Love, Joy, Feminism is one of my favourite blogs, and has been for a long time. Libby Anne’s writing has a wonderful combination of clarity and empathy that I always look forward to reading. A couple of weeks month or so ago (can you tell I’m a little behind on responding to things?) she wrote about marriage equality. Hardline anti-LGBTQ US evangelicals are losing support for their position not only in the general population, but in Millennials within their own communities. There’s some lovely looking graphs at her post, by the way- go check it out!
Libby Anne describes this, happily, as anti-LGBTQ evangelicals losing not only the individual state ‘battles’ against equality, but the ‘war’ as well. If we’re talking about marriage equality in the United States, this is undoubtedly true. If you widen your lens to take in my own Western Europe as well as some parts of South America, it stays that way. In these parts of the world more LGBT people are entitled either to legal equality- or at the very least some legal protections- than ever before.
Does that mean we’re winning the war, though? I’m not sure. But it definitely doesn’t mean that it’s okay to see “marriage equality throughout the United States” as the war that needs to be won. It doesn’t even mean that “marriage equality throughout the United States” is the war that needs to be won by USians.
There’s a parochialism to a lot of USian thought. You have a massive country that has been exercising a cultural dominance (among other things) over huge swathes of the rest of the world for decades. Lifetimes, even. Like all social relations borne of inequality, we in the rest of the world pay a lot more attention to you than you do to us. We know more about you than vice-versa. Non-USians internalise US concerns and understand some of the nuances of US culture(s) in a way that is not reciprocated.
Not reciprocated, that is, in all ways except one. The average USian doesn’t have the understanding of Irish (or German, Argentinian, Ugandan or Thai) politics and society that we do of yours, but this hasn’t stopped the US from actively interfering in other countries. Sometimes this is overt militarism. Sometimes it’s more subtle, but no less real. Take here in Ireland, where antichoice forces are bankrolled by American backers. People who have never met us campaigning for laws that will never affect them. Similarly, when you look outside your borders you can see that many homophobic USian fundamentalist evangelicals have set their sights outside your country and are busy interfering elsewhere to drum up homophobia, transphobia, and legal and physical violence against LGBTQ people. It’s not that the war is being won. Battles may be being won, but front lines don’t end at a particular nation’s border. The war is shifting, being taken by USians to places where most USians aren’t even looking.
The progress made in Western and Central Europe, the Americas and Australia on marriage equality and other LGBTQ+ rights and protections is incredible, although even in these parts of the world we’ve a long way to go. There are battles being won. But the rest of the world- Eastern Europe, Asia, the vast majority of Africa and the Middle East- matter every bit as much. Especially when Western forces have been interfering in most of these parts world for centuries, we don’t get to wash out hands of the results of our ongoing interference. Ever.
The war is nowhere close to being won.
Related articles
- Losing the Battle . . . and the War (patheos.com)
- Panel members announced (yoursafar.wordpress.com)
- What if the LGBTQ movement fought for prison abolition rather than same-sex marriage? (wagingnonviolence.org)
- Soraya Chemaly: Our Visible Spectrum Is One in Which Some of Us Are Simply More Expensive Than Others (huffingtonpost.com)
- Don’t cut ties with Uganda; that’s an anti-gay trap (76crimes.com)
- Tories Block UK Participation in EU Anti-Homophobia Summit (ibtimes.co.uk)
considertheteacosy.wordpress.com 
I have been needing that word ‘USians’ for a long time and this is the first place I’ve found it. Thank you so much! Great post too 🙂
I agree that there is a parochialism, but I don’t think it’s quite in the way you’ve described it. Nothing in that article says to me that the author thinks the war is being won internationally just because it’s being won in the US, or that the wars in other countries don’t matter the way that they do in the US. It reads to me simply as an article about the war in the US, written by a US author, for a US audience. The difference between this and a similar article that you or I might write on an Irish blog is that we would probably feel the need to qualify it by saying that we were only talking about the war in Ireland, while this author doesn’t feel the need to qualify it in the same way – and yes, that is US-centrism, in that US-based writers often feel that such a qualifier can simply be assumed. But that’s not the same thing as not recognising that there is any qualifier at all.