LGBT Rights World Wide
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Same-sex intercourse legal Marriage recognized, but not performed
Same-sex unions not recognized
Laws restricting freedom of expression and association
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Same-sex intercourse illegal Illegal, although no arrests for same-sex intercourse for the last three years
Up to life in prison
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Image and Table helpfully provided by Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0 License, and the GNU Free Documentation License
In America, it is currently a hot and debated topic, the rights of sexual and gender minorities, and it makes sense that Americans are more attuned to these issues than those of LGBT Rights around the world. But, it is a subject that we, as American citizens, should be more aware of. Not only to better inform our opinion on the matter, but also so we can know what horrors and tragedies are befalling LGBT people outside of our own country. We spend too much time on the internet only talking and learning about our own issues, and not the issues of the world around us. There are many countries, the majority, world wide that do not have proper legal and social protections for LGBT people, and there are even still some countries where being gay, trans, or anything else not heterosexual and cisgender are illegal, some with the penalty being summary execution. This is not a state of the world we would want to live in ourselves, so why do we let it slide when it's an ocean away?
Truth is? Sometimes, it's not even an ocean away. Being gay is illegal in some of the carribean island nations, and because many Americans take vacations and cruises to these islands, this is especially something you need to be aware of, if not for yourself than for your freinds or family who might fall victam to these laws without even knowing they exist in the first place.
And even if being gay may be legal in some places, the social factors and actual implimentation of these legalities may make these places harmful to be in, such as Jamaica, where gay people are frequently assulted and sometimes killed, just for being gay.
Russia is one of, if not the, largest nation on earth. It's so large, and constitutes so many different ethnic and cultural divisions, that it's internally broken up into constituatant republics. One of these republics is Chechnya, or Чечня in russian. Russia already has issues with LGBT rights, having banned and restricted discussions and openness on a national level, but in Chechnya, it's even worse. It's flat out illegal to be gay in Chechnya, and often times extrajudicial killings are carried out by freinds or family members if they find out someone they know is gay. People have been released from incarceration expressly so that they can be "honor killed" by family members instead of continued living. There was a media uproar back in april of 2017 surrounding this, but once it was off of twitters front page, most people simply forgot about it or assumed it had been "taken care of". It has not.
This is the man who said that "There are no gay people in Chechnya, and if there were, send them to canada, to cleanse of us of them". (Quote translated from Russian, courtesy of Sasha)
Recently, the commisioner for Dar es Salaam in Tanzania Paul Makonda has made the situation for LGBT and gay people in Tanzania even worse than it has been for years. In addition to being able to be sent to jail for up to 30 years for being gay, he has incited witch hunts of suspected gay people and sex workers. This is unfortunently just expanding a trend of African nations persecuting and or killing gay people for being gay. Almost all the countries or zones of control in africa that do have rights and or give gay people safety are all still directly under control of european powers like the United Kingdom or Spain. No independent nation in africa, to my knowledge, has rights or protections for gay people, with the exception of South Africa.
Conversion Therapy is a problem in America, along with world wide. Canadaian activist have been trying to ban it in the maple and snow country for years, with varying success. In europe, only the Swiss and Maltanese have inacted a ban, with only countries such as The UK and germany elsewise even having laws in consideration. It is on this issue that some Americans, especially having read the news about how bad things can be in south american countries, would be shocked to realize that around half of south american countries have full on banned the practice, and yet The USA can't even get it to vote federally.
And this is a bad problem, a very bad problem. People who try to support it say that being gay or allowing young people to think and act gay will lead them to sin or death or any other number of 'wrong' things. They will try to say that being gay is bad for your health, both physically and mentally, or that being gay causes you to be suicidal or something of that sort. It is, in all actuallity, the exact opposite. There is ample evidence that societal prejudice causes significant medical, psychological and other harms to LGBTQ people. For example, research on the issue of family acceptance of LGBTQ youth conducted at San Francisco State University found that "compared with LGBTQ young people who were not rejected or were only a little rejected by their parents and caregivers because of their gay or transgender identity, highly rejected LGBTQ young people were:
