With Arms Wide Shut: Threat Perception, Norm Reception, and Mobilized Resistance to LGBT Rights

Abstract

This article utilizes original survey and interview data to explore why norms governing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights mobilize an active resistance in some cases and not in others. Based on a comparison of Poland and Slovenia, this article shows that differing perceptions of threat define the way international norms are received in distinct domestic realms. Threat perception is heightened in cases where religion is historically embedded in the essence of the popular nation. In Poland, the Catholic Church created a role for itself as a symbol of the nation. There, the domestic opposition succeeded in framing a narrative that linked LGBT rights to external forces threatening national values. By contrast, the Catholic Church in Slovenia could neither maintain nor (re-)establish similarly strong ties to the popular nation, stifling the opposition's ability to mobilize a robust popular resistance. Whether resistance is effectual, however, is a related but separate question. The data suggest that resistance produced in high-threat contexts can be self-defeating in that it enhances the salience of the norm in the domestic setting.

Notes

By “Church,” I simply refer to the dominant religious institution, all of which happen to be Christian in the EU.

In 2011, I sent an online survey to one expert at each of the 291 transnational LGBT organizations that my research has identified in the 47 Council of Europe countries (Ayoub 2013b). Of the organizations surveyed, 180 responded, bringing the response rate to 62 percent—a high yield for organizational surveys (Baruch and Holtom 2008).

“We can best understand [societal security] by studying the processes whereby a group comes to perceive its identity as threatened, when it starts to act in a security mode on this basis, and what behavior this triggers. Societal security is about situations when societies perceive a threat in identity terms” (Waever 1993: 23). Social movement scholars have looked at how a collective threat can create opportunities for group identity and subsequent mobilization (Zepeda-Millan 2014a, 2014b) or repression (Ayoub 2010), as well as how countermovements interact with and play off of each other (Fetner 2008; Dorf and Tarrow 2014). Opening opportunities for one group (in this case LGBT actors) that offend influential actors may lead to counterprotest. Here, I look at domestic responses to the salience of LGBT norms and demonstrate how a perceived threat in the domestic arena to “external” norms mobilizes opposition.

Among scholars that challenged the secularization argument, Berger (1993) and Casanova (1994) offer a nuanced argument that explores the varied root factors of religious demise and revival across contexts. As Graff (2010: 601)—alongside Chetaille (2011)—has demonstrated so well, the instrumentalization and politicization of homophobia in Poland is not just about religious morality, instead it is about “a discourse of wounded pride characteristic of the postaccession period.… At stake are not the actual attitudes of Poland's citizens toward sexual freedom but the position of Poland as a state and a nation.” In a comparative perspective, O’Dwyer and Schwartz's (2010) excellent study on party politics has also emphasized that illiberal LGBT politics are a product of nationalism in Latvia and Poland.

In 1986, Pope John Paul II issued his first official statement on homosexuality, written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI): “[Homosexuality is a] tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder. Therefore special concern…should be directed to those who have this condition, lest they be led to believe that the living out of this orientation…is a morally acceptable option. It is not” (Ratzinger 1986: para. 3).

Poland is a case in which religion has resonated fundamentally in people's lives, arguably more so than any other case in Europe. The legacy of Yugoslavia's (and particularly Slovenia's) openness to the West is a testament for the effect of transnational channels on the situation there. Travel, experimentation, and innovation were more developed in Slovenia compared to other states in the region during the communist period.

Spain and Portugal have among the most far-reaching legal protections and rights for LGBT minorities in Europe (including marriage rights), and societal attitudes have become more favorable since 1990 (over 60 percent positive change).

Wald (2013) emphasizes the powerful role of the Greek Orthodox Church in both the Greek state and nation, tracing its influence back to four centuries of Ottoman occupation. LGBT activists referred to Italy as the “last bastion” of the Vatican (Personal interview, European Forum of LGBT Christian Groups, Co-President, October 29, 2010). Finally, the conflict in Ireland and N. Ireland sustains religion as a beacon of national identity, the result being initially sluggish protections for sexual minorities (N. Ireland decriminalized homosexuality 15 years after Great Britain, after legal intervention based on European Court of Human Rights principles).

Respondents who selected “10”, on a 10-point scale of homosexuality never being justifiable.

Beyond self-identification, Poles are far more likely to attend religious services. In 1990, 71 percent of Slovenes considered themselves adherent to the Catholic faith. Before WWII, 97 percent of Slovenes identified as Catholic.

Translated from the Italian print version.

More recently there has been some use of national symbols (such as Slovenian flags) in protest imagery (cf. Kuhar 2011a), especially surrounding the anti-Family Code referendum. That said, a rhetoric, drawing on pseudo-scientific data to say that adoption and same-sex unions are detrimental to the well-being of children, remains dominant.

Many LGBT activists were disappointed with the changes that the government had made preceding the final version of the bill (Personal interview, Lesbian Section SKUC-LL, Coordinator, October 28, 2010). The center-right government seized the opportunity to pass a watered down version of the bill, while making some concessions to gays and lesbians, appearing “progressive and tolerant” in light of the recent EU accession (Kuhar 2011a: 34).

To access photographic evidence of the link, see http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/5145/24kul.jpg.

In 2012, a partnership bill had a chance in Parliament but then lost by 17 votes (228 to 211). Despite unleashing a typically harsh homophobic rhetoric in Parliament, the bill's near passage exemplifies a shift in LGBT politics.

“Article 25…specifies that ‘relations between the Republic of Poland and the Roman Catholic Church shall be determined by [the] international treaty concluded with the Holy See, and by statute’” (Burns 2009: 167).

Furthermore, while most of Polish society backed accession, the Church's staunchly supportive agrarian constituency opposed the EU's Common Agriculture Policy.

The frame of the LGBT actors was exactly the reverse. Take, for example, the fliers for a pride parade in Poznan in 2011 that read: “Equality in Europe, Equality in Poland.”

Translated from the Polish.

Translated from the Polish.

Translated from the Slovenian.

The argument here echoes an element of “radical flank theory” that movements generate negative attention when they employ an extreme repertoire that can, in turn, cast the groups from which they are distinguishing themselves in a more favorable light (Minkoff 1994). Research has shown that disruptive countermovement activity, including violence aimed at opposing demonstrators, can lead to favorable policy outcomes and enhance societal sympathies for the movement (McAdam and Su 2002).

See also O’Dwyer's (2012: 344–348) discussion of the role of anti-LGBT backlash in Poland, whose findings corroborate those of my survey.

According to the president of KPH, “Many American Christian groups are active in Africa and elsewhere, but in Europe I think they no longer believe [having an impact] is possible” (Personal interview, KPH, President, November 16, 2011).