Chapter 6 - Strategies

Tags: Urgency Required
Additional tags: Lgbt

Part six discusses strategies for furthering gay and lesbian rights and equality. First, strategies in development cooperation, particularly those of Hivos, the Humanist Institute for Cooperation with Developing Countries, and in education. Subsequently, the strategies of the actual formulation of gay and lesbian rights in the Declaration of Montreal and in the Yogyakarta Principles are discussed.

For the strategy of gay and lesbian liberation, it is also important what trade unions can do and have done for LGBT persons. In the United States, christian fundamentalism and neo-conservatism pose a big problem. On the one hand, same-sex couples can enter a marriage in the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont and Maine. On the other, in the state of Utah the gay movie ‘Brokeback Mountain’ could not be freely screened. Then there is Eastern Europe: these countries have reached a point of no return, even though some people, in Poland and Lithuania for example, really would like to return. The European Union requires Eastern European countries that have joined the EU to conform to the decision that LGBT rights are human rights.