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WHAT IS THE ATTITUDE OF BELARUSIANS TO SEXUAL MINORITIES?

There is no telling the issue of attitude towards sexual minorities be widely presented in the Belarusian public discourse. To tell the truth, if take political discourse, official mass media have made several attempts to present the opponents of the government as advocates of these minorities or members thereof. The oppositionists reacted to it rather sharply classifying such propagandistic moves as a discredit attempt. It is noteworthy that some oppositionists (e.g., Belarusian Christian Democracy) have frequently been speaking rather hard to the point of unconventional sexual behaviour treating such behaviour as a breach of the Commandments and perversion of the human nature. Besides, even the opposition forces, though more liberal in this question, would rather treat the problem in accordance with the principle ”let the sleeping dog lie” refraining from either criticizing or asserting the rights of the sexual minorities to express their position.

A specific ”litmus paper” of the attitude towards sexual minorities proved to be the public reaction to the attempt of organizing a gay-parade in Minsk in May this year. The Event was broken up by militia forces; many of the participants were arrested. However, not only this routine reaction of the law enforcement system is of interest, and even not the xenophobic article that appeared in the governmental newspaper Respulika the day after the break-up of the event, but a vigorous discussion of this event in the Belarusian blog-sphere. It is clear that denizens of web-discussions are not a representative group of the whole community; opinions in the blog-sphere are more contrastive than in the whole community; the denizens are most often young qualified city-dwellers. However the passions that were flaring in the web-discussions on the gay-parade showed a widely-spread negative attitude towards sexual minorities even among the people of good democratic views.

The question concerning the attitude towards sexual minorities was included in June-2010 poll of IISEPS (Table 1).

Table 1. Distribution of answers to the question, “In the middle of May in Minsk representatives of sexual minorities – homosexuals, lesbians and transvestites – made an attempt to organize “Slav Gay-Parade 2010″, but were scattered by militia. Some people have a positive attitude towards sexual minorities, while others have a negative attitude. And what is your personal attitude towards them?”

Variant of answer

%

Positive

3.4

Don’t care

39.5

Negative

56.7

NA

0.4

Generally speaking, a favourable attitude towards sexual minorities is typical not only to the representatives of these minorities, just as a favourable attitude towards ethnic minorities is characteristic not only of the representatives of these ethnos. To put it differently, 3.4% of those favouring sexual minorities is not the percentage of these minorities in the Belarusian community.

As is clear from Table 1, a negative attitude towards individuals of unconventional sexual orientation was expressed by the overwhelming majority. The dependence of such attitude on the socio-demographic group and political preferences of a respondent is clarified by the data of Table 2.

Table 2. Relation of the attitude towards sexual minorities to socio-demographic characteristics and political preferences, %

Characteristics Attitude towards sexual minorities

Positive

Don’t care

Negative

Gender:
Male

2.4

39.1

58.2

Female

4.2

39.9

55.5

Age:
18-29

7.1

49.7

42.6

30-59

2.8

42.8

54.2

60 +

1.3

24.2

73.7

Education:
Primary

3.5

26.5

68.1

Incomplete secondary

1.9

31.6

66.0

Secondary

3.3

42.3

54.2

Vocational

3.5

35.2

61.0

Higher

5.0

53.6

40.9

Type of settlement:
Capital

2.1

38.3

59.6

Regional center

3.8

51.5

44.4

Big city

3.6

48.8

47.0

Town

5.5

39.5

54.3

Village

2.3

25.9

71.6

Income per family member:
under 270000 roubles

5.8

33.6

60.6

270000-450000 roubles

3.0

37.1

59.3

450000-900000 roubles

3.4

40.8

55.7

over 900000 roubles

3.4

58.6

37.9

Use of Internet:
Every day

4.0

52.3

43.7

Several times a week

4.1

57.4

38.1

Several times a month

7.3

49.3

43.3

Several times a year

3.1

41.5

55.4

Don’t use

2.6

30.4

66.6

Don’t know what it is

0

19.7

77.0

If you had to choose between integration with Russia and European Union membership, what would you choose?
Integration with Russia

3.3

36.4

60.1

EU-membership

4.2

47.8

48.0

Do you trust the president?
Trust

3.6

32.6

63.4

Don’t trust

3.3

51.5

45.1

Do you trust opposition the parties?
Trust

3.2

47.0

49.8

Don’t trust

3.5

40.7

55.4

The most distinguishing factors proved to be age and education: the percentage of those who has a negative attitude towards sex minorities grows linearly and quite noticeably higher when passing to the groups with lower education and senior age. In the groups of young citizens and individuals with higher education the number of holders of a neutral or “don’t care” attitude exceeds the number of those having a negative attitude towards sex minorities. Moreover, the attitudes differ subject to income and place of residence. Though there is no linear dependence on the place of residence: the number of antagonists of sexual minorities grows when passing from big cities to little towns and villages, but Minsk falls out of this tendency – the situation in it is the same as in towns. Capitals are usually more tolerant as compared to the rest of the country. Pro bably, in this case we see the effect of the history of Minsk development, the percentage of first-generation city-dwellers who have brought with them to the capital the moral concepts of their ancestors is high enough.

However, this explanation could hardly be called comprehensive; it, inter alia, does not explain a similar “tooth” to be observed in respect of sex minorities depending on the frequency of Internet use. Here we can see a similar tendency: the more frequently a respondent uses the Internet, the more tolerant the attitude, but for one exception – those using the Internet every day are a bit less tolerant than those using it several times a week.

The attitude does not practically depend on the sex – women manifest just a little more tolerance in this respect, which does not change the overall assessment ratio.

Political preferences have a weaker impact on the attitude towards sex minorities as compared to the socio-demographic characteristics. Euro-integration favourers trusting the opposition parties and not trusting the president are characterized by more tolerance, though even among them those who have a negative attitude towards unconventional sexual orientation make up approximately 50%. At the same time, among the proponents of the integration with Russia, the president’s favourers and opposition opponents, about 60% hold the same point of view – it is considerably less than among senior citizens and rural dwellers.

The Belarusian situation appears quite similar to the situation in Russia. In 2006 the Public Opinion Fund conducted an opinion poll about the attitude of Russians towards sexual minorities. According to the survey “there is no univocal attitude towards representatives of sexual minorities: almost half of the respondents (47%) admitted that they treat homosexuals and lesbians deprecatingly (meanwhile, this opinion is most often shared by men and representatives of the lowest resource social groups: senior citizens, undereducated citizens and rural dwellers); a bit lower (40%) is the percentage of those alleging they treat the representatives of sexual minorities without deprecation (this position is often shared by women, young citizens, highly educated respondents as well as Moscow dwellers and other polis-dwellers)”.

As can be seen figures as well as socio-demographic restrictions are similar.