Political Homophobia in the European Parliament

• In Event: Political Homophobia or Backlash? Populist Responses to LGBT Rights and Activism

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the development of political homophobia (Bosia and Weiss 2014) in the European Parliament through an analysis of anti-discrimination measures from 1984, 1994, and 2008. I use the trends from the anti-discrimination measures as a baseline to compare recent plenary debates which reference a range of keywords related to LGBTI policies. I hypothesize that the trend of implicit homophobia (Burridge 2004) will continue into the 6th, 7th, and 8th parliaments. This rhetoric frames LGBTI rights as distinctly European and thus incongruent with nationalist values espoused by many far-right MEPs.

The expansion of LGBTI political rights in Europe has largely been driven by the European Union acting on behalf of civil society organizations. As such, this diffusion of pro-LGBTI policies has been incorporated under the umbrella of a “European” identity. However, resistance to LGBTI rights remains present at every level of the European Union.

I document how the rising populist trend in EU institutions leads center-right MEPs to adopt the effective implicit, homophobic language. The emergence of an implicit strategy is a result of the explicit actions that the European Parliament has taken towards LGBTI-rights such as the creation of the LGBTI Rights Intergroup. Tracking this language can help us understand the changes in institutional character.

I make three arguments in this paper: first, the nature of political homophobia develops in response to shifting institutional norms around sexual and gender minorities. Second, homophobic rhetoric is heavily gendered in its emphasis on family, nation-state boundaries, and traditional religious practices. Third, studying political homophobia as an on-going process provides scholars with a new and important way to understand the populist wave in Europe.

Author

• Haley V Norris, Rutgers University