Right-Wing Anti-Gay Mobilizations in Mexico

The following is a translation of an article from Espartaco No. 46 (October 2016), publication of the Grupo Espartaquista de México, section of the International Communist League. On November 9, Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto’s proposal to allow same-sex marriage and adoption nationwide was rejected by a Congressional committee and will therefore not be voted on by Congress. As of now, same-sex marriage is legal in fewer than one-third of Mexico’s states.

In an attempt to refurbish his brutal government’s tattered image a little, Peña Nieto presented Congress with a proposal for constitutional reform in May to establish the right of gay people to get married and to adopt children—even though he had expressed unambiguous opposition to the latter in 2010. Outside of Mexico City and the states of Coahuila and Quintana Roo, where it is legal, gay marriage is possible in the remaining states, but only by filing a petition in court. We are for the right of marriage and adoption for LGBT people. We defend the right of anyone, regardless of sexual preference, to have a family or not. We are for full democratic rights for gay people, including the right to divorce. We are also for the right to free abortion on demand throughout the country as a fundamental democratic right for women.

Faced with Peña Nieto’s initiative, it was not only the PAN [Catholic clericalist National Action Party] who screamed bloody murder; the Congressmen of the PRI [currently ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party] itself made clear that the measure was not a “priority,” and they have “frozen” it. A shadowy organization backed by the Catholic church, the National Front for the Family, called a myriad of marches around the country in September with the ever-present demand that the family be “like that of Nazareth” (that is, virgin mother, credulous father and son of the Holy Spirit). Rodrigo Iván Cortés, spokesman for this organization and a former PAN Congressman, maintained that Pope Bergoglio [Francis] himself—who considers gay marriage the product of “the Devil’s envy”—advised him to go out into the streets to protest (lastampa.it, 1 September). The official publication of the Archdiocese of Mexico, the weekly Desde la fe [From the Faith] (29 May), resorted to the expert opinion of an exorcist, who pointed out that none other than Asmodeus is “the demon which today attacks the family” (see the biblical Book of Tobit; a more detailed description of Asmodeus is available in the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual).

These hysterical fantasies notwithstanding, the reactionary clericalist show of force should be taken seriously. The anti-gay mobilizations were especially sizable—tens of thousands—in the cities of Monterrey and Guadalajara and the Bajío region, as well as in Mexico City, where the campaign culminated in a national march on September 24. Alongside the motley crew of Catholic fanatics were openly neo-Nazi gangs giving Hitler salutes and menacing counterdemonstrators. These demonstrations by right-wing fanatics are a threat to LGBT people, to women, to the separation of church and state and, ultimately, to everyone’s democratic rights.

The right to gay marriage will not in itself put an end to bigotry—often murderous—against LGBT people, nor to the pain they experience in this anti-homosexual society which is so totally hypocritical regarding sex. But this pain makes it even more important to struggle for each democratic right, for each measure of social and political equality that can be gained in this society. The vanguard of the workers must stand up as the champion of all the oppressed; the realization of the proletariat’s historic task—the abolition of class society through socialist revolution—contains the seed of universal human liberation. The struggle against anti-gay and anti-woman prejudices is crucial for the construction of a genuine Leninist workers party capable of leading the working class in this colossal task.

Our defense of the right to adoption and marriage for LGBT people reflects our opposition to all discrimination based on sexual preferences; it has nothing to do with accepting the family as the basic economic unit that it represents in contemporary society. Many people have no choice but to fit themselves into the straitjacket of the monogamous nuclear family in order to gain basic rights such as housing, medical insurance and citizenship, or simply to survive. The institution of the family, together with the church, is the principal source of women’s oppression. Anti-gay fanaticism flows from the need to punish any deviation from this patriarchal structure.

We fight for a future society in which the necessary functions of the family—child-rearing, food preparation and other housework—will be socialized, that is, the responsibility of society as a whole. A person’s destiny will not be determined by the degree to which his or her family is rich or poor. The “alternative family,” so idealized by the bourgeois PRD [Party of the Democratic Revolution], feminist organizations and LGBT activists, is still an economic unit to which its members are bound. Anyone who wants to fight for full democratic rights for LGBT people and for women’s liberation would do well to recognize the conservatizing force that the nuclear family represents, and its key role in capitalist society.