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Comment by cuteboy19 | Hacker News Reader

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So... they've gone from "gays go into camps" to "gays can have all the rights of family". That sounds like progress to be celebrated to me. It's sixty years later and things are getting better, hooray?

I mean, any discussion of shit getting better in the USA sure has a laundry list of atrocities you can dig up too.

Yeah, gay marriage, of all places, wasn’t even legalized in California until 2008

Lots of countries were doing very bad things 60 years ago. Lots of countries were doing very bad things yesterday. That shouldn't stop us from celebrating when one of those countries stops doing those bad things or makes progress to treat people more fairly.

Except that nothing has changed. People don't have the right to protest or to vote. It's still the same authoritarian government with a nice coat of pink. Coincidentally this changes very little for the islands lgbt community which is still quite persecuted (by the government no less)

There are only 31 countries in the world that respect marriage equality. The fact that Cuba is going to be 32, in front of half of continental Europe is a good thing for Cuba.

> This is the same communist party that put gay people in concentration camps in the 1960s.

There are still parents in the USA who are currently sending their kids to gay conversion camps. I don't understand your point.

I think the OP is attempting to point out the abysmal record of gay rights in communist systems. Be it communism of the 60's, or modern communism like that practiced in China, gay's are second class citizens...tragically denied the rights enjoyed by heterosexuals.

> abysmal record of gay rights in communist systems

I think things are more nuanced (and interesting) than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism_and_LGBT_rights

For example:

> In 1962, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic decriminalized same-sex sexual intercourse after scientific research from Kurt Freund led to the conclusion that homosexual orientation cannot be changed.

Meanwhile, in USA:

> In 1962 Illinois adopted the recommendations of the Model Penal Code and thus became the first state to remove criminal penalties for consensual sodomy from its criminal code,[7] almost a decade before any other state.

There is an abysmal record of gay rights across all parts of the political spectrum, including using sexual orientation as a political tool of oppression. There's nothing special about communism.

Presumably getting purged for being "Trotskyist-zionist-titoist-bourgeois-nationalist traitors" is considered a better option than being purged for being gay?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechoslovak_Socialist_Repub...

I mean technically you can choose to be a `Trotskyist-zionist-titoist-bourgeois-nationalist` traitor or any other flavor of traitor, but you can't really choose who you're attracted to.

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