Gay Rights and the Illiberal World

David BoazOn Monday, LGBT activists in Tbilisi, Georgia,called off a planned Pride March after hundreds of violent counter ‐​protestersattacked activists and journalists.On Tuesday, WeChat, China ’s most popular social media service,shut down dozens of accounts on LGBT topics run by college students and nonprofit groups as part of a tightening of political control by the Communist Party.Three weeks ago, Hungary ’s parliamentpassed legislation that would ban the dissemination of content in schools deemed to promote homosexuality and gender change.And all these assaults on human rights reminded me ofa column written in 2013 by the British journalist Michael Hanlon. Hanlon wrote about a “morality gap” in the world that could be seen most clearly in attitudes toward gay rights. His column is worth quoting at length:It is now clear, though not much talked about, that humanity, all 7.1 billion of us, tends to fall into one of two distinct camps. On the one side are those who buy into the whole post ‐​Enlightenment human rights revolution. For them the moral trajectory of the last 300 years is clear: once we were brutal savages; in a few decades, the whole planet will basically be Denmark, ruled by the shades of Mandela and Shami Chakrabarti.And there ’s some truth in this trajectory — except for the fact that it only applies to half the planet. The other half resolutely follows a different moral code: might is right, all men were no...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs