Homophobia is alive, well and deadly in the United States. That is surely the single starkest lesson to be drawn from the tragedy in Orlando, which saw a New York-born American walk into a gay club and slaughter dozens with an AR-15 automatic rifle. The gun laws need debating of course, but the usual suspects may well thwart that discussion in the usual way. Meanwhile the avowed inspiration that Omar Mateen drew from Isis will lead to complex arguments about what it means for a terrorist group to “claim” an attack these days. But with this hate crime target, and with the killer’s parents attesting to hate crime motivation – anger at seeing two men kiss – one would hope that all could agree that this was a crime that flowed from a particular spring of hostility which runs deep in many cultures around the world, including the west.  The hesitancy in certain quarters, including rightwing British pundits on TV as well as American reactionaries, to label this as a homophobic hate crime, plain and simple, at first blush appears puzzling. After all, the standard script these days for political leaders immediately after a terrorist atrocity almost anywhere in the west involves describing an assault on “our values and way of life”, defined to include a degree of tolerance and an aversion to persecuting anybody on grounds of sexuality. The bullishness with which this tolerance is asserted, however, may sometimes be about compensating for the shallowness of its roots. In the UK, for example, Whitehall makes an entirely appropriate stand against bullying laws that Vladimir Putin signs against supposed “pro-gay” propaganda, and yet as recently as the late 1980s the British government was itself drafting statutes purely to spread smears, through the notorious section 28. Indeed, large numbers of serving Conservative MPs declined to back its repeal as recently as 2003. Even more recently, in the last parliament, very many MPs, including a plurality of the Tories, voted against equal civil marriage for gay people.  In the US, where the culture wars have been more central to politics, only a dozen years have passed since the Republicans masterminded a run of anti-gay marriage amendments to state constitutions, to raise the turnout among evangelicals, an effort that helped to George W Bush win a second term. Even today, rightwing governors play divisive games with superfluous laws regulating transsexual use of public toilets. The impulse to rally public policy against those deemed to be sexually different, then, has not quite gone away. The progress towards gay rights over the last generation is inarguable. But so is the backlash – even if, mercifully, very little of it is anything like as brutal as the murderous bigotry of Isis. The suspicion lingers that there are some who are willing to accept diversity only as a marker of difference with the west’s enemies, a highly conditional basis for tolerance.  The tide of ideas is turning, to some extent even within religion: Archbishop Justin Welby on Monday asserted the primacy of love over the proscriptions of the holy texts. Yet the texts remain, and conservative belief – Christian as well as Islamic – remains a powerful driver of homophobia. The tactical support of gay rights as a tool of western soft power is an improvement over the old prejudice. But it is hardly surprising if that does not provide the community with the support it deserves and expects in its hour of need.
Editorial: The west is these days happy to champion sexual diversity as one of its values. But the shallow roots of tolerance lead to hesitancy in naming a hate crime for what it is