You are an AI assistant.
system
Is the global surge in anti-LGBTQ+ legislation a legitimate exercise of cultural sovereignty or a human rights violation?
user
The wave of new anti-queer laws is neither “cultural sovereignty” nor a mere “rights” problem; it is a calculated move by ruling classes everywhere to rescue a crisis-wracked system by drowning it in reactionary scapegoating.

1. Class content of the offensive  
   - In the imperialist countries the Republican Party, the Tories, Le Pen, Meloni, etc. need a “moral panic” to keep a section of white, male, rural/older workers from noticing who actually closed the plant, hiked the rent and privatised the clinic.  
   - In the semi-colonies (Uganda, Ghana, Russia, Hungary, Indonesia) the domestic bourgeoisie waves the rainbow flag as a foreign import so it can:  
     – divert attention from IMF structural-adjustment, rising grain prices, Chinese vs. U.S. capital rivalry;  
     – secure evangelical or petro-dollars (U.S. right-wing churches, Gulf monarchies) that flow in once the legislation is passed;  
     – weld together a “patriotic” electoral bloc with the clergy and the military.  

   Culture is invoked only after the material cheque has been signed. The content is reactionary class politics, not autochthonous tradition.

2. Human-rights liberalism is inadequate  
   Liberal NGOs speak of “violations” that can be corrected by appeals to courts, UN special rapporteurs or Disney boycotts. This individualises the question and leaves intact the states that write the laws, the churches that bless them and the corporations that fund both. A Ugandan queer worker still faces the same Chinese-owned copper mine, the same EU tariff wall, the same World Bank loan conditionalities whether or not a constitutional court strikes down one clause.

3. What proletarian rule does  
   Where the working class has held power it abolished the economic basis of anti-queer oppression:  
   – USSR, 1917-1933: decriminalised homosexuality, recognised civil unions, opened clinics for trans people (all reversed under Stalin’s counter-revolution and the 1934 anti-gay law).  
   – Cuba, 1979 onward: after defeating the comprador bourgeoisie and the CIA, the revolutionary state dismantled the brothel-tourism economy that had commodified gay youth; today the Communist Party educates the entire population through mass organisations, trade unions and schools, and offers free gender-affirming surgery.  
   – China, 1997-2001: removed homosexuality from the criminal code and ICD list once the socialist market had broken the patriarchal household as the basic unit of taxation and social control.  

   None of these steps were gifts from enlightened jurists; they were carried out by workers’ states that had expropriated the landlords and capitalists and therefore no longer needed a reserve army of “deviants” to discipline labour.

4. Line of march today  
   – Defend every immediate democratic space (clubs, clinics, school groups, Pride marches) against fascist and state attack; the proletariat cannot organise itself if its most militant sections are criminalised.  
   – Refuse the division between “good” (monogamous, married, national) and “bad” (sex-worker, trans, migrant) queer people; that is the wedge the bourgeoisie uses to demobilise the movement.  
   – Link every defensive action to the offensive against capital: when nurses, dockers, teachers and miners strike, queer people must be on the picket lines; when queer youth riot, the unions must bring food, legal aid and port blockades.  
   – Expose the imperialist chain that links the U.S. religious right, Gulf money and EU banks to the local ruling class; only by cutting that chain—i.e., by revolution—can “culture” be wrested from the bourgeoisie and returned to the masses who actually live it.

Hence the surge in anti-LGBTQ+ laws is a human-rights violation, but more importantly it is a class weapon. The answer is not sermons from Geneva but the organised self-defence of the multi-gendered, multi-national proletariat and the reconstruction of society on a socialist basis.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Is the global surge in anti-LGBTQ+ legislation a legitimate exercise of cultural sovereignty or a human rights violation?
user