It's Human Nature
The far-right Freedom Party sees the advance of LGBTQ rights in Austria as an existential threat to children and the nuclear family
Yesterday, 10 people—one teacher and nine children aged 15 to 17—were killed and 12 injured in the course of a school shooting at a grammar school in the Lend district of Graz, an event that was described by chancellor Christian Stocker as a “national tragedy” that “deeply shocked the entire country.”
The perpetrator, reported to be a 21-year-old former pupil of the school, killed himself in a bathroom at the conclusion of his rampage. He was a lone wolf and possessed legal ownership of two weapons: a pistol and a shotgun. The school was evacuated, police secured the premises, and investigations into the shooting remain ongoing. The perpetrator’s motive remains unclear.
“This horror cannot be put into words,” President Alexander Van der Bellen said. “In this hour, we stand together to shoulder one another’s pain. In the difficult days to come, our country will show that its strength lies in this sense of togetherness.”
I will continue to provide information on this story in this newsletter as it develops.
Servus!
So read the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ)’s 2024 election manifesto:
The infringements on fundamental rights during the COVID-19 pandemic marked a unique breach of taboos in the history of the Second Republic. Mandatory masking, testing and, in particular, vaccination constituted impermissible state interference in the right of people to determine the fate of their own bodies. These constraints were accompanied by unprecedented indoctrination and brainwashing. These methods are now also being used in other areas—from gender madness and LGBTIQ propaganda to the early sexualization of children.
This paragraph is rather revealing in terms of how the FPÖ has come to view the issue of LGBTQ rights under its leader Herbert Kickl, who has taken the far-right even further to the right. First, it shows how COVID- and vaccine-skepticism and opposition to LGBTQ rights are, on the far-right, part of an inseparable nexus of minority positions that have a fundamental conspiratorial character. Second, the granting of rights and representation to a minority, in this case the LGBTQ minority, is seen to infringe on the rights of the majority, which is what they mean here by the individual.
“Conceiving demographic decline as a threat akin to total war and attributing population loss to the West’s cultural subversion policies are the two defining features of [Vladimir] Putin’s political thinking,” Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes noted in a recent article in the IWMpost. On the far-right, LGBTQ persons represent a danger to “the traditional family with a father and mother,” which is “undoubtedly the best environment in which to grow up feeling secure,” and to children, with transgender people and drag queens in particular often conflated with pedophiles. Again, from the FPÖ’s manifesto:
Our children must have the opportunity to develop freely and without interference—including with regard to their sexuality. More and more children and young people are becoming confused about their gender identity as a result of this propaganda and want to undergo physical changes. We are committed to protecting our children and strongly reject indoctrination with transgender ideology.
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Transgender and gender non-conforming people in particular have taken on a kind of centrality in far-right thought and ideology. They are the living embodiment of a perversion of human nature: “Anyone who believes that the number of genders can be arbitrarily determined or that gender can be changed at will disregards the essence of human beings.” Opposition to LGBTQ rights on the FPÖ’s part, then, is nothing short of civilizational. The very future of the human race, and a world of reproductive heteronormative nuclear families defined by sex, sexual conformity, the gender binary, and traditional gender roles, is at stake.
An FPÖ-People’s Party (ÖVP) government would have been a dark period for Austria’s LGBTQ community—which celebrates Pride this weekend—and transgender and gender non-conforming Austrians in particular. The protocol of the negotiations between the two parties contains not one reference to “LGBT” or similar. As a community with rights, protections, or particular needs, it simply doesn’t exist. The FPÖ tried to insert the following text into the coalition agreement—"Our childcare facilities must be free of ideology. Sex education and gender ideology have no place in kindergarten.”—though it does not appear as if the ÖVP ever gave it the all-clear.
By contrast, the ÖVP-Social Democratic Party (SPÖ)-NEOS’s program for government offers several advancements in the realm of LGBTQ rights. The coalition has committed to banning harmful conversion therapy practices based on sexual orientation and gender identity, something the previous ÖVP-Green coalition failed to do. It will implement new regulations to protect intersex minors from unnecessary medical interventions. The state will recognize same-sex marriages even in situations where those contracts are not recognized in the married person’s home country and allow for adoptions by same-sex couples even if one partner does not have Austrian citizenship. PrEP will be covered by public health insurance. Theirs is a tremendously ambitious agenda, one that would bring tangible improvements to the lives of LGBTQ people in Austria, much to the chagrin, one can anticipate, of the country’s far-right opposition.
Bis bald!
Great article, thanks!