LGBT Equality Research Articles

New Skin for an Old Ceremony

This article employs heteroactivism as a frame of analysis to examine recent shifts in resistances to gender and sexual equalities in Israel. Using ethnographic, visual, and textual methods, I examine as case studies the oppositions to two academic conferences, Issues in Therapy with Polyamory and Queer Utopias, that were both held at Bar Ilan University in 2019. The oppositions, which were led by three organisations affiliated with the Religious Zionist public (Leeba; Shovrot Shivion; Boharim Bamishpacha) reveal how Israeli heteroactivist discourses invoke familism, pro-natalism, religious sentiments, Zionist narratives, and collective trauma, in their attempts to recentralise the heteronormative Jewish family. LGBT equality in Israel has been achieved through legislative court-rulings, instead of being legally secured by the parliament, as it was in other countries previously explored by research on heteroactivsim. Nevertheless, this article shows, how this quasi-equality, combined with public sentiments of growing acceptance, induced by homonationalist and homonormative trends, sufficed to create a fertile ground for heteroactivist resistances. Through a discussion of the symbolic meaning of Bar Ilan University as an academic institution, affiliated with the Religious Zionist public, this article also illustrates how heteroactivist resistances may be embedded in specific localities and events, and not just on grand national campaigns.

Beautiful failure: A case study on #EqualityActJapan and a lesson in failing well on social media

Together with Athlete Ally, All Out and over 100 LGBT organisations in the Japan Alliance for LGBT Legislation, Human Rights Watch created the #EqualityActJapan campaign, calling for the first LGBT equality bill in Japan. Sadly, although this global digital campaign was impeccably delivered, exceeding key performance indicators such as cost efficiency, engagement, reach and total petitions delivered to political targets, the bill was never introduced. This paper discusses what happens when a campaign meets all of its digital campaigning key performance indicators but not its policy or legislative objective, providing a case study in how to fail well on social media. The lessons learned from this experience are crucial to apply to future digital campaigns.

The Incorporation of Cultural and Religious Diversity in LGBT Policies: Experiences of Queer Migrants from Muslim Backgrounds in Catalonia, Spain

This article reflects on the biases in sexual and gender diversity policies in relation to the axis of cultural and religious diversity in Catalonia (Spain), where these policies have experienced an enormous boost since 2014. The paper aims to analyse the articulation between the experiences of queer migrants from Muslim backgrounds living in Catalonia and the LGBT and intercultural policies. Based on interviews both with queer migrants and people involved in developing public policies, we analyse how these two axes intersect. The approach of policies is mainly monofocal and assimilationist, failing to acknowledge the hybridity of queer migrant experiences. However, we also find examples of policy programmes that adopt an intersectional perspective and embrace hybridity by advancing more inclusive LGBT equality policies. The conclusions highlight two axes of tensions that have emerged in the analysis of the policies: the construction of the figure of the queer person from a Muslim background and the role of the state regarding sexual and gender diversity.

Deliberative Democracy in Multicultural Societies: The Challenges of Effectiveness, Legitimacy, and Equality

Multicultural societies are marked by the coexistence of ethnic, sexual, religious, racial, and cultural minorities and mainstream groups. This coexistence can either be tense or collaborative. How to bridge the gap between the political demands of majority and minority groups? What are the obstacles to meaningful participation? What are the main challenges faced by such societies? And finally, how do we encourage large-scale debates around issues of minorities? In order to provide answers to these questions, this review examines Intercultural Deliberation and the Politics of Minority Rights by R. E. Lowe-Walker (2018), Deliberative Democracy Now: LGBT Equality and the Emergence of Large-Scale Deliberative Systems by Edwina Barvosa (2018), and Deliberative Democracy, Political Legitimacy, and Self-determination in Multicultural Societies by Jorge M. Valadez (2018).

Deliberative Democracy in Multicultural Societies: The Challenges of Effectiveness, Legitimacy, and Equality

Multicultural societies are marked by the coexistence of ethnic, sexual, religious, racial, and cultural minorities and mainstream groups. This coexistence can either be tense or collaborative. How to bridge the gap between the political demands of majority and minority groups? What are the obstacles to meaningful participation? What are the main challenges faced by such societies? And finally, how do we encourage large-scale debates around issues of minorities? In order to provide answers to these questions, this review examines Intercultural Deliberation and the Politics of Minority Rights by R. E. Lowe-Walker (2018), Deliberative Democracy Now: LGBT Equality and the Emergence of Large-Scale Deliberative Systems by Edwina Barvosa (2018), and Deliberative Democracy, Political Legitimacy, and Self-determination in Multicultural Societies by Jorge M. Valadez (2018).  

Bostock's Paradox: Textualism, Legal Justice, and the Constitution

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia—recognizing that anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination are forms of sex discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—has already gained a steady reputation as a textualist statutory interpretation decision. The reality of the ruling is far more complicated than that. Bostock is a textualist decision, but, as the argument here shows, Bostock also offers a construction of Title VII’s sex discrimination rule that sounds in a rule-of-law norm of legal justice about LGBT equality that itself traces roots to the Supreme Court’s constitutional LGBT rights jurisprudence. Bostock’s rule-of-law norm of legal justice, which expands and diffuses constitutional norms of LGBT equality in new ways, does more than shape Bostock’s interpretation of Title VII. Through it, Bostock supplies state actors, including courts, with instruction on how to treat all claims of lesbian, gay, and now trans rights, whether they formally involve constitutional rights claims or, as in Bostock, do not. In Bostock’s wake, state actors must ordinarily treat LGBT persons just the same as their cisheterosexual counterparts, affording them the same benefits of established and new legal protections that cisheterosexuals receive. The path to this larger picture proceeds through an account that explains Bostock both is—and is not—a textualist decision. The opinion’s textualist self-accounting, tracked in these pages, lacks normative justificatory punch on the central interpretive question raised by the claims it decides: whether Title VII’s sex discrimination ban covers anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination. A careful reading of Bostock shows the opinion both disparaging and then ultimately embracing “extratextual” reasons for choosing to read Title VII’s sex discrimination rule in the pro-gay and pro-trans directions that it does. The most telling of these reasons, in a dramatic turn, abandons the majority’s textualist hunt, and reaches for a general, rule-of-law ideal of legal justice—a distinctive understanding of formal equality involving LGBT persons—that emerges from, and extends to new levels, the legal foundations of the U.S. Supreme Court’s pro-lesbian and pro-gay constitutional rights jurisprudence, whose pro-trans legal implications are expressly recognized by the Supreme Court in Bostock for the first time. Bostock’s announcement of the operations of legal justice in the case—a stylized extension of operative constitutional norms—has far-reaching implications for the interpretation of other statutes that may benefit LGBT persons, as well as other legal rules that, now or in the future, implicate LGBT rights. Understanding how Bostock follows a line of justification found in the Supreme Court’s constitutional promises of equal dignity and respect for lesbian women, gay men, and trans people frames an account of what is legally misguided about the textualist approaches taken up by the Bostock dissents. These opinions, which indulge both anti-gay and anti-trans sentiments as touchstones for their own preferred choices for how to read Title VII’s sex discrimination ban, flout constitutional values that strip those choices of their own easy claims to legality. Having identified the legal flaws of the dissents’ textualist analytics, discussion turns to the most significant of the likely reasons why the Bostock majority opinion does not expressly avow the constitutional and rule-of-law grounds for its decision. No matter, the recognition of Bostock’s foundations in constitutionalism recasts the pressures the Supreme Court will face in future cases taking up questions that Bostock formally brackets, as well as other wonders about its own text’s meaning. With time, Bostock may prove to be an even bigger breakthrough for LGBT equality and rights under law than at first glance it seems.

Doing, being and verbalizing: Narratives of queer migrants from Muslim backgrounds in Spain

The hegemonic narrative in the West establishes that having same-sex relationships constitutes an identity that must be public. This article analyses how this narrative is reproduced and/or subverted in the discourses of queer migrant people from Muslim backgrounds in Catalonia (Spain). The analysis of 10 interviews reveals a more fluid notion of sexual orientation, an uncomfortableness with the identity categories regarding sexuality, and a stronger distinction between the public and the private boundaries. The informants found themselves in a complex situation that made it impossible for them to completely reproduce or subvert the overlapping normativities of both the origin and host society, compelling them to devise hybrid strategies to live their sexuality. The article closes with a reflection on the implications of the different ways of living sexuality in relation to the theorization of sexual/intimate citizenship and LGBT equality policies, which also reproduce the western hegemonic understanding of sexuality.

The other way around? How freedom of religion may protect LGBT rights

ABSTRACT While LGBT people are generally protected by a number of basic human rights, such as the right to privacy, freedom of expression and association, and the right not to be discriminated against, LGBT rights are repeatedly presented as contrary to freedom of religion. However, taking into account how religion has always been both condemning and embracing various forms of same-sex sexuality and transgenderism, and how an increasing number of religious people and whole denominations consider LGBT equality in accordance with their beliefs, one finds that freedom of religion relates just as much to LGBT people who live according to their own religious pro-LGBT convictions and to other people with pro-LGBT beliefs, as to those with anti-LGBT beliefs. As freedom of religion also protects the right not to believe and not to be forced to live according to other people’s religious beliefs, the general claim that LGBT rights must be limited because of the religious freedom of those with anti-LGBT beliefs also represents a direct attack on the negative freedom of religion of LGBT people. The awareness of this may in various ways affect both the legal and more general discussion on both LGBT rights and freedom of religion.

Conscience Wars in the Americas

A new type of religious conscience claim is appearing across the globe — in conflicts over sexuality, gender, reproduction, and the family, or what are often described as the “culture wars.” In the United States, many European countries, and parts of Latin America, conscience has emerged as an important framework for objecting to recently enacted laws or case law that confer on citizens reproductive rights and, increasingly, LGBT (or SOGIE) rights. Religious conscience claims in this setting can be asserted sincerely and with a theological basis and yet also serve as a way to limit the newly recognized rights of other citizens. Unlike in the paradigmatic scene of religious accommodation, conscience claims in the culture wars are asserted in defense of norms that the majority recently has shared and may in fact continue to share. Unlike in the paradigmatic case, where an individual from a minority faith seeks to engage in ritual observance or religiously-motivated dress or grooming that runs afoul of generally applicable laws, accommodation of conscience claims in culture-war conflicts may inflict significant harms on other citizens. Accommodation may impose older, traditional views on citizens whose rights the law only recently has come to protect. Our intervention is both practical and critical. We consider culture-war conscience claims across the Americas involving reproductive rights and LGBT equality and show how these more recent conscience claims resemble, and differ from, paradigmatic conscience claims involving ritual observance and dress. After surveying law across borders, we offer guidance about accommodating these conscience claims. We suggest a variety of approaches that would promote, rather than undermine, pluralism. It is often possible for the government to accommodate conscientious objectors’ claims while still protecting the rights of citizens who may be affected. Appreciating the multiple pathways for accommodation helps clarify the logic of the government’s choices. When government accommodates conscience in a framework that does not preserve the legally enshrined rights of other citizens, we show in this Essay, the government may be employing the law of accommodation to create a de facto public order favoring the beliefs of the objectors.

The LGBT Equality Gap and Federalism

LGBT people in the United States live with an Equality Gap that seems to grow wider with each legislative session. The majority of states do not have non-discrimination protections in place for LGBT people. In the absence of blanket federal non-discrimination protections, a same-sex couple can be denied service by bakers, catering halls, and photographers while trying to exercise their constitutionally protected right to marry. A transgender person can be denied access to a public bathroom that matches their gender identity. A federally funded adoption agency can refuse to work with LGBT persons who wish to adopt. In addition, many states have enacted explicitly anti-LGBT measures and prohibitions that exacerbate the Equality Gap and further underscore regional disparities. Even states with non-discrimination protections for LGBT people have considered expanding religious exemptions in a way that could greatly undercut the effectiveness and scope of existing non-discrimination protections. As a result of this mismatch of laws, the lived experience of LGBT people varies wildly depending on where they reside. For example, LGBT people living in New York enjoy many more protections and suffer none of the disabilities that are imposed on LGBT people living in Mississippi. The regional disparities are so extreme that some countries have issued travel advisories for their citizens visiting certain parts of the United States. This article examines the role federalism has played in the trajectory of LGBT rights and the creation of the Equality Gap. The first section of this article explores federalism as an institutional choice that strikes a balance between state and national power. The second section reviews the instrumental use of federalism by LGBT advocates to advance the legal strategy that ultimately led to nationwide marriage equality. It also provides an overview of corresponding and complementary visions of federalism expressed in both Windsor and Obergefell. The last section reviews the current Equality Gap and the most recent anti-LGBT initiatives that are being considered on the state and local levels in light of Bostock v. Clayton County, the 2020 US Supreme County case that extended Title VII non-discrimination protections to sexual orientation and gender identity. A brief conclusion closes with the observation that federalism has proven to be a pragmatic, but also imperfect, institutional choice for LGBT rights advocates because state level civil rights protections are, by their nature, partial, not portable, and especially vulnerable to majoritarian bias. This observation has particular salience for both our understanding of federalism and the future of LGBT advocacy.

All Fall Down: A Comprehensive Approach to Defeating the Religious Right's Challenges to Anti-Discrimination Statutes

Marriage equality and religious liberty; Obergefell v. Hodges and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby; bakeries refusing to make wedding cakes for gay couples and commercial photographers turning away soon-to-be lesbian brides — these issues and cases that make up the “new normal” of our national fight over LGBT civil rights. The fulcrum of the modern-day fight over LGBT civil rights is at the intersection of religious liberty as asserted by for-profit corporations and state anti-discrimination laws asserted by LGBT people who are refused goods, services and other public accommodations by these for-profit corporations.Notwithstanding the significant victories of the LGBT civil rights movement over the past 20 years, culminating in Obergefell, anti-LGBT sentiment continues to run deep. The leading voice of the anti-LGBT rights movement is the Religious Right, whose goal is to stop and reverse these civil rights victories. While the Religious Right has vocally opposed LGBT equality and civil rights for decades, the strategy behind its opposition, and thus its narrative, has drastically changed over the past 45 years. What was a narrative that attacked and pathologized LGBT people in the 1950s through the 1980s, today is a narrative that frames the Religious Right as victims of secularism — embodied, in part, in the law — that infringes on their religious liberty.What is religious liberty? Why has the Religious Right recently changed its strategy to embrace the religious liberty narrative? What roles do Obergefell, Hobby Lobby, the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, state Religious Freedom Restoration Acts, and the First Amendment play in the Religious Right’s campaign for religiously-based exemptions from state anti-discrimination laws for for-profit corporations? And, most importantly, what are the legal arguments that the LGBT civil rights movement can make to defeat this campaign? Neither Obergefell nor Hobby Lobby answered these questions. This Article does. It addresses all of the legal claims asserted by the Religious Right in its campaign to secure exemptions from state anti-discrimination laws for for-profit corporations and presents a comprehensive legal framework for dismantling those arguments. It concludes that by utilizing this comprehensive legal framework, state anti-discrimination laws may — consistent with Religious Freedom Restoration Acts and the First Amendment — be applied to for-profit corporations, regardless of the purported religious beliefs of that for-profit corporation. Moreover, they should be so applied to protect the both the rule of law and genuine religious freedom, which can only truly exist in the context or religious pluralism.

‘But if Taiwan legalizes same-sex marriage … ’: discourses of homophobia and nationalism in a Chinese antigay community online

ABSTRACT This article examines the interplay between homophobia and nationalism by analyzing online comments on the ruling of legalizing same-sex marriage in Taiwan. Drawing on methods from critical discourse analysis, I focus on the framing of this ruling by members from a Chinese antigay community online. I show that they frame this ruling as (1) in opposition to public opinion, (2) promoting ‘Westernization’ and ‘Independence’, (3) seeking immorality and self-destruction. I find that within these frames, they evoke nationalist discourses that represent supporters of this ruling as the ‘Other’ who attempt to split with China, thereby associating LGBT equality movements in China with this political threat. I argue that these nationalist discourses are used in a way that reinforces and legitimizes discourses of homophobia.

And If the Opponents of Gender Ideology Are Right? Gender Politics, Europeanization, and the Democratic Deficit

AbstractThis article explores the dynamics of antigender mobilization in Poland and shows how gender equality projects are interconnected with the rise of opponents of “gender ideology.” It highlights material and discursive links between the local implementation of gender mainstreaming and the antigenderist backlash. The article points out that particular gender equality policies in non-Western settings result from Europeanization and thus are marked by a significant democratic deficit—that is, they are promoted without engaging a wider audience and elude parliamentary control. The study shows that if gender equality projects, such as gender mainstreaming, are fostered by external international commitments and obscure bureaucratic measures, they may unintentionally provide the impetus for antigender mobilization. Indeed, gender wars are fueled not only by controversies over gender and LGBT equality but also by growing concerns about citizens’ control over the state and its policies. The article is data based, and by employing framing analysis, it provides an explanation of the recent political success of antigenderist campaigns, which take place in a world of reconfigured states and diminishing democracies.

Outcomes associated with employee and organisational LGBT value discrepancies

ABSTRACTWhile the congruence between the global values of an employee and those of their organisation is frequently studied, less research has examined outcomes associated with discrepancies pertaining to the value of LGBT rights and equality. Further, research on LGBT-supportiveworkplace climates tends to focus on the consequences for LGBT employees. While these studies are important, person-organisation LGBT value incongruence likely has consequences for employees across the spectrums of sexual orientation and gender identity. The present study sought to examine the potential deleterious correlates of person-organisation LGBT value incongruence in a sample of 180 employees in the United States, encompassing both LGBT- and non-LGBT-identifying individuals. We tested the association between person-organisation LGBT value incongruence and several personal and workplace correlates, including turnover intentions, perceived organisational support, counterproductive workplace behaviours, and mental health symptomology. Findings revealed that greater LGBT value incongruence was related to increased turnover intentions and decreased perceived organisational support but was unrelated to counterproductive workplace behaviours, depression, and anxiety. Further, perceived organisational support mediated the link between LGBT value incongruence and turnover intentions. Results suggest that organisational policies and practices demonstrating commitment towards the LGBT community may be beneficial for employees in general, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identification.

Constructing European Union Identity through LGBT Equality Promotion: Crises and Shifting Othering Processes in the European Union Enlargement

The European Union sees itself as a beacon of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender friendliness and seeks to promote these norms in its external relations. However, such identity claims and norm promotion are inherently political and should be critically examined as such. Taking a relational approach, this article conceptualises and examines the Othering processes within the European Union enlargement to highlight the political nature of what is often described as a technocratic process. Through exploring the triangulation of the European Union enlargement, Othering processes and crises, it is argued that (1) the use of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights as a measure of Europeanness is based on a longer tradition of defining the European Union’s symbolic boundaries, but that (2) it is in perceived moments of crisis that the European Union redraws and strengthens the boundaries between the Self and the different types of Others through changing combinations of Othering mechanisms. Finally, the article also argues that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights promotion is not only a tool in constructing the European Union’s identity but also a source of an identity crisis, as is shown by the rise of anti-gender politics.

Language influences mass opinion toward gender and LGBT equality

To improve gender equality and tolerance toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities, several nations have promoted the use of gender-neutral pronouns and words. Do these linguistic devices actually reduce biases that favor men over women, gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals? The current article explores this question with 3 large-scale experiments in Sweden, which formally incorporated a gender-neutral pronoun into its language alongside established gendered pronouns equivalent to he and she The evidence shows that compared with masculine pronouns, use of gender-neutral pronouns decreases the mental salience of males. This shift is associated with individuals expressing less bias in favor of traditional gender roles and categories, as reflected in more favorable attitudes toward women and LGBT individuals in public life. Additional analyses reveal similar patterns for feminine pronouns. The influence of both pronouns is more automatic than controlled.

Deliberative Democracy Now: LGBT Equality and the Emergence of Large-Scale Deliberative Systems. By Edwina Barvosa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 308p. $99.99 cloth.

Deliberative Democracy Now: LGBT Equality and the Emergence of Large-Scale Deliberative Systems. By Edwina Barvosa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 308p. $99.99 cloth.

Gay on God’s Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities

Gay on God’s Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities

Gay on God’s Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities. By Jonathan S. Coley. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xii+194. $90.00 (cloth); $27.95 (paper).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewGay on God’s Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities. By Jonathan S. Coley. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xii+194. $90.00 (cloth); $27.95 (paper).Ruth BraunsteinRuth BraunsteinUniversity of Connecticut Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 124, Number 6May 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/704050 Views: 118Total views on this site For permission to reuse a book review printed in the American Journal of Sociology, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Withdrawn as Duplicate: Gay on God’s Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities

Withdrawn as Duplicate: Gay on God’s Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities