Catholic = Anti-Gay Marriage? Not quite.

Watching the post-election fallout while reporting on gay marriage in Latin America has been a little bizarre. With Latinos in the United States actually giving President Obama an even greater portion of their support this time around, there’s a lot of head-scratching from the pundits at home. Latinos are supposed to be Catholic, right? And Catholics aren’t supposed to like gay marriage, right? And that means they should punish Obama for his support of gay marriage, right?

The politics of the issue in Latin America presents a similar paradox. Despite the fact that most of Latin America is heavily Catholic—and increasingly evangelical in many places—the region is well ahead of the United States in recognizing same-sex marriage and LGBT rights.

Even though there’s no sign that the church is fading as a political institution, it seems to have lost a lot of traction on this issue—among American Catholics, Latin American Catholics, and, well, European Catholics, too. (Spain and Portugal were among the first to legalize gay marriage, and France is also on its way. And, sure, Europe is more secular, but it’s still worth noting the trend.) Sometimes the courts are ahead of public opinion in pushing things along, but the countries’ Catholicness doesn’t seem to be putting major breaks on the issue.

In Latin America, it’s striking that the church is increasingly throwing its weight behind civil unions in order to head off marriage, a shift that suggests it recognizes all-out opposition is a losing proposition.

“It seems logical that two people of the same sex who care for each other and want to share their lives together can have some sort of civil acknowledgement, but it can’t be the same as what governs marriage,” Uruguay’s top bishop, Jaime Fuentes, said last week as the country’s congress debated the issue.

While the Catholic church remains an important institutional home for opposition to LGBT unions, when we look globally (and speaking in the most simplistic terms), Protestant and Muslim populations seem to be more pivotal demographics for the intensity of opposition to marriage.

A glance at this map from the Economist makes that pretty clear. Laws criminalizing homosexuality are found throughout Africa and the Middle East, but not so much where Catholics are the clearest majority.

In Uganda, for example, 42 percent of the population is Catholic, but another 42 percent is Protestant (mostly Anglican) and another 12 percent is Muslim.

And in Latin America, opposition to LGBT rights is generally strongest where the evangelical movement is strongest. Take the situation in Peru, where a backlash among evangelicals to Lima’s pro-LGBT mayor is driving a recall election.

The gap between what the church says and how this plays out politically is growing—fast. I wonder when that will stop coming as a surprise.

Lima’s mayor recalled over support for LGBT rights

Lima Mayor Susana Villarán will face a recall election in March, and her opponents are making her support for LGBT rights a central plank of their campaign. And they’re counting on evangelicals to oust her.

Last week, one of the leaders of the recall effort, Marco Tulio Gutiérrez, told a Peruvian magazine that evangelicals “do not agree with a mayor that participates in marches of transvestites and sissies [maricas], a pro-lesbian, pro-gay mayor…. Thanks to … evangelical churches’ pro-life and pro-family movements, everything has headed towards a good result.”

“We’re not homophobic,” he added. “But the state can’t take that [pro-LGBT] posture. That is going to be the banner of the [recall] campaign.”

(Gutiérrez doubled-down on his language in a subsequent interview.)

Villarán made headlines when she appeared in Lima’s gay pride march in 2011. And then she provoked an unexpected uprising from the city’s large evangelical community in 2011 when she backed an ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The sponsor of the nondiscrimination ordinance in the city’s legislature, Manuel Cardenas, told me that Villarán’s team had been caught entirely off guard by the strength of religious opposition to the proposal:

We did not think there was such a fundamentalist vision [in Lima]. We discovered that there was very fundamentalist thought… [Evangelical churches] had never shown such hardcore [fundamentalism]. Yes, we expected it from the Catholic church…. Really, we did not evaluate it. It was an error.

The recall election will take place on March 17, 2013. A recent poll found that 65 percent of Lima residents support the recall.

A hotbed of LGBT activism in the Peruvian Amazon

A small region deep in the Amazon managed an LGBT victory that has so far eluded Peru’s capital.

In 2010, the government of the Loreto region passed a nondiscrimantion ordinance that protects LGBT people. A similar ordinance proposed by Lima Mayor Susana Villarán in 2011 stalled in the face of multiple marches organized by religious conservatives.

Hate crimes remain a fact of daily life in Loreto–two trans sex workers were actually assaulted while I’ve been here. But the politics around the issue are fundamentally different than in the rest of Perú. “It’s like they have their own Yogyakarta principles,” remarked George Liendo of the national LGBT group PROMSEX, alluding to the international declaration in support of LGBT rights outlined in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in 2006.

Loreto’s geography would seem to make organizing difficult independent of the cultural barriers. The sparse population is spread over a territory that accounts for almost one-third of Peru’s landmass. The regional capital, Iquitos, is so far into the Amazon that no roads reach it. Other towns and villages are even more remote. Yet the nine-year-old LGBT group Comunidad Homosexual de Esperanza para la Región Loreto (CHERL) has a strong presence in Iquitos and is working with smaller organizations in five of the region’s smaller centers.

But CHERL activist Carlos Vela, who also works with the HIV-prevention organization Selva Amazónica, sees the community’s smallness as a plus.

“We’re closer to the authorities–let’s say we know almost everyone,” he said, adding that these social relationships have also helped members of the LGBT community work their way into positions inside the government.

An additional reason for this success seems to be that religious conservatives are much less active in local politics than in other parts of Peru, although the Seventh Day Adventists and several evangelical denominations have a wide reach even into remote villages. Loreto also borders countries with a much more liberal attitude towards homosexuality, Colombia and Brazil, which local activists say makes the conversation fundamentally different in Iquitos.

“The movement and gay life—through art, a little through culture, from the style of living of the Brazilians that always expresses … fantasy, bohemianism … it arrives faster here,” said Clauco Velasquez Wong, head of CHERL.

The region’s former congressman, José Augusto Vargas Fernández, even introduced a civil union bill during the last congress. It died in committee.

But this bill caught LGBT activists by surprise. In Loreto, couples’ rights remain a relatively low priority. The movement here is primarily focused on making the streets safer for gays and trans people (and there are a surprisingly large number of trans women in a town this size); concerns about couples’ rights are a relatively low priority. Work opportunities are also high on the agenda in a region where poverty is widespread.

As Velasquez put it:

There are very few job opportunities given to our trans friends or our gay friends because there always is a stigma or parameter that gays only can be a cook or a hairdresser, or a trans person can be a hairdresser or a sex worker…. We have to break [this stigma] and say that to be gay is synonymous with a great teacher, gay is synonymous with a great artist, that trans is synonymous with a great colorist, that trans is synonymous with a great nurse.

And despite the fact that marriage legalization is within sight in both Colombia and Brazil, Velasquez and the other LGBT activists I’ve talked to in Iquitos agree that it’s far too soon to be talking about it in Peru.

I am a diehard activist for the rights of LGBT people. But I and a group of colleagues believe that … marriage between people of the same sex still cannot be—civil unions could… Society is still not ready for the types of cases that are coming in nearby countries like Argentina…. For us, especially me, before we have marriage between people of the same sex here in Loreto, we first have to destigmatize the great prejudices that exist.

Drinking with the Peruvian congressman and other reporting updates

The past week has been a total whirlwind, so I wanted to take a minute to give an update.

First, I’m totally blown away with your generosity. It’s been less than a week since I launched my Indiegogo campaign, and I’m already more than halfway towards my goal. Thank you so much!

I spent last week running around Lima, which is an amazing city. The food is top rate (everything from chili stews to Amazonian rice-balls packed with meat to Chinese food), it’s got a beautiful walk along the cliffs overlooking the Pacific, and the people are really warm and welcoming.

I would have liked to have had more time to explore it; I spent most of my week running from back-to-back interviews. (I also missed a day recovering from food poisoning.) I met with a city councilman who provoked a backlash from religious leaders with a proposed gay rights ordinance, an alum of Liberty University who helped organize anti-gay protests, and several leaders of the LGBT movement in the city.

The highlight, though, was the time I spent with Carlos Bruce, a member of the Peruvian Congress who was the vice-presidential nominee of former President Alejandro Toledo in the last presidential campaign. (They started the campaign in the lead, but ultimately lost.) Despite the very real power of the church in Peruvian politics, Bruce has endorsed civil unions and took time to record a video for Peru’s equivalent of the “It Gets Better” project in the middle of the campaign.

He’s not entirely circumspect in his personal life, either. The night after our formal interview in the Congress, I met him at the bar he owns in the Barranco neighborhood, which he says is one of the city’s few bars attracting a mixed gay and straight clientele. That night, it was hosting a “fashion show” featuring women in bikinis and male bodybuilders in boxer shorts.

“Something for every taste,” Bruce said.

I’ve since headed inland, taking a break from interviewing to try and make sense of what I’ve gathered in Lima and in Argentina. The traveling has been a little bit more difficult than I expected–for some reason Peruvian wifi networks don’t like my computer very much, and it’s been a balancing act to stay connected, find hotels, and get myself from one place to the next.

I write now from a dumpy hostel on the outskirts of Cajamarca in the northern highlands, where I was awoken several times by packs of barking dogs and crowing roosters. I hope to get settled somewhere more manageable shortly.

Thanks again for everyone’s support, and I’ll check back in soon.