‘Pro-gay’ dictators are using LGBT rights as a fig leaf for other human rights abuses – iNews
For many LGBT communities, life is much better than it was. But that’s not good news for everyone. Cracking down on sexual deviants was the go-to excuse repressive regimes used for locking up any number of dissidents and undesirables. Instead, these days, some authoritarians pay lip service to the LGBT community – as window dressing to distract attention from their other human rights transgressions.
It’s called pinkwashing. Bigots and authoritarians, of various stripes, are using the political power of the LGBT community. They hold their noses, force a smile and cite their LGBT-friendly attitude as evidence of their moderation even as they go for weaker targets.
After the US Supreme Court’s decision to cancel women’s right to abortion last month, suspicions of pinkwashing emerged again. Justice Samuel Alito, whose ruling on the Dobbs case was passed by the conservative majority to overturn Roe v Wade, told the LGBT community not to worry.
To deflect criticism from his dystopian ruling on forced birth, Alito wrote: “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion… rights regarding contraception and same-sex relationships are inherently different from the right to abortion.”
Middle-class lesbians and gays – from Castro, San Francisco to Chelsea, New York – breathed a sigh of relief. Charles Moran, the president of the Log Cabin Republicans, the largest conservative LGBT group in the US, wrote in the New York Post: “The court is going out of its way to make it clear that its reasoning in this case does not apply to gay marriage and other LGBT rights… Most reasonable Americans, whatever their views on abortion, would agree that obtaining one is fundamentally different from entering a marriage.”
In other words: Never mind that victims of child rape (like the 10-year-old girl, six weeks pregnant, who was unable to terminate the pregnancy in Ohio last month thanks to the Supreme Court ruling), or working-class women in the southern states who can’t afford 400-mile trips for terminations. We’re all right, Mary.
Alito’s reassurances were undermined by another even more right-wing member of the Supreme Court. Justice Clarence Thomas said that, having cancelled abortion rights, it might be time to revisit earlier Supreme Court verdicts allowing access to contraception and same-sex marriage. Conservative gays are probably kidding themselves if they think hard-won LGBT rights, such as same-sex marriage, are safe.
As the political scientist and human rights researcher Omar Encarnacióni notes in Foreign Policy, already this year, several Republican states have curtailed teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools. At its recent convention, the Texas Republican Party adopted a spectacularly homophobic platform that referred to homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice” and rejected the existence of a transgender identity. Watch this space.
But American political extremists aren’t the only ones affecting support for gay rights to hide their repression of women. And it’s not the preserve of the radical right. In 2007, the government of Nicaragua’s leftist dictator, Daniel Ortega, criminalised all abortion in the same penal code reform that decriminalised homosexuality.
The term “pinkwashing” was first used in the context of Israel promoting itself as a modern, gay-friendly Middle Eastern oasis to distract attention from its treatment of Palestinians. It kicked off in 2005, with help from American marketing executives, to ensure Israel was “relevant and modern”. The Tel Aviv tourism board even spent $90m (£75m) rebranding the city as “an international gay vacation destination”.
It wasn’t just the politicians. The New York Times reported that an Israeli pornographer even shot a film, Men of Israel, on the site of a former Palestinian village. Classy.
Confident that the gays were happy, the then prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told the US Congress in 2011 that the Middle East was “a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted. Israel stands out. It is different.” Tell that to the Palestinians whose former land was used for a skin flick.
The treatment of gay Palestinians highlights the hypocrisy and double standards of LGBT-friendly Israel. It steadfastly refuses (in contravention of international law, again) to give asylum to homosexual Palestinians seeking refuge from the endemic homophobic violence in their own communities.
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It’s not just Israel. These days, they’re all at it. That life-long crusader for human rights, Marine Le Pen, likes the gays. Well, not exactly. The leader of the far-right National Rally tolerates them because she loves their votes. To pinkwash her party, she hired Sébastien Chenu, founder of the Gaylib movement, to soften its image. In the aftermath of Islamist terror attacks, including the one on the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, Le Pen portrayed her criticism of Islam as a defence of the LGBT community (despite continuing to call for a ban on same-sex marriage).
There are other wash cycles to help clean up the reputation of unsavoury organisations and regimes.
Think sportswashing. David Beckham has signed a £10m deal to help detoxify the brand of Qatar, the country that’s built stadiums for this year’s World Cup on the bones of who knows how many migrant slave workers. Newcastle has accepted Saudi Arabian cash as the Gulf state aims to whitewash its sickening human-rights record with some glamour from Premier League football.
There’s genderwashing. Rwanda has been in the news as the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, tries to cart off asylum seekers to the embrace of its dictator, Paul Kagame. “Being a champion of gender is the same as being the champion for justice and human rights,” Kagame said while collecting the 2016 Gender Champion Award.
It’s true, Kagame has shown a strong commitment to equal opportunities. More than half of the seats in Rwanda’s lower house of parliament are held by women. But Kagame is an equal-opportunities oppressor. It doesn’t matter if you’re male or female. Oppose him and you face intimidation, jail time or worse.
Kagame is happy for the world to look at women’s opportunities if it distracts attention from his nefarious operations, such as the alleged use of overseas assassination squads, which officials deny. You could say the same about the women-friendly Nobel Prize winner, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed.
In the bigger picture, these attempts to affect support for one minority to distract attention from the repression of another highlight the limits of identity politics, which in some instances are sounding increasingly shrill and solipsistic.
Waving your identity status around in a game of political Top Trumps isn’t clever when it means overlooking the plights of other groups. That’s what the bad guys want us to do.
The only rights that really matter are human rights. In other words, it’s not all about you. Or me.