Abstract
This essay examines the conditions that enable a ‘gay rights backlash’ through a comparison of the United States and Latin America. The United States, the cradle of the contemporary gay rights movement, is the paradigmatic example of a gay rights backlash. By contrast, Latin America, the most Catholic of regions, introduced gay rights at a faster pace than the United States without much in the way of a backlash. Collectively, this analysis demonstrates that a gay rights backlash hinges upon organisationally-rich ‘backlashers’ and an environment that is receptive to homophobic messages, a point underscored by the American experience. But the Latin American experience shows that the counter-framing to the backlash can minimise and even blunt the effects of the backlash.
What enables a gay rights backlash and what makes it thrive? There are no easy answers to these questions. After all, not all gay rights progress creates a backlash, and a gay rights backlash can take place even in the absence of gay rights. Moreover, scholarly attention to the term ‘backlash’ has been scant. Following Alter and Zürn (2018: 1), I posit the gay rights backlash as the very model of ‘backlash politics’, defined as ‘a particular form of political contestation with a retrograde objective as well as extraordinary goals and tactics that has reached the threshold of altering public discourse’. They add that ‘retrograde objectives often generate emotional appeals, including a rose-colored nostalgia and negative sentiments such as anger and resentment’. These analytical markers distinguish backlash from ordinary pluralist politics. Alter and Zürn also add threshold criteria for backlash claims and frames to alter public discourse. In particular, they question whether triggers are a necessary or sufficient condition for a backlash.
I show that the overarching objective of a gay rights backlash is to return society to a time when homosexuality was viewed as a sin, if not a crime, and heterosexuality was upheld as the norm for everyone in society. To that end, gay rights ‘backlashers’ employ rhetorical tools and political strategies that are norm-breaking and fuelled by resentment over the loss of status. Moreover, I demonstrate that whether a gay rights backlash succeeds at altering public discourse, to say nothing of changing public policy or sentiment about gay rights, something that some gay rights scholars have deemed a requirement for backlash (Bishin et al., 2015), hinges on more than triggers. These outcomes also depend on the organisational resources of the ‘backlashers’; the extent to which homophobic messages resonate with the public; and, most of all, how gay rights activists frame their struggle for equality. I explore these variables in light of the counterintuitive experiences of the United States, which generated the most robust gay rights backlash of any democracy, and Latin America, the most Catholic of regions, where gay rights erupted dramatically without much in the way of a backlash.
As shown next, the American anti-gay rights movement enjoyed more organisational resources and greater public resonance to homophobic messages than its counterpart in Latin America. These factors enabled attacks on the American LGBT community that were not only retrograde and nostalgic but also unprecedentedly coarse and cruel. But it was the framing of the gay rights campaign that made the biggest difference between the two cases. American gay rights activists adopted a legalistic framing to secure gay rights anchored on the constitutional claim of equality under the law. Although a winning strategy in the courts, this framing actually hardened opposition to gay rights. Latin American gay rights activists, by contrast, ingeniously framed their struggle as a human rights crusade. Grounded in a broader societal struggle for human rights, citizenship, and democratisation, this framing simultaneously advanced gay rights and undercut opposition to them.
The very model of backlash politics
Between 1974 and 2009, more than 245 anti-gay ballot measures were put to the voters across the United States with the intention of overturning or preventing gay rights (Stone, 2012). The most notable of these measures were constitutional amendments that succeeded in banning gay marriage in 32 states. Eleven of them were put on the ballot in 2004, with the intention of mobilising conservative voters in the hopes of aiding George W. Bush’s re-election, including in the pivotal state of Ohio. According to Pew Research Center (2006), the strategy likely worked. Ohio’s gay marriage ban won with 61% of the vote, while Bush eked out a victory by only 51%, his smallest margin of victory in any major state. Had Bush lost Ohio, he would not have been re-elected. No other democracy begins to approximate this level of successful opposition to gay rights. According to Adam (2003: 259), the ‘speed and success’ of laws and constitutional amendments enacted in the United States to ban gay marriage show ‘the earmarks of a moral panic’ that ‘is exceptional at the world stage’.
Fronting the campaign against gay marriage was the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a paradigmatic backlash movement. NOM came to national prominence in 2008, with California’s Proposition 8, the most epic of gay marriage battles. A heartbreaking loss for the LGBT community, Proposition 8 amended California’s constitution to ban gay marriage. In so doing, the amendment sent some 20,000 Californian gay marriages into legal limbo. In 2009, the California Supreme Court declared Proposition 8 constitutional but upheld the legality of the gay marriages already conducted in California. In 2013, in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the US Supreme Court invalidated the amendment.
An unabashedly retrograde and nostalgic message anchored NOM’s crusade: that children need a mom and a dad, and that gay marriage makes a married mom and dad dispensable. The organisation also stressed that being against gay marriage is not anti-gay, it is just pro-marriage. These arguments were often couched in language intended to reassure people of faith that they were not homophobes. NOM President Maggie Gallagher (2010: 1) said,
Gay marriage advocates believe there isn’t any difference between two men in a sexual union and a husband and wife, and those of us who see this difference are blinded by hatred and prejudice. They delegitimize opponents, brand us as haters, and then try to strip us of our rights.
But it was NOM’s tactics that raised eyebrows. NOM exploited Californians’ most irrational fears about homosexuals and children. A notorious NOM television advertisement made for the Proposition 8 campaign featured two gay fathers being quizzed about marriage and reproduction by their daughter; ‘the takeaway, of course, is that this faux-family is twisting the mind and morals of their child with perverse ideas about marriage and love’ (Stern, 2014). Race-baiting was another infamous NOM tactic. NOM tried ‘to drive a wedge between gays and blacks by publicizing prominent black leaders’ opposition to marriage equality and goading members of the LGBT community into denouncing them as bigots’ (Arana, 2012: 1). The group also recruited ‘glamorous young Latino and Latina leaders’ from the entertainment and sports worlds willing to publicly oppose gay marriage to entice ‘resentment between key Democratic constituencies in order to make supporting marriage equality toxic for politicians’ (Arana, 2012: 1).
Rich resources and strong resonance
NOM’s successful anti-gay marriage campaign drew upon decades of anti-gay rights activism by the ‘Christian Right’. This activism rose in the early 1970s, in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall Riots, which launched the gay liberation movement. From the onset, the Christian Right employed a public discourse that was at once retrograde and designed to keep homosexuals in the margins of society. Conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, famous for spearheading the campaign that defeated the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), led the way by drawing on ‘longstanding opposition to racial integration, interracial marriage, and mixed-race families’ to link the ERA with the dangers of ‘sex mixing, homosexual marriage, and the threat of homosexual school teachers’ (Frank, 2016).
Schlafly’s attack on homosexuality was the opening act for ‘Save Our Children’, a norm-busting extravaganza of conspiracy theories, falsehoods, and insults organised by singer and orange juice brand spokesperson Anita Bryant. It succeeded in repealing an ordinance enacted by Dade County, Florida, in 1977, banning discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodation on the basis of sexual orientation. According to The Advocate (Ball, 2012: 1), Bryant, a ‘born-again Baptist’, conducted ‘an antigay crusade driven by a vitriolic rhetoric that had never been heard before and has rarely been matched since’. During the repeal campaign, she referred to homosexuals as ‘garbage’ and published newspaper ads contending that ‘the recruitment of children is absolutely necessary for the survival and growth of homosexuality – since homosexuals cannot reproduce, they must recruit, they must freshen their ranks’ (Ball, 2012: 1).
Jerry Falwell, a Southern Baptist televangelist, and the founder of the Moral Majority, took Save Our Children national. Established in 1979, the Moral Majority is credited with incorporating the Christian Right into the Republican Party (Winters, 2012). A core concern for Falwell was protecting the family from what he perceived to be a multi-faceted attack by abortionists, feminists, and homosexuals. In his manifesto, Listen, America!, Falwell (1980: 183) wrote that ‘Homosexuality is Satan’s diabolical attack upon the family, God’s order in creation’. Elsewhere, Falwell opined that ‘Homosexuals are not a minority any more than murderers, rapists, or other sinners are a minority’ (Banwart, 2013: 146).
During the 1980s and 1990s, as the gay rights movement gained momentum, in no small measure because of the spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, a second wave of ‘family values’ organisations began to gain national prominence. Among them were the Family Research Council, the Family Research Institute, the American Family Association, Focus on the Family, and the Traditional Values Coalition. Like the Moral Majority, these new organisations were laser-focused on the LGBT community. But they were less keen to use religious language to condemn homosexuals than to practice what Nussbaum (2010: xiv) has referred to as ‘the politics of disgust’. This politics consisted of ‘depicting the sexual practices of lesbians and especially gay men as vile and revolting’, which in turn opened room for the argument that such practices worked to ‘contaminate and defile society, producing decay and degeneration’ (Nussbaum, 2010: xiv). To the extent to which this mission succeeded, it became easier for society to support legal discrimination against homosexuals and their exclusion from the public sphere. This strategising explains why the Southern Poverty Law Center labelled many of these new anti-gay rights organisations as ‘hate groups’.
The Gay Agenda, a 1992 film, is a telling example of the politics of disgust. Even at a time when the majority of Americans disapproved of homosexuality, the film was deemed too controversial to be televised. Predictably, the film exposed a ‘hidden’ homosexual agenda to recruit children and destroy the moral fabric of America. But it was also an indictment on homosexual sex. The film features an interview with psychologist Paul Cameron, the head of the Family Research Institute, whose research has been ‘denounced as mere propaganda masquerading as science’ (Nussbaum, 2010: 6). Among the ‘facts’ cited by Cameron in the film is that ‘75 percent of gay men regularly digest fecal material’ and that ‘homosexuality is so perverse as to cause its practitioners to kill, and be killed disproportionately’ (Herman, 1997: 78). For students of the Christian Right, the film’s themes of ‘disease and seduction’ are ‘strongly reminiscent of older, anti-Semitic discourse’, since ‘Jews historically were associated with disease, filth, urban degeneration, and child stealing’ (Herman, 1997: 79).
NOM’s anti-gay marriage activism also found broad resonance among ordinary Americans. For one thing, it was in sync with the ‘criminalization of LGBT people in the United States’ (Mogul et al., 2011). As recently as 1986, the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of sodomy laws in Bowers v. Hardwick; this decision was not reversed until 2003, with Lawrence v. Texas, making the United States one of the last Western nations to de-criminalise homosexuality. The ban on gay marriage was also in keeping with other famous ‘gay bans’ in American history, such as President Eisenhower’s 1953 executive order banning ‘perverts’ from working in the federal government and ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, the 1993 law that prevented gays and lesbians from serving in the military unless they kept their sexuality a secret. By the time that law was voided, in 2011, more than 10,000 gays and lesbians had been expelled from the armed forces.
The campaign to ban gay marriage also benefitted from prevailing public sentiments towards homosexuals and gay rights. Gallup’s (2019) poll on the question ‘Do you think gay and lesbian relations between consenting adults should or should not be legal?’ reveals that as recently as 2006, the percentage of Americans answering yes to that question was only 49% (it is 73% today), and 32% in 1987. As for support for gay marriage, it was only in 2012 that support for it among Americans crossed the 50% threshold. As recently as 2009, 57% of Americans were opposed to gay marriage (Gallup, 2009). Little wonder that in many states, especially in the South, the margin of victory for anti-gay marriage referenda was sky-high: 86% in Mississippi, 81% in Alabama, 78% in South Carolina, 76% in Georgia, and 75% in Arkansas.
Gay rights without a backlash?
For much of the 1970s and 1980s there was no need for a US-style anti-gay rights movement in Latin America. The military dictatorships that ruled much of Latin America during the Cold War years had either effectively eradicated the gay liberation movements that arose in the early 1970s inspired by the Stonewall Riots, or prevented them from rising in the first place. This crackdown made Latin America the most ‘unfriendly, dangerous, and potentially lethal’ place for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in the world (Encarnación, 2016a). However, even after the return of democracy to much of Latin America during the 1980s, the government in much of the region, in keeping with tradition, continued to defer to Catholic leaders on matters related to homosexuality, including the legalisation of gay rights organisations. This deference made gay rights activism in Latin America an uphill struggle through the 1990s. LGBT organisations in Argentina, the country with the longest and richest history of gay rights activism in Latin America, did not gain legality until 1991.
With legality at hand, LGBT organisations across Latin America began to advocate for rights, including state recognition of same-sex relationships. The first victory came in 1996, when Buenos Aires adopted a new city charter that banned anti-gay discrimination. It led to a same-sex civil union law for the residents of the Argentine capital in 2002. In 2009, Mexico City officials made the Mexican capital the first locality in Latin America to legalise gay marriage. Argentina’s historic 2010 gay marriage law made that country the first in the region to legalise gay marriage nationwide. Inspired by Spain’s 2005 gay marriage law – which among other things revealed to the Argentines that it was possible to overcome Catholic opposition to gay marriage – the Argentine law made no distinction in the rights granted to homosexual and heterosexual couples, including adoption. Argentina’s example was quickly followed by Uruguay, Colombia, and Brazil, making Latin America one of the global engines of the marriage equality movement (Díez, 2015).
Following the lead of the Spanish Catholic Church, Latin American Catholic leaders declared gay marriage ‘a threat to the common good’ and ‘destructive to the relationship between marriage and procreation’ (Encarnación, 2020: 72). The Catholic hierarchy also made it known that it expected Catholic legislators to oppose gay marriage, and in at least one country, Mexico, it threatened any legislator voting in favour of gay marriage with excommunication (Encarnación, 2016b: 58). But there was no coordinated campaign in Latin America to demonise homosexuals and no serious attempt to ban gay marriage by legal action (Corrales, 2020).
Brazil is a possible exception. The Brazilian Catholic Church, the world’s largest, and, arguably, the most progressive (it was in Brazil where the progressive Liberation Theology movement left its deepest mark), sat out the war over gay rights, including gay marriage. But a growing and politically influential Brazilian Evangelical movement, heavily influenced by its American counterpart, happily picked up the fight (Corrales, 2018). Since the early 2000s, the ‘Evangelical bloc’ has tried with mixed success to thwart the advances of the gay rights movement. It stopped the passage of bills to legalise same-sex civil unions, to ban anti-gay discrimination, and to fight homophobia in public schools. But it was less successful in enacting its own priorities, such as bills to define marriage as the exclusive union of one man and one woman, to create a national holiday to celebrate a ‘hetero-pride day’, and to ban ‘Christ-phobia’, or the desecration of Christian symbols (a ban that targeted Brazilian gay pride parades, which routinely feature floats that mix sexual and religious imagery). All of these bills fizzled out; most of them were not even brought up to a vote.
Poor resources and weak resonance
Unlike the Christian Right, Latin American Catholic leaders did not invest in organisations to counter the rise of gay rights. Catholic leaders also lacked the expertise in fighting the gay rights movement that the American Christian Right had honed for decades, despite assistance from US groups. As noted by Corrales (2018), ‘American evangelicals coach their counterparts in Latin America on how to court parties, become lobbyists and fight gay marriage’. But this interference by the Americans could not deliver results fast enough because, among other reasons, of a lack of tradition in Latin America of organised political lobbying by religious organisations.
A deep crisis of moral authority, ensuing from an association with bloodthirsty military dictatorships during the Cold War, further complicated the Church’s response to gay rights. The situation was most acute in Argentina, where the Church was complicit in the disappearance of thousands of political dissidents. For this complicity, Argentine Catholic clergy have been prosecuted, and the Argentine Conference of Bishops was forced to apologise to the nation in 1995. Sex and child abuse scandals further undercut the ability of Church officials to criticise homosexuals. The scandals all but blunted any attempt by Church leaders to demonise homosexuals as criminals and predators, as they themselves were facing similar accusations. In 2010, for instance, as the fight over marriage rights for gay couples was heating up in Brazil, Monsignor Luiz Marques Barbosa of the diocese of São Paolo was fighting allegations of paedophilia.
History and culture also limited the use of vitriolic rhetoric against the LGBT community. Despite Latin America’s famous Macho culture, the region lacks America’s ugly history of legal discrimination against homosexuals. Following France, many Latin American countries de-criminalised homosexuality in the 19th century: Brazil in 1830, Peru in 1836, Mexico in 1872, and Argentina in 1887. This early liberalism on the issue of homosexuality did not mean that homosexuals in Latin America were free from discrimination – they could still be prosecuted on indecency charges. But in contrast to the United States, homosexuals in Latin America would be spared a regime of discriminatory laws, such as laws barring homosexuals from the government and the military.
Latin American Catholics are also more socially progressive than their reputation would suggest. According to Pew Research Center (2013), Latin American Catholics are much less morally opposed to abortion, homosexuality, use of recreational drugs, and drinking alcohol than Latin American Protestants. Latin America is also more secular than many people presume to be the case. While 56% of Americans consider religion to be a central aspect of their lives, only 44% of Mexicans feel the same; 43% for Argentines, 41% for Chileans, and 28% for Uruguayans (Pew Research Center, 2014). Little wonder that by the time the Argentine Congress began debating the legalisation of gay marriage, in 2010, support for gay marriage approached 70% (Dollar, 2010).
Not surprisingly, the attacks that individual Catholic leaders launched on the LGBT community that could be thought of as extraordinary spectacularly backfired on them. After Mexico City enacted a gay marriage bill – a decision upheld by Mexico’s Supreme Court – Archbishop of Guadalajara Juan Sandoval Íñiguez accused Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard of bribing the justices. Ebrard filed a defamation suit against the Church and publicly chastised Sandoval Íñiguez for not grasping that ‘We live in a secular state, and in it, whether we like it or not, the rule of law prevails’ (Encarnación, 2016b: 58). The Mexican Supreme Court censured Sandoval Íñiguez in a unanimous decision supported even by the justices who had dissented on the gay marriage decision.
In Argentina, Buenos Aires Archbishop Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (the future Pope Francis) criticised gay marriage in a private letter to the Carmelite Sisters. ‘This is not a mere political project – this is an attack on God’s plan. This is a move by the father of all lies intended to confuse and mislead the children of God’, he wrote (Encarnación, 2016b: 139). After the letter was leaked to the press, it ‘triggered strong reactions by the press and the legislators’ and ‘caused some citizens and politicians who formerly identified with the Church’s official stance to distance themselves from it’ (Vaggione, 2011: 943). The harshest response came from President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who said that talk of ‘God being at war with homosexuals’ and gay marriage being the ‘Devil’s project’ were ‘reminiscent of the Crusades and the Inquisition’ (Encarnación, 2016b: 58).
Contrasting gay rights campaigns
Ultimately, however, the most determinative variable shaping the different dynamics of the gay rights backlash in the United States and Latin America was the framing of the gay rights campaign. From its inception, the American campaign for gay rights was framed as a ‘civil rights struggle’ anchored on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution (Wolfson, 2004). Although ultimately victorious at the courts, this framing was not without unintentional consequences, including intensifying opposition to gay rights. For one thing, as Klarman (2012) has noted, the heavy reliance by American gay rights activists on litigation to advance gay rights meant that every gay rights victory in the United States was met by a dramatic political backlash.
After the Hawaiian Supreme Court ruled, in 1993, that there was no compelling reason for barring homosexual couples from marriage, the Christian Right and its political allies in the US Congress enacted the ‘Defense of Marriage Act’, or DOMA. This 1996 law barred the federal government from recognising gay marriages in states where those marriages were already legal. The Hawaii decision also triggered a failed attempt to amend the US Constitution to define marriage as ‘the exclusive union of a male and a female’. This attempt to write discrimination into the Constitution suggested the length to which opponents of gay rights were willing to go to undermine gay rights.
Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 US Supreme Court ruling that struck down all remaining sodomy laws in the United States, triggered the anti-gay marriage movement. According to Moscowitz (2013: 33),
Fearing that Lawrence might pave the way for legalizing more rights for gays and lesbian citizens (including marriage), conservative groups in a retaliatory and preventive move began to push state-by-state for constitutional amendments that would shut the door on marriage equality as much as possible. Conservative groups sensed that they could use the gay marriage controversy for political gain, mobilize the public around the issue, and fire up their core base.
In a clear sign of backlash, Lawrence also depressed public support for gay rights. In July, just one month after the ruling was announced, public support for legalising homosexual sex plummeted to 48%, down from a comfortable 60% in Gallup’s May survey for the same year (Gallup, 2019).
After the US Supreme Court, in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), legalised gay marriage, the Christian Right responded with ‘religious freedom acts’. These laws allow private businesses to discriminate against LGBT people as long as that discrimination is based on sincerely held religious beliefs. Championed by Liberty Counsel and The Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, the religious freedom movement claims that gay rights are an infringement on the civil rights of Christians, especially freedom of religion and speech. The most famous case of ‘Christian victimization’ is Kim Davis, a clerk from Kentucky who refused to issue marriage certificates to same-sex couples citing her religious views. For this action, which was reminiscent of the opposition to integration in the American South, Davis was found in contempt of the law and jailed for 5 days. Another notable case is Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker who refused to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple, prompting a fine from the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Backed by the ADF, Phillips took his case all the way to the US Supreme Court, which in 2018 ruled in his favour. But the ruling was very narrow; it simply stated that Phillips’ religious beliefs had been disrespected. No violation of freedom of speech was found.
Just as important is that the American gay rights campaign lacked ambition and vision to advance LGBT equality and to counter the vitriolic rhetoric of the anti-gay rights movement (Encarnación, 2020). For instance, to the extent to which citizenship – understood not only as legal rights but also as a sense of belonging to a national community – became part of the national conversation about gay marriage, it was to stress how extending marriage rights and responsibilities to homosexuals would not upset prevailing notions of citizenship. Instead, gay marriage was portrayed by gay rights activists as a mere vehicle for shoring up traditional values, for stabilising homosexual households (Sullivan, 1989), and even for civilising gay males by taming their sexuality (Eskridge, 1996). Such arguments were at the heart of what came to be known as ‘the conservative case for gay marriage’ (Sullivan, 1989).
Not surprisingly, despite its success, critics broadly panned the US gay marriage campaign. Mumford (2005: 524) wrote, ‘I feel alternately disappointed and angered at the narrowness of the vision that the movement and its leaders feel compelled to offer us’. According to Shaiko (2007: 95),
LGBT organizations have little in the way of a proactive agenda to counter the efforts of the religious conservatives and family values groups across the country. Unless and until movement activists and leaders are willing to engage their opponents in a spirited debate about the place of gays and lesbians in our society, they are destined, at least for the next few decades, to remain second-class citizens.
Franke (2019: 1), writing after gay marriage was legalised by the US Supreme Court, argued that ‘The movement for LGBTQ rights has been domesticated, its goals refocused on marriage and family’.
A human rights framing
Latin America’s gay rights campaign was broadly framed as a ‘human rights crusade’ anchored on the view that gay rights find their legitimacy not in domestic civil laws but in universal human rights principles. The campaign emphasised not how gay rights would change gay lives but rather how gay rights would transform society as a whole by advancing human rights and deepening democracy. Such an ambitious and idealistic framing had many mutually reinforcing effects: it inspired the LGBT community, it built support for gay rights within civil society and across the political spectrum, and it crippled the capacity of the Catholic Church to fight back against gay rights.
Argentina set the tone for Latin America. ‘The freedom of sexuality is a basic human right’ was the first slogan of the Comunidad Homosexual Argentina, or CHA, a gay rights organisation that emerged during the democratic transition of 1983 (Encarnación, 2016b: 188). This slogan signalled a radical interpretation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is mum on the issue of sexual orientation. It also foreshadowed the coming of the idea that ‘gay rights are human rights’ which became popular in international gay politics during the 1990s. Gay rights groups also branded themselves as human rights organisations and embraced the playbook of the human rights movement with the intention of connecting their activism to the larger conversation about the human rights abuses of the infamous ‘Dirty War’ (1976–1983).
In 1984, around the time when the Argentine military was on trial for crimes against humanity (the first for a Latin American nation), CHA leaders ran an advertisement in the daily Clarín that read, ‘With discrimination and repression there is no democracy’ (Encarnación, 2016b: 114). It argued that ‘there will never be a true democracy if society permits the existence of marginalized sectors and the methods of repression are still in place’. It concluded by noting that ‘more than 1.5 million Argentine gays are preoccupied with the national situation and that they experienced with the rest of the nation the hard years of dictatorial rule’. The point of the advertisement was to question the democracy of the period in light of the continuing human rights abuses against the LGBT community.
Gay rights activists also capitalised on escraches, or public shaming, a quintessential Argentine human rights strategy, to pressure politicians into including some 400 homosexuals believed to have been killed during the Dirty War (most of them members of the Argentine Gay Liberation Front) in the official report of the National Commission on the Disappeared. They ultimately failed, but this defeat birthed the claim that ‘homosexuals are the disappeared among the disappeared’, a useful rhetorical tool for highlighting state violence against homosexuals during the Dirty War (Encarnación, 2016b: 92). Finally, gay rights activists successfully lobbied for the incorporation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights into the Argentine Constitution, which gave human rights the weight of constitutional law.
When campaigning for gay marriage, gay rights activists embraced the term ‘egalitarian marriage’ to suggest the desire to open the institution of marriage to everyone. They also stressed that their goal was not marriage rights but rather ‘full citizenship’. Both stances aimed to garner support for gay marriage from the most important sectors of Argentine civil society – especially the human rights community and the trade union movement. The emphasis on full citizenship, in particular, ensured that the legalisation of gay marriage would serve as a platform for the expansion of gay rights beyond same-sex marriage; especially a gender identity law, reproductive rights for same-sex couples, and a national ban on ‘gay conversion’ therapy.
In an environment of broad recognition of gay rights as human rights, it is not surprising that during the debate over gay marriage, some clergy came out in favour of it. They argued that ‘Jesus never condemned nor mentioned homosexuality’ and ‘that all biblical revelation point toward focusing on love without any type of exclusion’ (Vaggione, 2011: 944). Such pronouncements by the progressive Catholic clergy allowed legislators and even deeply religious Christians ‘to think, define, and act differently from what the ecclesiastical hierarchy proposes by constructing Catholicism as a heterogeneous tradition with respect to sexuality’ (Vaggione, 2011: 945). Nor it is surprising that once the notion of gay rights as human rights entered the political mainstream that gay rights gained support across the political spectrum. Gay marriage was legislated by the National Congress and with bipartisan support.
Among those championing gay marriage as a human rights matter was President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, whose party, the Justicialista Party, has a long history of hostility towards homosexuals. When conservative legislators, in a desperate attempt to derail gay marriage, suggested that Argentina follow the American example of putting gay marriage to a popular vote, she retorted that ‘Leaving the fate of the rights of a minority to the whims of the majority was unbecoming of a democratic society’ (Encarnación, 2016b: 145). Upon signing the gay marriage law, she argued that the law did not belong to any group in particular but rather to society itself, ‘as part of a progression toward more equality, diversity and pluralism’ (Encarnación, 2016b: 148).
Conclusion
This study’s findings highlight the need to unpack the counter-framing to the backlash in determining whether a backlash manages to alter public discourse and reverse public policy and opinion about gay rights. In so going, the study broadly underscores the prominence of ‘framing’ strategies in the social movement literature (Buechler, 1993). By structuring their demands as a struggle for human rights, democracy, and citizenship, Latin American gay rights movements were able to simultaneously motivate their followers, build societal support for their cause, and demobilise their foes.
Another key insight from this study is that an effective counter-framing to a gay rights backlash could well be a historical contingency. The human rights framing of Latin America’s gay rights campaign was possible because of the region’s rich history with human rights. This history gave Latin American gay rights activists unusual access to the language and strategies of the human rights movement. It also gave resonance to the activists’ struggles. There is no significant history of American social movements availing themselves of human rights to advance their goals, in no small measure because of the success of conservatives in depicting human rights as foreign or un-American.
Finally, this study provides a glimpse into the dark side of American democracy. The vitriolic language used by the Christian Right to dehumanise homosexuals in order to justify denying them their civil rights is beyond disheartening. And tactics like gay marriage referenda, promoted as an exercise in democracy by ‘letting the people decide’ made a mockery of democracy by allowing the majority decide the fate of the rights of a vulnerable minority. These indignities are a stain on American democracy that recent gay rights victories cannot erase.
