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Comment by krychu | Hacker News Reader

From reading a bit more on the issue those zones are defined as free of LGBT _ideology_. Poles seem to make distinction between homosexuality and LGBT movement, which is valuable insight. But media portrays it as zones where homosexual people are not welcome. That’s not right. It’s concerning how much pressure there is to accept LGBT ideals.

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What is this sinister ideology you presume us scary gays to have, precisely? I mean, I would have thought “please don’t treat us as second class citizens” about sums it up.

You're right that there is no such thing as "gay ideology". Unfortunately though, the discussion isn't about that but rather "LGBT ideology", which isn't really well defined but my guess is the Poles mean something like "minority-oriented identity politics", perhaps combined with "non-child producing relationships are great and to be celebrated rather than merely tolerated". Consider that LGBT contains trans-sexuality which isn't the same thing as homosexuality, but it all gets grouped together.

As for being treated as second class citizens, well, it's worth studying why that happened to ensure there's no repeat of it. Historically speaking there's a correlation between homophobia and societies wealth, that is, wealthier societies have less of it and poorer societies have more of it. Or more accurately it's related to the size of the state. This is easy to understand in the context of how to support the elderly: in a poor country with a small state, the family unit is essential for social stability as people without children have no real way to support themselves in old age. Without any welfare state they become a burden on their neighbours.

So the social pressure to have children in poorer countries with weak welfare systems is understandably very large. About 10% of men are homosexual so a completely free and open gay-tolerant culture effectively requires villages and towns to support 10% of a childless male population in old age or sickness, something that's completely impossible without a large, sophisticated and consensually-based welfare state. Which of course most parts of the world didn't have for a very long time and many places still don't have. Social pressure on gay men to find a wife and have children despite their orientation was thus the only tool available.

Ex-Soviet states in particular are full of people who watched as a government that provided a lavish welfare state ended up collapsing completely, impoverishing millions. It's not a huge surprise that we see a lot of family-oriented conservatism there as a consequence. They have direct experience of the opposite approach failing them.

This sort of analysis matters because it suggests there might be a problem in future if we don't find ways to make society much more wealthy, due to the financial viability problems facing many pension schemes, large government deficits in many countries etc. Are the current levels of welfare state spending viable? I think they certainly can be, as there are countries with strong safety nets and balanced budgets. But in many western countries they're currently on borrowed time. At the moment politicians are trying to solve this via mass immigration to ensure the young population can still support the old, but that's increasingly facing pushback in Europe and America. If at some point the welfare state stops delivering on its promises and governments start slashing pension rights, as happened during the collapse of the USSR, then social pressure to have children will return and we might see anti-gay sentiment flare up again.

I don't like where this analysis leads, but fortunately I don't see any fundamental barriers to increasing productivity by a large amount and thus balancing the welfare books. As long as the welfare state is strong, LGBT people will be able to live in peace.

I really don't buy that in this case. Poland's population has been stagnant or falling since the fall of the Soviet Union, like most of the rest of the Eastern bloc, and politically motivated homophobia has ramped up abruptly in the last year (rather than, say, in the early naughties, as you'd expect if it was actually associated with worries about population). I'd more or less assume it's because the migrant crisis has largely ended, so PiS needs something new to scare people with.

EDIT: Incidentally, I suspect that much the same thing has happened more broadly in the developed world with trans people. In the late 20th and early 21st century, many Western European countries passed major reforms to trans rights, and it largely went without comment from the far right, because they were at the time fixated on same-sex marriage. It was only _after_ most countries legalised same-sex marriage and the sky failed to fall in that the "trans people are corrupting and impurifying all of our precious bodily fluids" thing started, and it only wound up to full volume as the perceived threat of the migrant crisis faded (to the point that it now seems to be basically the primary issue for some European far-right groups). Some people, presumably, always need an enemy. I wonder who it'll be next.

Yes, but issues that politicians pay attention to isn't at all a perfect correlation for issues that the population cares about. They tend to only focus on a handful of issues at the same time for instance. It's possible PiS is now focusing on it for the first time but those attitudes were there the whole time.

edit: Oh, for transsexuality, perhaps the issue is that it seems to be increasing? It's an extremely rare thing in any event but it makes sense that if the numbers start going up it'd attract more attention:

https://www.nzma.org.nz/journal/read-the-journal/all-issues/...

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