The United States is lagging behind many countries in coming to terms with past injustices.
Here are why - and what can be done.
There are reparations to the LGBTQ community in numerous countries - but the USA is still lagging behind.
For decades the LGBTQ community was stigmatized - with terrible consequences such as inhuman treatments, layoffs and court judgments.
But one thing is certain: "Gay reparations" in the USA should not end with an apology for Stonewall.
This article is available for the first time in German - it was first published on May 29, 2021 by the magazine "Foreign Policy".
It may come as a surprise to US readers, but one of the most vibrant human rights movements around the world today is that of gay reparations.
H.
for action to redress the legacy of systemic discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Canada, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain and the United Kingdom have introduced such gay reparations in the last decade alone.
These are hardly uniform measures, and they do not include people getting money just because they are homosexual, as some people suspect. In most countries, gay reparations are limited to an apology from the government to the LGBTQ community for past wrongs and a promise to do better in the future. In others, they have resulted in the victims of state repression against homosexual citizens being commemorated. In 2008 the German government opened a memorial to the homosexual victims of National Socialism, an unknown number of whom perished in Nazi concentration camps and many of whom were victims of cruel medical experiments aimed at eradicating their homosexuality.
In still other countries, gay reparations included pardoning those convicted under laws criminalizing same-sex attraction, such as the United Kingdom, which issued a posthumous pardon in 2017 for those convicted of "grossly immoral behavior" were - including for Alan Turing, the mathematician who is said to have shortened the final phase of World War II.
In some cases, they also consisted of financial compensation for lost wages or pensions if the persons spent time in prison or in a psychiatric facility for a homosexual offense, as in Spain since 2009 and in Germany since 2016.
Reparations to LGBTQ communities in numerous countries - USA is still lagging behind
But that impulse did not reach the United States. The country came closest to redress for the LGBTQ community in 2019 when the New York Police Department issued a belated apology for the raid that sparked the riot on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. "The NYPD's actions were plain and simple wrong ... and I apologize for that," said New York Police Commissioner James O'Neill.
The lack of gay reparations, let alone discussion of it, in the United States is certainly not the result of a rosy story devoid of systemic discrimination against the LGBTQ community - but it can be argued that this story is not particularly well known . With the possible exception of “don't ask, don't tell”: this infamous 1993 regulation allowed gays, lesbians and bisexuals to serve in the military as long as they kept their sexual orientation a secret. When the Obama administration overturned them in 2011, around 13,000 LGBTQ soldiers had been laid off from their jobs.
Decades before "Don't ask, don't tell", from the 1920s to at least the 1960s, there was the strategy of "entrapment" in which undercover police officers flirted with other men they believed were homosexual hoping to engage them in illegal activities. According to the book
"The Deviant's War"
by historian Eric Cervini, which deals with gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny, in the 15 years after World War II there was one arrest of homosexuals every ten minutes, including for sodomy, dancing, kissing or holding hands for a total of one million arrests. And the “entrapment” was followed by the “Lavender Scare,” the persecution of federal officials suspected of being homosexual in the mid-20th century.
Witch hunt for homosexuals in the USA: Numerous layoffs - inhuman treatments
In the 1950s and 1960s, up to 10,000 people may have been fired or expelled from their federal positions for being homosexual or suspected of being homosexual based on evidence as flimsy as their dress, language, or appearance. The trigger for this witch hunt was the 1953 decree issued by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, which forbade "perverts" to work in the federal government. Some of the victims of Lavender Scare committed suicide while others were sent to government facilities, most notably St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC, where they were forced to undergo such inhumane treatments as lobotomies, insulin-induced comas, and conversion therapy to undergo,with which their sexual orientation should be changed.
LGBTQ rights activists compare treatments at St. Elizabeths Hospital to government human trials of syphilis on black men in Tuskegee, Alabama that left hundreds of black men diagnosed with syphilis untreated between 1932 and 1972, so doctors can make progress of the disease. "As with the Tuskegee experiment, those who were subjected to the experiments by federal officials were a despised minority who never consented to treatment," said Charles Francis, president of the Mattachine Society in Washington, DC, the premier organization in the United States advocates gay reparations and especially a formal apology by Congress.
Homosexuality Criminalized in USA: Decades of Stigmatization of the LGBTQ Community
In addition, there are many court rulings that have stigmatized homosexual people for decades.
Two judgments particularly illustrate the aversion that American jurisprudence has shown in the past towards gays, lesbians and bisexuals.
In
Bowers v.
Hardwick
(1986), a US Supreme Court ruling that upheld Georgia state sodomy laws, the court found that the constitution failed to protect gay, lesbian, and bisexual rights to private, consensual sexual relationships because, the judges said , homosexual sex is unrelated to family, marriage, abortion, or procreation. In his unanimous opinion, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger quoted 18th century English lawyer William Blackstone, who described homosexual sex as a shameful crime against nature, worse than rape, and a crime that must not be named.
Homosexuality remained criminalized in the United States until the Supreme Court overturned the Hardwick ruling in 2003.
Meanwhile, the Virginia Supreme Court upheld
Bottoms v.
Bottoms
(1995) the lower court ruling that granted custody of a child to a grandmother because the child's biological mother, Sharon Bottoms, was in a lesbian relationship, which was a crime under Virginia law at the time.
This ruling is not an exception: it was common at the time for courts to deny LGBTQ people the right to raise and adopt their own biological children.
LGBTQ people in USA humiliated, demonized and even committed acts of violence against them
State sponsored discriminatory acts against homosexuals sent an unmistakable message to ordinary Americans: that it was acceptable to humiliate, demonize, and even commit acts of violence against LGBTQ people. The infamous and bloody history of social attacks on the US LGBTQ community includes singer and spokeswoman Anita Bryant's 1977 "Save Our Children" crusade, in which gay men were portrayed as pedophiles, and the "declaration of war" on them Evangelist Jerry Falwell's homosexuality - a rhetorical tactic used in the 1980s to raise funds for Falwell's "Moral Majority Organization" - as was the attack on Pulse LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016.
The attack on the Pulse, one of the deadliest mass shootings in US history, killed 49 people and injured 53 people, many of them young Hispanic men. Even before the Pulse, there was the now largely forgotten arson attack on Upstairs, a gay bar in the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1973, in which 32 people died. The strong homophobia of the time even prevented the tragedy from being recognized by the mayor of New Orleans or the governor of Louisiana.
Given the dire history of LGBTQ oppression in the United States, it is amazing that no redress has yet been made.
Canada, a country with a clearly less problematic history of homosexuality, issued an apology to the gay community in 2017.
Along with the apology, millions of dollars in compensation were paid to victims of the "gay cleansing," people discharged from the military for their sexual orientation, and a memorial to the victims of those persecuted for their sexual orientation in the United States Capital Ottawa approved.
USA: Reparations issue heavily burdened - unpaid legacy of slavery and racism
One obvious reason for the belated adoption of gay reparations in the United States is that the reparations issue is particularly burdensome in American society, due to the still unbalanced legacy of slavery and racism.
Some critics of gay reparations, like conservative political commentator Michael Medved, have argued that homosexuals do not deserve redress because, unlike black Americans, they are not victims of multi-generational harm - meaning that no matter the evil, homophobia is in the Past, this evil is not like that caused by slavery, as it does not pass from generation to generation. Medved also cites the economic success of some people in the American LGBTQ community (which has created the myth that LGBTQ Americans are wealthier than the general population) as a reason why gay reparations are unnecessary.
Others are against all forms of reparations, racist or not, because they believe that reparations are inherently divisive and lead to a "slippery slope" scenario in which all groups see themselves as victims and worthy of reparations.
As an author of the right-wing website
RedState
argues, gay reparations would
extend
reparation claims from "the obese, disfigured, disabled, short, bald" and from "[migrants who were not treated kindly when trying to enter the US illegally" as well of "super-intelligent Asians rejected by Harvard".
Little response to human rights in American politics and society
From a global perspective, however, there seem to be more compelling reasons why the United States is lagging behind on gay reparations. The first is the low response to human rights in American politics and society. Gay reparations movements abroad, particularly in Spain, the UK and Germany - countries that pioneered the gay reparations movement - have run their efforts as a crusade for human rights. To do this, they have appropriated the rhetoric and strategies of the international human rights movement to make their demands and advance their agenda. .
Inspired by human rights activism, gay reparations activists have highlighted the need for reparations as a moral obligation aimed at restoring the dignity of LGBTQ people. They have also used historical stories of homosexual oppression to influence public opinion and politics towards the LGBTQ community, such as: B. the suppression of gays and lesbians in Nazi Germany or through the homophobic laws of the Francisco Franco regime in Spain, and have denounced officials for not campaigning for the human rights of LGBTQ people.
But in the United States, there aren't many precedents of social movements that have sprung up (let alone succeeded) around the core issue of human rights. Even the American civil rights movement failed in the 1960s when it attempted to link its struggle for civil rights with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. This was not least because American Conservatives effectively demonized human rights as un-American during the Cold War - even though Americans, like former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, were among the main authors of the 1948 Declaration and this document on basic American documents like the Declaration of Independence, fall back.
In the USA, there is sometimes the view that human rights are un-American - activism for LGBTQ law there is more conservative
Strangely enough, the view that human rights are un-American persists to this day.
For example, the Trump administration has tried to reformulate the promotion of human rights at the global level to include only property rights and freedom of religion.
This was the job of the Inalienable Rights Commission of then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Predictably, the Commission's final report resulted in women's groups and LGBTQ activists accusing President Donald Trump's State Department of promoting only the human rights it liked while undermining those it did not support, such as LGBTQ- Right.
A less obvious factor behind the United States' lag in gay reparations lies in the American LGBTQ rights movement itself.
The United States may have been the birthplace of the gay movement that arose as a result of the Stonewall riots.
Over the past few decades, however, LGBTQ rights activism in the United States has been relatively conservative when viewed through the international lens.
Since the late 1990s at the latest, the legal battle over same-sex marriage has preoccupied American activists, almost at the expense of all other issues.
And this fight was hardly radical.
Gay reparations in the US shouldn't end with an apology for Stonewall
While activists in countries like Argentina, Germany and Spain stressed that same-sex marriage would serve to transform society and culture at large by expanding freedom and equality and deepening citizenship and democracy, activists in the United States were more inclined to highlight that same-sex marriage would push same-sex couples into existing norms and even tame their sexuality. The latter argument came to be known as the Conservative Gay Marriage Plea, in which it was concluded that American society, including conservative people, should support same-sex marriage because it would strengthen traditional values.
Portraying the struggle for same-sex marriage as for such humble goals as strengthening homosexual households has missed a great opportunity to engage society in a broad debate about the role of LGBTQ people in society. This also made it more difficult for gay activists to expand the fight for LGBTQ rights beyond marriage to include issues such as transgender rights and gay reparations. However, these shortcomings should not mean that gay reparations in the United States end with an apology for Stonewall.
International experience shows that it is never too late for nations to correct past injustices.
It took the UK more than a century to deal with its persecution of gay men on charges of grossly immoral behavior.
And the result is definitely worth it.
Aside from restoring their dignity to victims of government-sponsored policies of discrimination and violence against homosexuals, Gay Reparations promise that the history of oppression of LGBTQ people will come to an end while future generations will be reminded of the victims and struggles that have gone before they came.
by Omar G Encarnación
Omar G. Encarnación
is Professor of Political Studies at Bard College and author of
The Case for Gay Reparations
and
Democracy Without Justice in Spain
.
This article was first published in English on May 29, 2021 in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” - as part of a cooperation, a translation is now also available to
Merkur.de
readers
.
+
Foreign Policy Logo
© ForeignPolicy.com
Also Read:
The United States Needs To Think Bigger When Fighting Climate Change.
Here is a suggestion of what that might look like.