‘Gender Activists Will Kidnap Your Kids’: The Construction of Feminist and LGBT+ Rights Activists as Modern Folk Devils in Czech Anti-Gender Campaigns

This chapter examines how internet forums such as Facebook can be used in creating and spreading misleading stories and stimulating fear and panic. With the example of the Czech society, the author analyses various web forums that are based on anti-LGBT rights and anti-feminist ideologies, promoting these as threats to nuclear families and traditional gender norms. The text shows the paradoxical portrayal of LGBT activists as, on the one hand, freaks living on the fringe of society, not much more than a laughing stock, and, on the other hand, as a threat with the potential power to destroy traditional values in Czech society.

African activists face uphill battle on LGBT rights

Significance Although the bill may never become law, it is nevertheless symptomatic of a wider resurgence of anti-LGBT sentiment across Africa, which is being fanned by political populists. Impacts Efforts to secure LGBT rights through litigation may often be the only available option but will produce mixed results. Unscrupulous politicians will continue to leverage anti-LGBT sentiment to score cheap political points. Wealthy conservative organisations, both domestic and foreign, will continue to fund anti-LGBT activities.

The Phenomenon of the Freedom Party: the Effect of Newness or the Beginning of a New Value Cleavage?

The article analyzes the reasons of success of the Freedom Party in the 2020 Seimas elections. The case of Freedom Party is particularly interesting as it did not appeal to the median voter like previous new parties, but took a clearly liberal stance on such vulnerable issues (in rather conservative Lithuanian society) as LGBT rights. The article examines several probable accounts of the success story of the party: the newness of the party, the value shift in the society and the realignment of the voters. The article employs the data of the 2020 post-election survey and other relevant data sets. The analysis revealed that the effect of novelty contributed somewhat to the success of the Freedom Party, but the main reason for its good performance was the ability to mobilize liberal-minded voters, the number of which increased significantly compared to the 2016 Seimas elections. The party was able not only to take advantage of the changing values of the new generation, but also to consolidate liberal-minded voters who were previously dispersed. The results of the analysis suggest that attitudes on the conservatism–liberalism dimension have become an important factor determining party preferences in Lithuania, while so far, the only significant cleavage in Lithuania was based on different attitudes towards Russia and the Soviet past.

Attitudes towards LGBT individuals after Bostock v. Clayton County: Evidence from a quasi-experiment

Do United States Supreme Court decisions on LGBT rights shape attitudes towards LGBT individuals among the mass public? In this paper, I conduct an empirical test of the effect of quasi-random exposure to the announcment of \textit{Bostock v. Clayton County} - a landmark case which held that that an employer who fires their employee because of their sexual orientation or gender identity violates Section VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act - on favorability towards LGBT individuals. Relying on data from Phase 2 of the Democracy Fund/UCLA Nationscape survey, I find that quasi-random exposure to the announcement of \textit{Bostock} engendered increases in favorability towards LGBT individuals among the wider American public. Subgroup analyses also indicate that the largest increases in favorability were among Democratic partisans and the religiously unaffiliated, while minimal changes in favorability were detected among those who are among the most likely to oppose LGBT rights, including Republicans and Evangelical Protestants. The findings speak to the validity of the legitimacy model and highlight the limitations of the backlash model in the post-\textit{Obergefell} era of public opinion towards LGBT rights.

A Pluralist Approach to ‘the International’ and Human Rights for Sexual and Gender Minorities

Queer theorists have considered the problems concerning the political strategy of using LGBT rights to justify racist xenophobia and using homo/transphobia to consolidate heterosexist nationalism. Their timely interventions are important in exposing state violence in the name of human rights and sovereign equality, but they have offered no alternative. They may also have reinforced the assumption of state science. This assumption is based on a trinity structure of the nation-state-sovereignty of ‘modern, self-determining men’, who are against each other and thereby co-built the so-called ‘international’. State-centric internationalism produces exclusionary effects that undermine the rights of sexual and gender minorities. To address this, I first consider the debate over ‘LGBT rights as human rights’, and identify two types of cultural relativism (epistemological and political) as the categories to formulate a decolonial response to the debate. In this article, queer political theorising is pushed forward to: 1) critically evaluate universalism, 2) differentiate cultural relativism (opposing the political version of it) and 3) revise the epistemological version with decolonial-queer praxis. I propose a pluralist approach to sovereignty and human rights; informed by this approach, the lack of international consensus is remedied by recognising the polyvocality within transnational queer activism beyond the monopoly of states’ representation of their own peoples. This proposal also aims to decentre modern statecraft from the political imagination of contemporary international studies scholarship.

Donor Support for the Human Rights of LGBT+

This rapid review synthesises evidence on the bilateral and multilateral donors promoting and protecting the human rights of LGBT+ people on a global scale. It focusses on those donors that have policies, implementation plans and programmes on LGBT+ rights. This review also examines the evidence on the impact of their work. The bilateral donors providing the most support for LGBT+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, +) communities in 2017-18 are the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), UK Department for International Development (DFID), The Netherlands Development Cooperation, Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), and the European Commission (EC). Whilst the multilateral donors providing the most support for LGBT+ are the UN and World Bank. The United Nations (UN) is doing a huge amount of work on LGBT+ rights across the organisation which there was not scope to fully explore in this report. The UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (UNOCHR) in particular is doing a lot on this theme. They publish legal obligation information, call attention to rights abuses through general assembly resolutions. The dialogue with governments, monitor violations and support human rights treaties bodies. The work of the World Bank in this area focuses on inclusion rather than rights. A small number of projects were identified which receive funding from bilateral and multilateral donors. These were AMSHeR, International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), and Stonewall. This rapid review focused on identifying donor support for LGBT+ rights, therefore, searches were limited to general databases and donor websites, utilising non-academic and donor literature. Much of the information comes directly from websites and these are footnoted throughout the report. Little was identified in the way of impact evaluation within the scope of this report. The majority of projects found through searches were non-governmental and so not the focus of this report.