946671

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BPI0010.1177/1369148120946671The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsEncarnacion

Special Issue Article

The British Journal of Politics and

The gay rights backlash: International Relations

2020, Vol. 22(4) 654­–665
© The Author(s) 2020
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Latin America

Omar G Encarnación

Abstract
This essay examines the conditions that enable a ‘gay rights backlash’ through a comparison of
the United States and Latin America. The United States, the cradle of the contemporary gay
rights movement, is the paradigmatic example of a gay rights backlash. By contrast, Latin America,
the most Catholic of regions, introduced gay rights at a faster pace than the United States
without much in the way of a backlash. Collectively, this analysis demonstrates that a gay rights
backlash hinges upon organisationally-rich ‘backlashers’ and an environment that is receptive to
homophobic messages, a point underscored by the American experience. But the Latin American
experience shows that the counter-framing to the backlash can minimise and even blunt the
effects of the backlash.

Keywords
gay backlash, gay marriage, hate crimes, homophobia, identity politics, LGBT rights

What enables a gay rights backlash and what makes it thrive? There are no easy answers
to these questions. After all, not all gay rights progress creates a backlash, and a gay rights
backlash can take place even in the absence of gay rights. Moreover, scholarly attention
to the term ‘backlash’ has been scant. Following Alter and Zürn (2018: 1), I posit the gay
rights backlash as the very model of ‘backlash politics’, defined as ‘a particular form of
political contestation with a retrograde objective as well as extraordinary goals and tactics
that has reached the threshold of altering public discourse’. They add that ‘retrograde
objectives often generate emotional appeals, including a rose-colored nostalgia and nega-
tive sentiments such as anger and resentment’. These analytical markers distinguish back-
lash from ordinary pluralist politics. Alter and Zürn also add threshold criteria for backlash
claims and frames to alter public discourse. In particular, they question whether triggers
are a necessary or sufficient condition for a backlash.
I show that the overarching objective of a gay rights backlash is to return society to a
time when homosexuality was viewed as a sin, if not a crime, and heterosexuality was

Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA

Corresponding author:
Omar G Encarnación, Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000, USA.
Email: [email protected]
Encarnación 655

upheld as the norm for everyone in society. To that end, gay rights ‘backlashers’ employ
rhetorical tools and political strategies that are norm-breaking and fuelled by resentment
over the loss of status. Moreover, I demonstrate that whether a gay rights backlash suc-
ceeds at altering public discourse, to say nothing of changing public policy or sentiment
about gay rights, something that some gay rights scholars have deemed a requirement for
backlash (Bishin et al., 2015), hinges on more than triggers. These outcomes also depend
on the organisational resources of the ‘backlashers’; the extent to which homophobic
messages resonate with the public; and, most of all, how gay rights activists frame their
struggle for equality. I explore these variables in light of the counterintuitive experiences
of the United States, which generated the most robust gay rights backlash of any democ-
racy, and Latin America, the most Catholic of regions, where gay rights erupted dramati-
cally without much in the way of a backlash.
As shown next, the American anti-gay rights movement enjoyed more organisational
resources and greater public resonance to homophobic messages than its counterpart in
Latin America. These factors enabled attacks on the American LGBT community that
were not only retrograde and nostalgic but also unprecedentedly coarse and cruel. But it
was the framing of the gay rights campaign that made the biggest difference between the
two cases. American gay rights activists adopted a legalistic framing to secure gay rights
anchored on the constitutional claim of equality under the law. Although a winning strat-
egy in the courts, this framing actually hardened opposition to gay rights. Latin American
gay rights activists, by contrast, ingeniously framed their struggle as a human rights
crusade. Grounded in a broader societal struggle for human rights, citizenship, and
democratisation, this framing simultaneously advanced gay rights and undercut opposi-
tion to them.

The very model of backlash politics

Between 1974 and 2009, more than 245 anti-gay ballot measures were put to the voters
across the United States with the intention of overturning or preventing gay rights
(Stone, 2012). The most notable of these measures were constitutional amendments that
succeeded in banning gay marriage in 32 states. Eleven of them were put on the ballot in
2004, with the intention of mobilising conservative voters in the hopes of aiding George
W. Bush’s re-election, including in the pivotal state of Ohio. According to Pew Research
Center (2006), the strategy likely worked. Ohio’s gay marriage ban won with 61% of the
vote, while Bush eked out a victory by only 51%, his smallest margin of victory in any
major state. Had Bush lost Ohio, he would not have been re-elected. No other democracy
begins to approximate this level of successful opposition to gay rights. According to
Adam (2003: 259), the ‘speed and success’ of laws and constitutional amendments
enacted in the United States to ban gay marriage show ‘the earmarks of a moral panic’
that ‘is exceptional at the world stage’.
Fronting the campaign against gay marriage was the National Organization for
Marriage (NOM), a paradigmatic backlash movement. NOM came to national promi-
nence in 2008, with California’s Proposition 8, the most epic of gay marriage battles. A
heartbreaking loss for the LGBT community, Proposition 8 amended California’s consti-
tution to ban gay marriage. In so doing, the amendment sent some 20,000 Californian gay
marriages into legal limbo. In 2009, the California Supreme Court declared Proposition 8
constitutional but upheld the legality of the gay marriages already conducted in California.
In 2013, in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the US Supreme Court invalidated the amendment.
656 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 22(4)

An unabashedly retrograde and nostalgic message anchored NOM’s crusade: that

children need a mom and a dad, and that gay marriage makes a married mom and dad
dispensable. The organisation also stressed that being against gay marriage is not anti-
gay, it is just pro-marriage. These arguments were often couched in language intended to
reassure people of faith that they were not homophobes. NOM President Maggie
Gallagher (2010: 1) said,

Gay marriage advocates believe there isn’t any difference between two men in a sexual union
and a husband and wife, and those of us who see this difference are blinded by hatred and
prejudice. They delegitimize opponents, brand us as haters, and then try to strip us of our rights.

But it was NOM’s tactics that raised eyebrows. NOM exploited Californians’ most
irrational fears about homosexuals and children. A notorious NOM television advertise-
ment made for the Proposition 8 campaign featured two gay fathers being quizzed about
marriage and reproduction by their daughter; ‘the takeaway, of course, is that this faux-
family is twisting the mind and morals of their child with perverse ideas about marriage
and love’ (Stern, 2014). Race-baiting was another infamous NOM tactic. NOM tried ‘to
drive a wedge between gays and blacks by publicizing prominent black leaders’ opposi-
tion to marriage equality and goading members of the LGBT community into denouncing
them as bigots’ (Arana, 2012: 1). The group also recruited ‘glamorous young Latino and
Latina leaders’ from the entertainment and sports worlds willing to publicly oppose gay
marriage to entice ‘resentment between key Democratic constituencies in order to make
supporting marriage equality toxic for politicians’ (Arana, 2012: 1).

Rich resources and strong resonance

NOM’s successful anti-gay marriage campaign drew upon decades of anti-gay rights
activism by the ‘Christian Right’. This activism rose in the early 1970s, in the wake of the
1969 Stonewall Riots, which launched the gay liberation movement. From the onset, the
Christian Right employed a public discourse that was at once retrograde and designed to
keep homosexuals in the margins of society. Conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, famous
for spearheading the campaign that defeated the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), led the
way by drawing on ‘longstanding opposition to racial integration, interracial marriage,
and mixed-race families’ to link the ERA with the dangers of ‘sex mixing, homosexual
marriage, and the threat of homosexual school teachers’ (Frank, 2016).
Schlafly’s attack on homosexuality was the opening act for ‘Save Our Children’, a norm-
busting extravaganza of conspiracy theories, falsehoods, and insults organised by singer
and orange juice brand spokesperson Anita Bryant. It succeeded in repealing an ordinance
enacted by Dade County, Florida, in 1977, banning discrimination in housing, employment,
and public accommodation on the basis of sexual orientation. According to The Advocate
(Ball, 2012: 1), Bryant, a ‘born-again Baptist’, conducted ‘an antigay crusade driven by a
vitriolic rhetoric that had never been heard before and has rarely been matched since’.
During the repeal campaign, she referred to homosexuals as ‘garbage’ and published news-
paper ads contending that ‘the recruitment of children is absolutely necessary for the sur-
vival and growth of homosexuality – since homosexuals cannot reproduce, they must
recruit, they must freshen their ranks’ (Ball, 2012: 1).
Jerry Falwell, a Southern Baptist televangelist, and the founder of the Moral Majority,
took Save Our Children national. Established in 1979, the Moral Majority is credited with
Encarnación 657

incorporating the Christian Right into the Republican Party (Winters, 2012). A core con-
cern for Falwell was protecting the family from what he perceived to be a multi-faceted
attack by abortionists, feminists, and homosexuals. In his manifesto, Listen, America!,
Falwell (1980: 183) wrote that ‘Homosexuality is Satan’s diabolical attack upon the fam-
ily, God’s order in creation’. Elsewhere, Falwell opined that ‘Homosexuals are not a
minority any more than murderers, rapists, or other sinners are a minority’ (Banwart,
2013: 146).
During the 1980s and 1990s, as the gay rights movement gained momentum, in no
small measure because of the spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, a second wave of ‘fam-
ily values’ organisations began to gain national prominence. Among them were the
Family Research Council, the Family Research Institute, the American Family
Association, Focus on the Family, and the Traditional Values Coalition. Like the Moral
Majority, these new organisations were laser-focused on the LGBT community. But they
were less keen to use religious language to condemn homosexuals than to practice what
Nussbaum (2010: xiv) has referred to as ‘the politics of disgust’. This politics consisted
of ‘depicting the sexual practices of lesbians and especially gay men as vile and revolt-
ing’, which in turn opened room for the argument that such practices worked to ‘contami-
nate and defile society, producing decay and degeneration’ (Nussbaum, 2010: xiv). To the
extent to which this mission succeeded, it became easier for society to support legal dis-
crimination against homosexuals and their exclusion from the public sphere. This strate-
gising explains why the Southern Poverty Law Center labelled many of these new anti-gay
rights organisations as ‘hate groups’.
The Gay Agenda, a 1992 film, is a telling example of the politics of disgust. Even at a
time when the majority of Americans disapproved of homosexuality, the film was deemed
too controversial to be televised. Predictably, the film exposed a ‘hidden’ homosexual
agenda to recruit children and destroy the moral fabric of America. But it was also an
indictment on homosexual sex. The film features an interview with psychologist Paul
Cameron, the head of the Family Research Institute, whose research has been ‘denounced
as mere propaganda masquerading as science’ (Nussbaum, 2010: 6). Among the ‘facts’
cited by Cameron in the film is that ‘75 percent of gay men regularly digest fecal material’
and that ‘homosexuality is so perverse as to cause its practitioners to kill, and be killed
disproportionately’ (Herman, 1997: 78). For students of the Christian Right, the film’s
themes of ‘disease and seduction’ are ‘strongly reminiscent of older, anti-Semitic dis-
course’, since ‘Jews historically were associated with disease, filth, urban degeneration,
and child stealing’ (Herman, 1997: 79).
NOM’s anti-gay marriage activism also found broad resonance among ordinary
Americans. For one thing, it was in sync with the ‘criminalization of LGBT people in the
United States’ (Mogul et al., 2011). As recently as 1986, the US Supreme Court upheld
the constitutionality of sodomy laws in Bowers v. Hardwick; this decision was not reversed
until 2003, with Lawrence v. Texas, making the United States one of the last Western
nations to de-criminalise homosexuality. The ban on gay marriage was also in keeping
with other famous ‘gay bans’ in American history, such as President Eisenhower’s 1953
executive order banning ‘perverts’ from working in the federal government and ‘Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell’, the 1993 law that prevented gays and lesbians from serving in the mili-
tary unless they kept their sexuality a secret. By the time that law was voided, in 2011,
more than 10,000 gays and lesbians had been expelled from the armed forces.
The campaign to ban gay marriage also benefitted from prevailing public sentiments
towards homosexuals and gay rights. Gallup’s (2019) poll on the question ‘Do you think
658 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 22(4)

gay and lesbian relations between consenting adults should or should not be legal?’
reveals that as recently as 2006, the percentage of Americans answering yes to that ques-
tion was only 49% (it is 73% today), and 32% in 1987. As for support for gay marriage,
it was only in 2012 that support for it among Americans crossed the 50% threshold. As
recently as 2009, 57% of Americans were opposed to gay marriage (Gallup, 2009). Little
wonder that in many states, especially in the South, the margin of victory for anti-gay
marriage referenda was sky-high: 86% in Mississippi, 81% in Alabama, 78% in South
Carolina, 76% in Georgia, and 75% in Arkansas.

Gay rights without a backlash?

For much of the 1970s and 1980s there was no need for a US-style anti-gay rights move-
ment in Latin America. The military dictatorships that ruled much of Latin America dur-
ing the Cold War years had either effectively eradicated the gay liberation movements
that arose in the early 1970s inspired by the Stonewall Riots, or prevented them from
rising in the first place. This crackdown made Latin America the most ‘unfriendly, dan-
gerous, and potentially lethal’ place for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in
the world (Encarnación, 2016a). However, even after the return of democracy to much of
Latin America during the 1980s, the government in much of the region, in keeping with
tradition, continued to defer to Catholic leaders on matters related to homosexuality,
including the legalisation of gay rights organisations. This deference made gay rights
activism in Latin America an uphill struggle through the 1990s. LGBT organisations in
Argentina, the country with the longest and richest history of gay rights activism in Latin
America, did not gain legality until 1991.
With legality at hand, LGBT organisations across Latin America began to advocate for
rights, including state recognition of same-sex relationships. The first victory came in
1996, when Buenos Aires adopted a new city charter that banned anti-gay discrimination.
It led to a same-sex civil union law for the residents of the Argentine capital in 2002. In
2009, Mexico City officials made the Mexican capital the first locality in Latin America
to legalise gay marriage. Argentina’s historic 2010 gay marriage law made that country
the first in the region to legalise gay marriage nationwide. Inspired by Spain’s 2005 gay
marriage law – which among other things revealed to the Argentines that it was possible
to overcome Catholic opposition to gay marriage – the Argentine law made no distinction
in the rights granted to homosexual and heterosexual couples, including adoption.
Argentina’s example was quickly followed by Uruguay, Colombia, and Brazil, making
Latin America one of the global engines of the marriage equality movement (Díez, 2015).
Following the lead of the Spanish Catholic Church, Latin American Catholic leaders
declared gay marriage ‘a threat to the common good’ and ‘destructive to the relationship
between marriage and procreation’ (Encarnación, 2020: 72). The Catholic hierarchy also
made it known that it expected Catholic legislators to oppose gay marriage, and in at least
one country, Mexico, it threatened any legislator voting in favour of gay marriage with
excommunication (Encarnación, 2016b: 58). But there was no coordinated campaign in
Latin America to demonise homosexuals and no serious attempt to ban gay marriage by
legal action (Corrales, 2020).
Brazil is a possible exception. The Brazilian Catholic Church, the world’s largest, and,
arguably, the most progressive (it was in Brazil where the progressive Liberation Theology
movement left its deepest mark), sat out the war over gay rights, including gay marriage.
But a growing and politically influential Brazilian Evangelical movement, heavily
Encarnación 659

influenced by its American counterpart, happily picked up the fight (Corrales, 2018). Since
the early 2000s, the ‘Evangelical bloc’ has tried with mixed success to thwart the advances
of the gay rights movement. It stopped the passage of bills to legalise same-sex civil unions,
to ban anti-gay discrimination, and to fight homophobia in public schools. But it was less
successful in enacting its own priorities, such as bills to define marriage as the exclusive
union of one man and one woman, to create a national holiday to celebrate a ‘hetero-pride
day’, and to ban ‘Christ-phobia’, or the desecration of Christian symbols (a ban that targeted
Brazilian gay pride parades, which routinely feature floats that mix sexual and religious
imagery). All of these bills fizzled out; most of them were not even brought up to a vote.

Poor resources and weak resonance

Unlike the Christian Right, Latin American Catholic leaders did not invest in organisa-
tions to counter the rise of gay rights. Catholic leaders also lacked the expertise in fighting
the gay rights movement that the American Christian Right had honed for decades, despite
assistance from US groups. As noted by Corrales (2018), ‘American evangelicals coach
their counterparts in Latin America on how to court parties, become lobbyists and fight
gay marriage’. But this interference by the Americans could not deliver results fast
enough because, among other reasons, of a lack of tradition in Latin America of organised
political lobbying by religious organisations.
A deep crisis of moral authority, ensuing from an association with bloodthirsty mili-
tary dictatorships during the Cold War, further complicated the Church’s response to gay
rights. The situation was most acute in Argentina, where the Church was complicit in the
disappearance of thousands of political dissidents. For this complicity, Argentine Catholic
clergy have been prosecuted, and the Argentine Conference of Bishops was forced to
apologise to the nation in 1995. Sex and child abuse scandals further undercut the ability
of Church officials to criticise homosexuals. The scandals all but blunted any attempt by
Church leaders to demonise homosexuals as criminals and predators, as they themselves
were facing similar accusations. In 2010, for instance, as the fight over marriage rights for
gay couples was heating up in Brazil, Monsignor Luiz Marques Barbosa of the diocese of
São Paolo was fighting allegations of paedophilia.
History and culture also limited the use of vitriolic rhetoric against the LGBT com-
munity. Despite Latin America’s famous Macho culture, the region lacks America’s ugly
history of legal discrimination against homosexuals. Following France, many Latin
American countries de-criminalised homosexuality in the 19th century: Brazil in 1830,
Peru in 1836, Mexico in 1872, and Argentina in 1887. This early liberalism on the issue
of homosexuality did not mean that homosexuals in Latin America were free from dis-
crimination – they could still be prosecuted on indecency charges. But in contrast to the
United States, homosexuals in Latin America would be spared a regime of discriminatory
laws, such as laws barring homosexuals from the government and the military.
Latin American Catholics are also more socially progressive than their reputation
would suggest. According to Pew Research Center (2013), Latin American Catholics are
much less morally opposed to abortion, homosexuality, use of recreational drugs, and
drinking alcohol than Latin American Protestants. Latin America is also more secular
than many people presume to be the case. While 56% of Americans consider religion to
be a central aspect of their lives, only 44% of Mexicans feel the same; 43% for Argentines,
41% for Chileans, and 28% for Uruguayans (Pew Research Center, 2014). Little wonder
that by the time the Argentine Congress began debating the legalisation of gay marriage,
in 2010, support for gay marriage approached 70% (Dollar, 2010).
660 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 22(4)

Not surprisingly, the attacks that individual Catholic leaders launched on the LGBT
community that could be thought of as extraordinary spectacularly backfired on them.
After Mexico City enacted a gay marriage bill – a decision upheld by Mexico’s Supreme
Court – Archbishop of Guadalajara Juan Sandoval Íñiguez accused Mexico City Mayor
Marcelo Ebrard of bribing the justices. Ebrard filed a defamation suit against the Church
and publicly chastised Sandoval Íñiguez for not grasping that ‘We live in a secular state,
and in it, whether we like it or not, the rule of law prevails’ (Encarnación, 2016b: 58). The
Mexican Supreme Court censured Sandoval Íñiguez in a unanimous decision supported
even by the justices who had dissented on the gay marriage decision.
In Argentina, Buenos Aires Archbishop Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (the future Pope
Francis) criticised gay marriage in a private letter to the Carmelite Sisters. ‘This is not a
mere political project – this is an attack on God’s plan. This is a move by the father of all
lies intended to confuse and mislead the children of God’, he wrote (Encarnación, 2016b:
139). After the letter was leaked to the press, it ‘triggered strong reactions by the press and
the legislators’ and ‘caused some citizens and politicians who formerly identified with the
Church’s official stance to distance themselves from it’ (Vaggione, 2011: 943). The harsh-
est response came from President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who said that talk of
‘God being at war with homosexuals’ and gay marriage being the ‘Devil’s project’ were
‘reminiscent of the Crusades and the Inquisition’ (Encarnación, 2016b: 58).

Contrasting gay rights campaigns

Ultimately, however, the most determinative variable shaping the different dynamics of
the gay rights backlash in the United States and Latin America was the framing of the gay
rights campaign. From its inception, the American campaign for gay rights was framed as
a ‘civil rights struggle’ anchored on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment
of the US Constitution (Wolfson, 2004). Although ultimately victorious at the courts, this
framing was not without unintentional consequences, including intensifying opposition
to gay rights. For one thing, as Klarman (2012) has noted, the heavy reliance by American
gay rights activists on litigation to advance gay rights meant that every gay rights victory
in the United States was met by a dramatic political backlash.
After the Hawaiian Supreme Court ruled, in 1993, that there was no compelling reason
for barring homosexual couples from marriage, the Christian Right and its political allies
in the US Congress enacted the ‘Defense of Marriage Act’, or DOMA. This 1996 law
barred the federal government from recognising gay marriages in states where those mar-
riages were already legal. The Hawaii decision also triggered a failed attempt to amend
the US Constitution to define marriage as ‘the exclusive union of a male and a female’.
This attempt to write discrimination into the Constitution suggested the length to which
opponents of gay rights were willing to go to undermine gay rights.
Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 US Supreme Court ruling that struck down all remaining
sodomy laws in the United States, triggered the anti-gay marriage movement. According
to Moscowitz (2013: 33),

Fearing that Lawrence might pave the way for legalizing more rights for gays and lesbian
citizens (including marriage), conservative groups in a retaliatory and preventive move began to
push state-by-state for constitutional amendments that would shut the door on marriage equality
as much as possible. Conservative groups sensed that they could use the gay marriage controversy
for political gain, mobilize the public around the issue, and fire up their core base.
Encarnación 661

In a clear sign of backlash, Lawrence also depressed public support for gay rights. In July,
just one month after the ruling was announced, public support for legalising homosexual
sex plummeted to 48%, down from a comfortable 60% in Gallup’s May survey for the
same year (Gallup, 2019).
After the US Supreme Court, in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), legalised gay marriage,
the Christian Right responded with ‘religious freedom acts’. These laws allow private
businesses to discriminate against LGBT people as long as that discrimination is based on
sincerely held religious beliefs. Championed by Liberty Counsel and The Alliance
Defending Freedom, or ADF, the religious freedom movement claims that gay rights are
an infringement on the civil rights of Christians, especially freedom of religion and
speech. The most famous case of ‘Christian victimization’ is Kim Davis, a clerk from
Kentucky who refused to issue marriage certificates to same-sex couples citing her reli-
gious views. For this action, which was reminiscent of the opposition to integration in the
American South, Davis was found in contempt of the law and jailed for 5 days. Another
notable case is Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker who refused to sell a wedding cake to a gay
couple, prompting a fine from the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Backed by the
ADF, Phillips took his case all the way to the US Supreme Court, which in 2018 ruled in
his favour. But the ruling was very narrow; it simply stated that Phillips’ religious beliefs
had been disrespected. No violation of freedom of speech was found.
Just as important is that the American gay rights campaign lacked ambition and vision
to advance LGBT equality and to counter the vitriolic rhetoric of the anti-gay rights
movement (Encarnación, 2020). For instance, to the extent to which citizenship – under-
stood not only as legal rights but also as a sense of belonging to a national community –
became part of the national conversation about gay marriage, it was to stress how
extending marriage rights and responsibilities to homosexuals would not upset prevailing
notions of citizenship. Instead, gay marriage was portrayed by gay rights activists as a
mere vehicle for shoring up traditional values, for stabilising homosexual households
(Sullivan, 1989), and even for civilising gay males by taming their sexuality (Eskridge,
1996). Such arguments were at the heart of what came to be known as ‘the conservative
case for gay marriage’ (Sullivan, 1989).
Not surprisingly, despite its success, critics broadly panned the US gay marriage cam-
paign. Mumford (2005: 524) wrote, ‘I feel alternately disappointed and angered at the
narrowness of the vision that the movement and its leaders feel compelled to offer us’.
According to Shaiko (2007: 95),

LGBT organizations have little in the way of a proactive agenda to counter the efforts of the
religious conservatives and family values groups across the country. Unless and until
movement activists and leaders are willing to engage their opponents in a spirited debate
about the place of gays and lesbians in our society, they are destined, at least for the next few
decades, to remain second-class citizens.

Franke (2019: 1), writing after gay marriage was legalised by the US Supreme Court,
argued that ‘The movement for LGBTQ rights has been domesticated, its goals refocused
on marriage and family’.

A human rights framing

Latin America’s gay rights campaign was broadly framed as a ‘human rights crusade’
anchored on the view that gay rights find their legitimacy not in domestic civil laws but
662 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 22(4)

in universal human rights principles. The campaign emphasised not how gay rights would
change gay lives but rather how gay rights would transform society as a whole by advanc-
ing human rights and deepening democracy. Such an ambitious and idealistic framing had
many mutually reinforcing effects: it inspired the LGBT community, it built support for
gay rights within civil society and across the political spectrum, and it crippled the capac-
ity of the Catholic Church to fight back against gay rights.
Argentina set the tone for Latin America. ‘The freedom of sexuality is a basic human
right’ was the first slogan of the Comunidad Homosexual Argentina, or CHA, a gay rights
organisation that emerged during the democratic transition of 1983 (Encarnación, 2016b:
188). This slogan signalled a radical interpretation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, which is mum on the issue of sexual orientation. It also foreshadowed the
coming of the idea that ‘gay rights are human rights’ which became popular in interna-
tional gay politics during the 1990s. Gay rights groups also branded themselves as human
rights organisations and embraced the playbook of the human rights movement with the
intention of connecting their activism to the larger conversation about the human rights
abuses of the infamous ‘Dirty War’ (1976–1983).
In 1984, around the time when the Argentine military was on trial for crimes against
humanity (the first for a Latin American nation), CHA leaders ran an advertisement in
the daily Clarín that read, ‘With discrimination and repression there is no democracy’
(Encarnación, 2016b: 114). It argued that ‘there will never be a true democracy if soci-
ety permits the existence of marginalized sectors and the methods of repression are still
in place’. It concluded by noting that ‘more than 1.5 million Argentine gays are preoc-
cupied with the national situation and that they experienced with the rest of the nation
the hard years of dictatorial rule’. The point of the advertisement was to question the
democracy of the period in light of the continuing human rights abuses against the
LGBT community.
Gay rights activists also capitalised on escraches, or public shaming, a quintessential
Argentine human rights strategy, to pressure politicians into including some 400 homo-
sexuals believed to have been killed during the Dirty War (most of them members of the
Argentine Gay Liberation Front) in the official report of the National Commission on the
Disappeared. They ultimately failed, but this defeat birthed the claim that ‘homosexuals
are the disappeared among the disappeared’, a useful rhetorical tool for highlighting state
violence against homosexuals during the Dirty War (Encarnación, 2016b: 92). Finally,
gay rights activists successfully lobbied for the incorporation of the 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights into the Argentine Constitution, which gave human rights
the weight of constitutional law.
When campaigning for gay marriage, gay rights activists embraced the term ‘egalitar-
ian marriage’ to suggest the desire to open the institution of marriage to everyone. They
also stressed that their goal was not marriage rights but rather ‘full citizenship’. Both
stances aimed to garner support for gay marriage from the most important sectors of
Argentine civil society – especially the human rights community and the trade union
movement. The emphasis on full citizenship, in particular, ensured that the legalisation of
gay marriage would serve as a platform for the expansion of gay rights beyond same-sex
marriage; especially a gender identity law, reproductive rights for same-sex couples, and
a national ban on ‘gay conversion’ therapy.
In an environment of broad recognition of gay rights as human rights, it is not surpris-
ing that during the debate over gay marriage, some clergy came out in favour of it. They
argued that ‘Jesus never condemned nor mentioned homosexuality’ and ‘that all biblical
Encarnación 663

revelation point toward focusing on love without any type of exclusion’ (Vaggione, 2011:
944). Such pronouncements by the progressive Catholic clergy allowed legislators and
even deeply religious Christians ‘to think, define, and act differently from what the eccle-
siastical hierarchy proposes by constructing Catholicism as a heterogeneous tradition
with respect to sexuality’ (Vaggione, 2011: 945). Nor it is surprising that once the notion
of gay rights as human rights entered the political mainstream that gay rights gained sup-
port across the political spectrum. Gay marriage was legislated by the National Congress
and with bipartisan support.
Among those championing gay marriage as a human rights matter was President
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, whose party, the Justicialista Party, has a long history of
hostility towards homosexuals. When conservative legislators, in a desperate attempt to
derail gay marriage, suggested that Argentina follow the American example of putting
gay marriage to a popular vote, she retorted that ‘Leaving the fate of the rights of a minor-
ity to the whims of the majority was unbecoming of a democratic society’ (Encarnación,
2016b: 145). Upon signing the gay marriage law, she argued that the law did not belong
to any group in particular but rather to society itself, ‘as part of a progression toward more
equality, diversity and pluralism’ (Encarnación, 2016b: 148).

Conclusion
This study’s findings highlight the need to unpack the counter-framing to the backlash in
determining whether a backlash manages to alter public discourse and reverse public
policy and opinion about gay rights. In so going, the study broadly underscores the promi-
nence of ‘framing’ strategies in the social movement literature (Buechler, 1993). By
structuring their demands as a struggle for human rights, democracy, and citizenship,
Latin American gay rights movements were able to simultaneously motivate their follow-
ers, build societal support for their cause, and demobilise their foes.
Another key insight from this study is that an effective counter-framing to a gay rights
backlash could well be a historical contingency. The human rights framing of Latin
America’s gay rights campaign was possible because of the region’s rich history with
human rights. This history gave Latin American gay rights activists unusual access to the
language and strategies of the human rights movement. It also gave resonance to the
activists’ struggles. There is no significant history of American social movements avail-
ing themselves of human rights to advance their goals, in no small measure because of the
success of conservatives in depicting human rights as foreign or un-American.
Finally, this study provides a glimpse into the dark side of American democracy. The
vitriolic language used by the Christian Right to dehumanise homosexuals in order to
justify denying them their civil rights is beyond disheartening. And tactics like gay mar-
riage referenda, promoted as an exercise in democracy by ‘letting the people decide’
made a mockery of democracy by allowing the majority decide the fate of the rights of a
vulnerable minority. These indignities are a stain on American democracy that recent gay
rights victories cannot erase.

Funding
Support for this research was made possible by a grant from the Bard College Research Council.

ORCID iD
Omar G Encarnación https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3238-805X
664 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 22(4)

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