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A compelling and timely vision for gay reparations in the United
States In the last two decades many nations have adopted "gay
reparations," or policies intended to make amends for a history of
discrimination, stigmatization, and violence on the basis of sexual
orientation and gender identity. Far from being a homogenous or
uniform phenomenon, gay reparations encompass a small constellation
of approaches including a formal apology to the LGBT community for
past wrongdoing, financial compensation for victims of anti-LGBT
laws and actions, and the erection of monuments to the memory of
those who suffered because of structural homophobia. The United
States, however, has been reluctant to embrace gay reparations,
making the country something of an outlier among Western
democracies. Beyond making the case for gay reparations in the
United States, this book explores a wide range of questions
provoked by the rise of the gay reparations movement. Among these
questions, three stand out for what they reveal about the puzzling
and complex nature of this new front in the struggle for LGBT
equality. Why, after centuries of attempts to marginalize,
dehumanize, and even eradicate LGBT people, are governments coming
around to confront this dark and painful historical legacy? How do
we make sense of the diversity of gay reparations being implemented
by governments around the world? And, finally, what would an
American policy of gay reparations look like? Omar G. Encarnacion
draws upon the rich history of reparations to confront the legacies
of genocide, slavery, and political repression and argue that gay
reparations are a moral obligation intended to restore dignity to
those whose human rights have been violated because of their sexual
orientation and gender identity. Reparations are also necessary to
close painful chapters of anti-LGBT discrimination and violence and
to remind future generations of past struggles for LGBT equality.
To this end, he traces America's dark and painful LGBT history-from
colonial-era laws criminalizing homosexual conduct, to a postwar
ban on homosexuals working in the federal bureaucracy, to the
government's support of the junk-science underpinning the practice
of "gay conversion" therapy promoted by the Christian Right. The
book also examines how other Western democracies notorious for
their repression of homosexuals-specifically Spain, Britain, and
Germany-have implemented gay reparations. These foreign experiences
reveal potential pathways for gay reparations in the United States.
More importantly, they show that while there is no universal
approach to gay reparations it is never too late for countries to
seek to right past wrongs.
Encarnación makes the controversial argument that a strong civil society and social capital are not necessary to enhance either democratization or the stability of a new democracy. Tracing the development of the concept "civil society," he argues that what matters are the political institutions existing in a state and the strategies and decisions of political leaders. The importance of these are examined through careful case studies of Brazil, where a strong civil society was not critical in the transition to democracy and has not led to a robust democracy, and Spain, where a weak civil society neither prevented the transition nor strong democratic institutions.
Spain is a notable exception to the implicit rules of late
twentieth-century democratization: after the death of General
Francisco Franco in 1975, the recovering nation began to
consolidate democracy without enacting any of the mechanisms
promoted by the international transitional justice movement. There
were no political trials, no truth and reconciliation commissions,
no formal attributions of blame, and no apologies. Instead, Spain's
national parties negotiated the Pact of Forgetting, an agreement
intended to place the bloody Spanish Civil War and the
authoritarian excesses of the Franco dictatorship firmly in the
past, not to be revisited even in conversation. Formalized by an
amnesty law in 1977, this agreement defies the conventional wisdom
that considers retribution and reconciliation vital to rebuilding a
stable nation. Although not without its dark side, such as the
silence imposed upon the victims of the Civil War and the
dictatorship, the Pact of Forgetting allowed for the peaceful
emergence of a democratic state, one with remarkable political
stability and even a reputation as a trailblazer for the national
rights and protections of minority groups.Omar G. Encarnacion
examines the factors in Spanish political history that made the
Pact of Forgetting possible, tracing the challenges and
consequences of sustaining the agreement until its dramatic
reversal with the 2007 Law of Historical Memory. The combined
forces of a collective will to avoid revisiting the traumas of a
difficult and painful past and the reliance on the reformed
political institutions of the old regime to anchor the democratic
transition created a climate conducive to forgetting. At the same
time, the political movement to forget encouraged the embrace of a
new national identity as a modern and democratic European state.
Demonstrating the surprising compatibility of forgetting and
democracy, "Democratization Without Justice in Spain" offers a
crucial counterexample to the transitional justice movement. The
refusal to confront and redress the past did not inhibit the rise
of a successful democracy in Spain; on the contrary, by leaving the
past behind, Spain chose not to repeat it.
Known around the world as a bastion of machismo and Catholicism,
Latin America in recent decades has emerged as the undisputed gay
rights leader of the Global South. More surprising yet, nations
such as Argentina have surpassed more "developed" nations like the
United States and many European states in extending civil rights to
the homosexual population. Setting aside the role of external
factors and conditions in pushing gay rights from the Developed
North to the Global South - such as the internationalization of
human rights norms and practices, the globalization of gay
identities, and the diffusion of policies such as "gay marriage" -
Out in the Periphery aims to "decenter" gay rights politics in
Latin America by putting the domestic context front and center. The
intention is not to show how the "local" has triumphed the "global"
in Latin America. Rather the book suggests how the domestic context
has interacted with the outside world to make Latin America an
unusually receptive environment for the development of gay rights.
Omar Encarnacion focuses particularly on the role of local gay
rights organizations, a long-neglected social movement in Latin
America, in filtering and adapting international gay rights ideas.
Inspired by the outside world but firmly embedded in local
politics, Latin American gay activists have succeeded in bringing
radical change to the law with respect to homosexuality and, in
some cases, as in Argentina, in transforming society and the
culture at large.
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