I’m more exposed to American conservatism. And even here I barely understand it. I used to be Christian, but I left the religion before I realized I was bi, and before I knew genderfluidity and trans people existed.

I guess I’d have to know why individual religious groups, countries, cities,(etc…) have anti-LGBTQ beliefs. Maybe there are no blanket statements that properly address it for the entire world.

  • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    31
    ·
    9 months ago

    A lot of conservative ideology is to be nostalgic for an idealised version of past hierarchies. If we could just return to the social relations of the good old days, all the problems of present society would be solved. If your culture did not traditionally accept openly queer people, the presence of LGBTQ people becomes a problem to be solved in the reactionary mind.

    One of the other important “traditional” hierarchies to most conservatives is that of gender which can explain the rage many of them feel towards queer people, especially against trans women, who are seen as subverting gender roles.

    Conservatives don’t have to be openly homophobic though and societies can develop in ways that produced superficially pro-LGBT reactionaries. Nordic societies are less tolerant of open homophobia than many other places and anti-LGBT sentiment doesn’t translate into political power.

    Instead the reactionaries there have adopted what can best be described as rainbow racism. Although they drag their heels whenever anyone talks of expanding them, the conservatives there have adopted a superficial support for LGBTQ rights but have done so in a reactionary way where being accepting of queer people is added to the list of virtues that makes the civilised Aryans superior to the savages of “the jungle”.

  • SteamedHamberder [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    27
    ·
    9 months ago

    The cis-het “nuclear family” with paterfamilias as petty dictator, sex as procreative and pleasurable for the male partner rather than mutually pleasurable is inherently reactionary. Likely quite rare throughout human history too. This idealized version of sexuality stands in opposition to queer expressions of all kinds.

    • EllenKelly [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      9 months ago

      following this, OP could read Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors, there’s free copies online, I think you can buy a hardcopy for $14

      it’s an ‘easy’ read, and it brings a lot of the Origin Of the Family Private Property and the State, which is was a bit of a slog (though essential reading imo)

  • Kaplya [none/use name]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    Having grown up and lived in a few countries across Asia during my youth, and even taken part in helping with the activism organized by local social democratic parties in the late 2000s, I can only give my personal impressions on how things had changed in the region, mostly through interacting with the older generations (leftists and otherwise).

    By the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new wave of young Western-educated professional class began to return to their home countries, brought back new Western liberal ideas to otherwise traditionally conservative societies and vowing to reform their home countries and transition into an advanced economy.

    These people would form new centrist neoliberal political parties and fashioning the ideology as the Third Way politics (which was pushed by Clintonite Democrats in the US but especially hard by the Blairite New Labour Party in the UK, which won them the historic landslide election on May Day, 1997). The idea is that they are not your traditional left or right wing parties, but represented the third “middle of the road” way that transcended the traditional left-right divide.

    The main thrust of these new centrist liberal politics focused on fighting corruption and bringing social justice and technocracy to reform a society already falling behind the times. You see, the reason that our country is poor and underdeveloped is not because of capitalism and imperialism, but because our right-wing leaders are corrupt and our way of thinking is outdated. We can all become part of the advanced countries we see in the West, we just need to fight corruption and adopt modern Western liberal values.

    Immediately, this was already splitting the working class votes against the more established left wing parties. More than that, younger people are generally more progressive and they are naturally attracted to such new ideas, so these younger Western-educated professional class also began to take over the youth wing of leftist parties as well, often pitting against the older generation party members, who saw their takeover as hostile and an overemphasis on social justice rather than the class struggle they had been fighting for their entire lives, a path they think is doomed to fail. Often the reformism is far from radical and even liberal in nature (i.e. anti-labor), which would allow foreign capitalist powers to easily maneuver into the domestic market and destroy whatever hard-earned worker’s rights they had fought for over the years.

    This represented a new and perhaps even more effective means of spreading neoliberal ideology across the world, not by employing right wing paramilitary death squads to coup left wing governments (though it still happens), but through an ideological indoctrination of the overseas students who came to study in Western institutions, who would then bring the seeds back to their home countries and allow it to germinate there.

    A couple things to note here: first, when we’re talking about the 1990s and early 2000s, it bears to remember that most people had already become disillusioned with socialism and communism as an alternative system to capitalism. The USSR had fallen, all the post-Soviet states had already opened up to liberal reforms, North Korea was undergoing a severe famine, China wasn’t even something that resembles a strong economy yet. The resurgence of socialist and communist ideas among the youth is more recent trend than you think, not just in the West but across the Global South as well.

    Second, while even the West had yet to fully accept what we take for granted as progressive values today, like the LGBT movements as mainstream, the push was already happening in those countries and their ideas were being carried back by Western-educated students.

    However, this new wave of centrist or left-leaning movements would soon fail to make a clear material impact on the society. In some countries, the right-wing governments were able to exploit the conservatism of the society to pit the voters against the centrist parties. In others, the victory of neoliberal parties (and social democratic parties with neoliberal platforms) led to even worse material outcome for the vast majority of the people. In almost every case, liberal reform has invariably been a failure in the Global South.

    The failures of liberal reform would in turn give way to the return of right-wing governments. Working class voters saw this as a betrayal, which had led to even more worker’s rights being stripped away to make way for foreign multi-national corporations to exploit, so whether consciously or not, these new liberal reformers are effectively functioning as “foreign agents”. Local petty bourgeoisie soon found themselves incapable of competing with foreign companies with huge capital, and flocked to nationalist right-wing parties.

    This turns into a vicious cycle that enables a perpetual shift towards the right, with no end in sight. The fact is that no amount of reform will be able to fix a country that has been deliberately positioned in such a way that is vulnerable to foreign imperialism. Every move you make, you end up worse. For example, let’s say the new government wants to nationalize a certain natural resources, what happens? You get sanctioned, the exchange rate falls, the debt multiplied, and you end up with an even more unpopular government than the previous right-wing government, who would then use the opportunity to appeal to their conservative base and distract them from the obvious looting going on by the crony capitalists.

    • HexaSnoot [none/use name]@hexbear.netOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      “For example, let’s say the new government wants to nationalize a certain natural resources, what happens? You get sanctioned, the exchange rate falls, the debt multiplied, and you end up with an even more unpopular government than the previous right-wing government”

      I don’t get why it works this way.

      “This represented a new and perhaps even more effective means of spreading neoliberal ideology across the world, not by employing right wing paramilitary death squads to coup left wing governments (though it still happens), but through an ideological indoctrination of the overseas students who came to study in Western institutions, who would then bring the seeds back to their home countries and allow it to germinate there.”

      Someone tried telling me about the harm of when the US pretends to be #1 in supporting certain good things. Like LGBTQ rights, despite actually having been extremely against it for all of US history until recent years. They described it as a Trojan horse to sneak in imperialist propaganda into other countries. And then people of those countries see what the Trojan horse is filled with, and deem the the Trojan horse evil that must be banned. So then they’re against things like LGBTQ rights because they’ve seen it used as a vehicle filled with pieces of imperial agenda.

      I didn’t get it, but you describing those pieces as seeds self-spreading and germinating helps it makes much more sense to me.

      • Kaplya [none/use name]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        I don’t get why it works this way.

        This is just one example, but Michael Hudson said it best with the case of Argentina:

        Among the BRICS+ countries, Argentina is a case in point. Its foreign dollar debt has grown largely by IMF sponsorship. The IMF’s main political function in US foreign policy has been to enable pro-American client oligarchies to move their money out of countries whenever there is a chance of a left-wing or simply democratic reformer being elected. Convert their Argentinean currency into dollars lowers the peso’s exchange rate. Without IMF intervention, that would mean that as the exchange rate falls, the wealthy classes engaging in capital flight receive fewer and fewer dollars. To support the currency – and hence, the hard-currency dollars that capital-flight actors receive – the IMF lends the right-wing government dollars to buy up the excess pesos that the client oligarchy is selling off. That enables Argentineans to move their money out of the country to obtain a much higher amount of US dollars than they would if the IMF were not lending money to the right-wing puppet government.

        When the new reform government comes in, it finds itself loaded down with a huge foreign debt owed to the IMF. This debt has not been taken on in a way that helped Argentina develop its economy and earn dollars to pay back the loan. It is simply a result of IMF support of right-wing governments. And the IMF then tells the new government (whether Argentina or any other debtor) to pay off its foreign loans by lowering the wages of labor. That is the only way that the IMF recognizes for countries to “stabilize” their balance of payments. So the reform government is obliged to behave just like a right-wing government, intensifying the class war of capital against labor. The “cure” for their balance-of-payments deficits thus becomes even worse than the original disease, that is, its rentier oligarchy moving their money out of the country.

        ——-

        I didn’t get it, but you describing those pieces as seeds self-spreading and germinating helps it makes much more sense to me.

        To be clear, I wasn’t talking about LGBTQ specifically. I was talking about the whole Western liberal ideology chief among which was their economics and the whole package of Western liberal values that emphasize liberty, democracy and the free market.

        The basic idea is that developing countries should open up their domestic markets for foreign corporations to come in, and to attract these foreign investments, you have to give up protecting your domestic industries, your labor rights and promoting various socio-cultural values like “human rights, being against authoritarianism, and endorsing democracy and free elections” etc. Western NGOs often enter the country to promote these “values” as part of preparing these countries to open up for foreign capitalist exploitation.

        All of these coincided with America exporting its culture which became exponentially accessible with the rise of internet in the 2000s, and the imminent intrusion and erosion of the cultural and national identities of the local people.

        So, while there are actual progressive values like LGBTQ rights being transmitted to those countries inclusive within this whole package of “Western liberal democratic values”, the eventual reaction against the failure of such liberal reforms necessary means that there is a natural tendency to reject the Western/foreign culture in its entirety.

        This is why progressive movements need to be cultivated organically from within the local society. One example is Cuba, who has spent more than half a century resisting American imperialism and its cultural influence, was able to eventually develop its own progressive culture more or less independent from the ones promoted by Western imperialist countries.

  • JohnBrownNote [comrade/them, des/pair]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    9 months ago

    a really whole lot of it is hegemonic christianity, either directly in euro cultures, introduced by colonizers centuries ago, or american churches backing anti-gay laws in africa more recently.

    i’m not sure where you’d find boomers being boomers about gay stuff that wasn’t traceable to the catholic or east orthodox church. maybe china?

    • pooh [they/them, any]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      9 months ago

      i’m not sure where you’d find boomers being boomers about gay stuff that wasn’t traceable to the catholic or east orthodox church. maybe china?

      Bit idea: Greek Boomers in early AD complaining about “the good old days” before the spread of Christianity, when men could be men, which means men having sex with men.

      • AutomatedPossum [she/her]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        9 months ago

        The only actual country in East Asia where gay marriage is legal is Nepal. Outside of that, it is only legal on Taiwan (unless your gay spouse is mainland Chinese, marrying anybody from the PRC has recently become illegal there). This is all in spite of East Asian countries as different as Japan, Vietnam or Thailand having higher public support for gay marriage than the US - this support does not extend to legal recognition, but instead attempts of reform have remained stuck in a judicial and buerocratic limbo for years in all three of these places.

      • spectre [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        If you have TikTok watch the user @cloudcloutclaud who is a gay Chinese guy who give direct answers to these sorts of questions.

      • iridaniotter [they/them]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        9 months ago

        A lot of homophobia can be traced to how a given culture reproduces. Traditionally (as in, at least two thousand years), Chinese men could legally have a wife but also additional lovers. Emperors are well known for this (indeed, like a third of Han emperors had male lovers), but it wasn’t exclusive to emperors. During the medieval period (idk it was like somewhere between 400 and 600, I’m on my phone so can’t check rn), there was a scare that relationships between officials and their wives were in trouble as the men were too focused on their male lovers instead. Monogamous same-sex relationships were rare and usually temporary as there was immense social pressure to reproduce. Confucianism served as the ideology of reproduction.

  • blight [any]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    9 months ago

    If you really boil it down, I think it was first about efficiently breeding as many colonizers as possible, and by now the religious institutions have established hegemony.

    • HexaSnoot [none/use name]@hexbear.netOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      There are a lot of patriarchies out there. I’ve frequently felt colonization in the US involved cult rules for a breeding program. Anything outside procreation would likely be against the program. Including mastubation because you’re not using your libido for making babies. What you’re saying could be a blanket statement across a great many colonizing projects.

  • iridaniotter [they/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    9 months ago

    Gender and sexuality was already pretty cisheteronormative in Christian Europe from my understanding. Contrast this with other societies that have several gender roles. Capitalism in Europe led to the traditional extended family structure developing into the nuclear family, further reinforcing the gender binary. I am not sure if this was inevitable due to capitalism, or a consequence of capitalism developing out of European culture. Either way, it was then forced on nearly every other culture in the world. Nations were either colonized and had much of their culture suppressed, or Westernized themselves as part of their industrialization. Conservatives are defenders of capitalist ideology, thus they love the nuclear family and hate nonbinary (neither cis male or female) gender. Genuine reactionaries - that is, people who want to truly go back to pre-capitalist society - don’t really exist, and the closest thing are the trads that pick and choose, like stanning both absolute monarchies and nuclear families.

    • HexaSnoot [none/use name]@hexbear.netOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      I’m having a hard time connecting exactly how it’s capitalist, other than the thread about breeding programs and the fact that capital demands expansion across more land for more resources through colonial projects.

      The influence of capital has been difficult for me to grasp because I have a hard time putting it in words for myself.

      • AlkaliMarxist@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        The theory, I believe, is that the nuclear family is very useful to capitalism because it breaks the bonds which form larger communities. If your family is the largest social group (outside of the nation itself) that you are part of, the largest group in which you are expected to protect other members and vice-versa, it becomes very difficult to organize and easy to see everything as a competition mediated by the market. Additionally, the patriarch dominates social reproduction, protecting his position of power by attempting to reproduce his ideology in his offspring. At the same time he is weakened in greater society due to his alienation from both his peers and his own family.

        Basically it carves humanity up into small cells which are inherently desperate and alienated, making solidarity almost impossible.

  • Tankiedesantski [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    9 months ago

    For a big chunk of Asia, one of the main reasons is the Brits or French or Americans showing up and forcing the criminalization of homosexuality at gun point. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the one Asian country to completely resist/escape colonization (Thailand) is also the most accepting of non-Binary people.

    • dinklesplein [any, he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      there’s something to be said for the irony of nationalists calling queer acceptance western ‘d*generacy’ when homo/transphobia can pretty clearly be causally ascribed in some capacity to the imposition of western values thonk

  • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    9 months ago

    For superpowers and countries that have regional conflicts (usually cold conflicts), the idea is that women are weak, gay men are effeminate thus they would be weak soldiers. For whatever reason, their military is based and strong and can turn any limp wrist teenager into a special forces killer, but they can’t turn a supposedly weak, gay man into a basic soldier lol. Says more about the military than homosexuality.

  • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    9 months ago

    Depends on who you want to focus on. Any conservative can come up with any reason in their head (“it’s grotty”, “god says no”), but these aren’t very good explanations for why its a cultural throughline in conservativism.

    I think over time there was a focus on patrilineal property inheritance that slowly spread from the upper class lords down into the middle classes over centuries (say, from the slow death of Rome to late “feudalism” and early industrial revolution). If your kid is queer in some way (particularly first born males), its less likely your property is “secure”. The truck and barter of women (or more specifically, wombs) to provide strong healthy heirs would also lend itself to being anti-LGBT. While I could imagine that rationally a gay first born son may “do his duty”, it seems pretty unlikely as the aristocracy and the church had a vested interest in keeping things this way (also, the Church sometimes got new clergy from aristocratic queers rejecting the system, which also served as hostages and tighter connections of sorts).

    There is this idea of a homogenised past, but I have a suspicion that outside of the aristocracy and clergy that directly associate with them, small villages would have had wildly varying language and culture. The peasantry has less of an incentive to track the inheritance of property, so it seems very likely to me that at least some English villages (say) may have had fairly accepting queer culture. It would be quite hard to study as they didn’t write anything down. A part of the liberal-national revolutions is setting out to create the idea of a nation. Someone wrote a book about the French nationalist project, which destroyed a huge amounts of variation in culture in the French countryside. I don’t remember what it was called, sorry. I imagine the English/British one was a lot slower (started earlier, aristocracy never quite fell out of favour etc), and still today one can comment of every other village having its own accent (a relic). This wouldn’t be to idealise the past either, I imagine some villages took their Christianity very seriously and were very homophobic/traditionalist.

    The Church also inherited the idea of Pater Familias from the Romans, the idea that the father of the household owned the other subjects of his house (his wife, his slaves, his children). This is obviously a big part of the patriarchy. You can still see this concept rear its ugly head today in certain forms of daddly masculinity, but it isn’t a legal concept now. How much the Church enforced this down to random villages in France would be hard to tell; lots of people were illiterate.

    Liberalism and Nationalism, the twin thoughts that permeate our society, inherited many things from the previous feudal system. There was a great migration from the countryside to the cities as farming became more and more efficient. The former middle classes (see: financiers, artisans, merchants) often already in cities became the dominant class (over time) and were faced with a large supply of cheap labour. Not only was this cheap labour useful in outcompeting traditional artisans with division of labour, but it also allowed the middle classes to essentially create a new society centered around massively populated cities (e.g. London, France). The division of labour in farming also helped fuel the reproduction of this society. This new society, based around the locuses of trade, were the new “nations” that were able to leverage vastly more military power both in personnel and material than the traditional aristocracies (look at battle sizes in Europe in the 13th century compared to the 19th century). 2000 Horse-back riding aristo-fucks may have trained since birth to put down peasant rebellions, but a musket shot from a barn will put them down just the same. (NB: Settler colonies evolved a little differently, which is why Canada, Australia, and the US look wildly different to France, the UK, Belgium etc. However, they may have been necessary for the formation of nationalism back in Europe with the vast wealth plundered from Turtle Island, massively enriching trading cities)

    The way families and masculinity interacted with Capitalism wasn’t a direct one-one path. The Pater Familias turned into the division of labour of the reproduction of society. Just as in a factory one specific guy pulls this lever every five seconds, one specific guy sands down some points etc, so does the woman reproduce society daily (by preparing the household, and specifically the man, for work) and reproduce society generationally (by being an incubator for the next generation). No nationalist ever talks about this particularly openly (at least in my experience), but when they’re feeling stressed about their nation’s position it comes out about birth rates and the like. However, the echoes of Pater Familias still exist today amongst certain sort of domineering men who think they own their families.

    Likewise, the concern over primogeniture and lines of male inheritance have been twisted to serve the same goals. We want more of our nation, we see ourselves in competition with other nations partly defined by wealth but partly defined by sheer numbers and control over territory, and we think queer people stand in the way of reproduction our nation and are insufficiently loyal to the nation.

    This also has a lot of explanatory power outside of just anti-queer politics. Anti-feminism and anti-migrant sentiment also come from this. Anti-abortion stuff as well.

    (Uh… I hope this made sense, I’m feeling a lot of energy today)