGBT movements develop national, regional, and global strategies that rely on political authoritarianism, the spread of misinformation, and grassroots mobilization. A notable rhetorical feature of the anti-gender movement is its use of human rights language to undermine LGBT rights, for example, by using religious freedom or parental rights as a basis for attacking minority rights. This political homophobia approach is the major threat to LGBT rights worldwide.
In many parts of the world, as never before, the legal recognition of the rights of LGBT people is gaining ground, and the long arc of history shows rapid progress, primarily triggered by democratic institutions such as elected officials or independent judges. One benchmark is the gradual decriminalization of same-sex conduct, another is the extension of marriage equality. However, this legal evolution coexists with threats such as those witnessed in Colombia. Well-organized groups mobilize around abstract and unfounded fears, articulating their conservative agendas in the frame of “gender ideology” that would somehow undermine the family and corrupt children, exploiting polarized elections, constitutional changes, or institutional crises.
Moreover, these actors are often aligned with authoritarian political projects that use social media to spread misinformation and smear campaigns. They instrumentalize anxieties around children and their welfare to garner popular support, invoking inveterate, dangerous stereotypes of LGBT people as immoral corrupters of children. In some contexts, these actions usher in anti-LGBT legislation and, at the same time, bolster the political fortunes of authoritarian leaders.
This new form of anti-LGBT sentiment is codified in legislation that focuses on censoring public expressions of identity, including speech on sexual orientation and gender identity, justified under the pretext of “protecting children.” The Russian “gay propaganda” law is a classic example of political homophobia that curbs the rights of LGBT youth and has a broader, stifling effect on the public expression of identity.
In recent years, Hungary has enacted laws banning discussions on LGBT issues, ended legal gender recognition for transgender and intersex people, and amended the constitution to define marriage as a heterosexual union and to functionally prohibit same-sex adoption. Seeking to justify its homophobic rhetoric the government held a homophobic referendum coinciding with national election day in April.
Poland, and more recently Romania, have taken steps to adopt comparable legislation. A bill before the Ghanaian parliament that forbids any form of support or speech regarding LGBT rights similarly discriminates against LGBT people.
In the Americas, lawmakers have increasingly proposed anti-LGBT legislation, such as in the United States where in the last five years there has been a spate of laws primarily targeting trans and non-binary youth in states including Texas, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. And in Brazil, Human Rights Watch analyzed 217 bills and laws that restrict comprehensive sexuality education, including information on sexual orientation and gender identity, or ban alleged “indoctrination.” In Guatemalaand Perú lawmakers have proposed bills with similar terms, though in Guatemala the bill was withdrawn.
We should view the struggle for LGBT rights as part of a broader struggle against authoritarianism: a political regime founded on the erosion of human rights and freedoms, particularly of the most vulnerable groups. We should invest more in understanding the tactics that pro-authoritarian groups use, especially on social media. We should also develop recommendations and strategies to end the harmful misuse of social media and hold tech companies accountable for allowing the spread and amplification of damaging, bigoted messages.
Finally, any legal actions and progress should continue building on the grassroots mobilization of LGBT people and our allies. As is, law without social mobilization is vulnerable to authoritarian backlash.
