On Monday, LGBT activists in Tbilisi, Georgia, called off a planned Pride March after hundreds of violent counter-protesters attacked activists and journalists.
On Tuesday, WeChat, China’s most popular social media service, shut down dozens of accounts on LGBT topics run by college students and nonprofit groups as part of a tightening of political control by the Communist Party.
Three weeks ago, Hungary’s parliament passed legislation that would ban the dissemination of content in schools deemed to promote homosexuality and gender change.
And all these assaults on human rights reminded me of a column written in 2013 by the British journalist Michael Hanlon. Hanlon wrote about a “morality gap” in the world that could be seen most clearly in attitudes toward gay rights. His column is worth quoting at length:
It is now clear, though not much talked about, that humanity, all 7.1 billion of us, tends to fall into one of two distinct camps. On the one side are those who buy into the whole post-Enlightenment human rights revolution. For them the moral trajectory of the last 300 years is clear: once we were brutal savages; in a few decades, the whole planet will basically be Denmark, ruled by the shades of Mandela and Shami Chakrabarti.
And there’s some truth in this trajectory — except for the fact that it only applies to half the planet. The other half resolutely follows a different moral code: might is right, all men were not created equal and there is a right and a wrong form of sexual orientation.
You can identify those countries in the dark half of the divide by their attitudes to homosexuality and women; to honour killings, race, disability, mental illness, religious minorities and to crime, torture and punishment, even animal rights and the environment.…
Let’s start with attitudes to gays, not because gay rights are the most important issue, but because attitudes to homosexuality show the morality gap in sharpest relief.…
A look at the timeline of gay rights shows a seemingly unstoppable barrage of permissiveness, with state after state passing laws first legalising homosexuality, then going further: permitting gay marriage and gay adoption and formalising gay relationships in terms of pensions and property rights. It’s tempting for those of us in this enlightened half of the world to think of this as a great wave of progress that rose up in the mid-20th century and will sweep across the world.
Tempting, but wrong. In fact, in much of the world, received wisdom on homosexuality appears to be going into reverse.
Of course, this divide in the world is well known. It’s been discussed and analyzed in Pew Research studies, examined at HumanProgress.org, and included in the rankings of the Human Freedom Index.
Martin Luther King, Jr., often said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” There’s certainly evidence that’s true, but it’s cold comfort for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals living stunted lives in so much of the world today.
