Get Over It, Daily Brief April 16, 2024

There’s an old slogan from rights activists that says: “Some people are gay. Get over it.”

It’s pithy, memorable, easily repeatable – as with all good slogans. It’s also easily repurposed for other uses, like, “Some people are trans. Get over it.”

Most importantly, it puts responsibility on the receiver of the message. It says, it’s not the scapegoated groups that’s the issue here. The issue is you, the individual reader or listener. You are called on to reassess your thinking. Its bluntness is a challenge: this is how reality is, and if what’s in your head can’t accept reality, the problem is what’s in your head.

Authorities in Belarus should maybe meditate on this. The other day, they again attacked lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. Specifically, they changed the definition of pornography under Belarusian law so it now categorizes depictions of LGBT folks as it does depictions of necrophilia and pedophilia. In short, they’re labelling LGBT lives as “pornography.”

Of course, it’s nothing new exactly in Belarus, which under the dictatorship of Aliaksandr Lukashenka is a human rights hell hole generally. Authorities have attacked LGBT folks there before, too, and public officials are pushing to introduce even criminal penalties for “non-traditional sexual relationships and gender change propaganda.” Belarus is marching in lock-step with its ally, Russia, which has expanded its anti-gay propaganda law and banned the “international LGBT movement” – an organization which, as you know, doesn’t exist.

Putin has been attacking LGBT folks in part to try to boost his support among conservatives abroad, especially in the West over the war in Ukraine. Putin often ludicrously presents his atrocity-ridden invasion of Ukraine as a battle for “traditional values.”

A few months ago, my former colleague Graeme Reid (now with the the UN as an Independent Expert) wrote an article on “Russia, Homophobia and the Battle for ‘Traditional Values.’” In it, he described a competition between two visions of the world:

On one side is the vision of a social order in which the individual is subordinated to [the state’s] notion of ‘culture’ and tradition, brooking no dissent. The competing vision is rights-based and accommodating of diversity.

What anti-LGBT dictators, like Lukashenka and Putin, and their admiring Western demagogues are calling for when they talk about “traditional values” is obvious. They want a world where the state, the government, can deny you your individual freedoms – even your own bodily autonomy – based on “tradition,” which conveniently for them, they get to define. No thanks.

In their authoritarian efforts, they even take steps that deny the very existence of LGBT people.

Those of us who believe in freedom and accept the reality of human diversity have the opposite view. And we say, “Some people are gay. Get over it.”