Before the 2014 Winter Olympics kicked off in Sochi last week, many gay rights activists around the world had encouraged politicians and members of the public to boycott the Olympics, citing Russia’s maltreatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
Calls for a Sochi boycott came after Russia implemented several anti-gay laws in 2013, which violated both the Russian Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights. Under Russia’s gay propaganda laws, the promotion of “non-traditional” sexual relations to anyone under the age of 18 is prohibited.
The boycott wasn’t just directed at fans, but corporate Olympic sponsors such as Coca-Cola as well, after several LGBT activists and human rights groups expressed concern about the country’s “gay propaganda” laws.
Even President Barack Obama expressed concern about the issue, saying “I have no patience for countries that try to treat gays or lesbians or transgender persons in ways that intimidate them or are harmful to them.”
Unfortunately for Obama, his own country is engaging in the same types of anti-gay laws that Russia has on its books.
Specifically, there are eight states in the U.S. — Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and Utah — that forbid teachers in sexual health education classes from discussing gay and transgender issues, which includes sexual health and HIV/AIDS awareness in a positive light, or talked about at all.
US: Just as bad as Russia?
According to the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, what these laws essentially do is require teachers to “actively portray LGBT people in a negative or inaccurate way,” which is concerning for LGBT activists since “These statutes only serve to further stigmatize LGBT students by providing K-12 students false, misleading, or incomplete information about LGBT people,” GLSEN said.
For example, in Alabama, sexual health education classes “must emphasize, in a factual manner and from a public health perspective, that homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public and that homosexual conduct is a criminal offense under the laws of the state.”
In other words, children in Alabama are being taught that homsexual conduct is a criminal offense even though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2003 criminalizing private, consensual homosexual conduct was unconstitutional.
Students in South Carolina are not taught about any alternative sexual lifestyles, which includes homosexual relationships. However, students are taught briefly about sexually transmitted diseases that those in homosexual relationships can contract.
In Arizona, state law mandates that “no district shall include in its course of study instruction which … (1) promotes a homosexual lifestyle … (2) portrays homosexuality as a positive alternative lifestyle … (3) suggests that some methods of sex are safe methods of homosexual sex.”
“These laws foster an unsafe school atmosphere,” GLSEN said, pointing to a 2009 National School Climate Survey which found that “LGBT students in states with stigmatizing laws are more likely to hear homophobic remarks from school staff, are less likely to report incidents of harassment and assault to school staff, and are less likely to report having support from educators.
“Moreover, when incidents occur and educators do intervene, they do so less effectively in these states,” the group said.
In addition to the eight states that prohibit educators from discussing homosexuality, two states — South Dakota and Missouri — have laws prohibiting school districts from enacting policies that specifically work to prevent bullying due to a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
Look in the mirror
While the “no promo homo” bans in the U.S. are arguably less extreme than Russia’s ban, some say it seems hypocritical for the U.S. to call for an Olympic boycott over a human rights violation that exists in a similar format within its own borders.
But as Human Rights Watch pointed out in a report on the issue, many people around the globe have been caught a political conundrum since more than 70 countries have anti-gay laws that “expressly criminalize same-sex relations and are even more draconian than Russia’s ban on ‘propaganda’…”
In an opinion piece for the Washington Post, Yale University law professors Ian Ayres and William Eskridge wrote that before the U.S. continues to chastise Putin for implementing laws that violate a group of people’s human rights, the U.S. has to take the plank out of its own eye first, since “The underlying ideology of these statutes is the same: Everybody should be heterosexual, and homosexuality is per se bad.
“This ideology has never rested on any kind of evidence that homosexuality is a bad ‘choice’ that the state ought to discourage,” Ayres and Eskridge wrote. “The ideology is a prejudice-laden legacy of a fading era. In fact, the strategy is daffy: Even if homosexuality were a bad lifestyle choice, state laws are not an effective way to head off such a choice.”
The duo went on to say that the important lesson here is that when we see another violating the rights of a group of people, LGBT persons in this case, we can better see the “moral failings in ourselves.”
“It was revulsion toward Nazi Germany’s eugenics policy that, in part, caused U.S. legislatures and courts to renounce state sterilization programs,” Ayres and Eskridge said.
“Opposition to South African apartheid and the Soviet Union’s totalitarian regime generated greater national pressure for the Eisenhower administration and the Warren court to renounce apartheid in the American South.”
Time for change
While the U.S. still has some of these “stigmatizing” laws on the books, GLSEN pointed out that several anti-gay laws have also been repealed in the U.S., and efforts to pass new laws such as Tennessee’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill have been largely unsuccessful.
“For example, North Carolina and several other states repealed existing ‘no promo homo’ provisions in the process of revising their larger sexual health education laws.
“At the district level, the Anoka-Hennepin school district in Minnesota revised its Sexual Orientation Curriculum Policy, a similar law that applied to all school curriculum, after being sued by several students who claimed the school did little to address rampant bullying and harassment based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.”
But since these anti-gay laws exist in some states, LGBT activists, including Ayres and Eskridge, say that it’s time for the U.S. judicial system to repeal any remaining gay-stigmatizing statutes.
“Just as judges led the way against compulsory sterilization and racial-segregation laws, so they should subject anti-gay laws to critical scrutiny,” Ayres and Eskridge wrote.