page_title: LGBT rights opposition
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: LGBT rights opposition / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Chart of prosecutions under § 175 in years 1902-1987; up to 1943 with bestialityEvents: 1907-1909: Harden-Eulenburg Affair; 1914-1918 WW1; 1924: Fritz Haarmann; 1957: Bundesverfassungsgericht Deutsch: Verurteilungen nach § 175, bis 1943 mit Sodomie, Ereignisse: 1907-1909: Harden-Eulenburg-Affäre; 1914-1918: Erster Weltkrieg; 1924: Fritz Haarmann; 1957: Urteil des Bundesverfassungsgerichts Italiano: Processi per omosessualità e bestialismo celebrati in Germania in base al § 175 tedesco negli anni 1902-1987. Sono evidenziati alcuni eventi e scandali: 1907-1909: Scandalo Harden-Eulenburg; 1914-1918 prima guerra mondiale; 1924: caso di Fritz Haarmann; 1957: Bundesverfassungsgericht. Polski: Wykres liczby skazanych z § 175 w latach 1902-1987
context_page_description: LGBT rights opposition is the opposition to legal rights, proposed or enacted, for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.
  Organizations influential in LGBT rights opposition frequently oppose the enactment of laws making same-sex marriage legal, the passage of anti-discrimination laws aimed at curtailing anti-LGBT discrimination, including in employment and housing, the passage of anti-bullying laws to protect LGBT minors, laws decriminalizing same-gender relationships, and other LGBT rights related laws. These groups are often religious or socially conservative in nature. Such opposition can be motivated by homophobia, transphobia, bigotry, animosity, religion, moral beliefs, political ideologies, or other reasons.
  Laws that LGBT rights opponents may be opposed to include civil unions or partnerships, LGBT parenting and adoption, military service, access to assisted reproductive technology, and access to sex reassignment surgery and hormone replacement therapy for transgender individuals.
  According to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "natural law theory offers the most common intellectual defense for differential treatment of gays and lesbians".
context_section_description: The first organized gay rights movement arose in the late nineteenth century in Germany.
  In the 1920s and into the early 1930s, there were LGBT communities in cities like Berlin; German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld was one of the most notable spokespeople for LGBT rights at this time. When the Nazi party came to power in 1933, one of the party's first acts was to burn down Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, where many prominent Nazis had been treated for perceived sexual problems. Initially tolerant to the homosexuality of Ernst Röhm and his followers, many gay men were purged from the Nazi Party following the Night of the Long Knives and the Section 175 Laws began to be enforced again, with gay men interned in concentration camps by 1938.
  Under the Nazi rule in Germany, the dismantling of rights for LGBT individuals was approached in two ways. By strengthening and re-enforcing existing laws that had fallen into disuse, male homosexuality was effectively re-criminalised; homosexuality was treated as a medical disorder, but at a social level rather than individual level intended to reduce the incidence of homosexuality. The treatment was a program of eugenics, starting with sterilisation, then a system of working people to death in forced labour camps, and eventually refined by medical scientists to include euthanasia. The driving force was the elimination of perceived degeneracy at various levels – genetic, social, identity and practice, and the elimination of such genetic material in society. Lifton wrote about this in his book The Nazi Doctors:
  [...] sexology and defense of homosexuality [...] were aspects of "sexual degeneration, a breakdown of the family and loss of all that is decent," and ultimately the destruction of the German Volk. [...] medicine was to join in the great national healing mission, and the advance image of what Nazi doctors were actually to become: the healer turned killer. [...] Sterilization policies were always associated with the therapeutic and regenerative principles of the biomedical vision: with the "purification of the national body" and the "eradication of morbid hereditary dispositions." Sterilization was considered part of "negative eugenics" [...]
  It is argued that the number of gay people who perished in the Holocaust was quite low in comparison to other Holocaust victims, and confined to Germany itself, based on estimates that of 50,000 gay people who came before the courts, between 5,000 and 15,000 ended up in concentration camps. However, many of those who came before the courts were directed (or volunteered) to undergo sterilisation/castration; they would be included with others who, in line with the historic shift in German society (that started with Westphal, and developed through Krafft-Ebing to Magnus Hirschfeld, of homosexuality being seen as having a neurological, endocrinological or genetic basis), were treated for homosexuality as a medical rather than criminal matter. Those treated by psychiatrists and thereby included in the T4 project to eliminate people with alleged medical disorders would not be reflected in the rates of those dealt with as criminals.
  After the Second World War, the United States became more intolerant of homosexuality, but many gay men and lesbians decided to reveal their gay identities after meeting others in the military. Many gay bars and villages were created, and a whole gay subculture formed. Campaigns for gay rights began to develop, initially in the UK. Towards the end of the 1960s homosexuality began to be decriminalised and de-medicalised in areas such as the UK, New Zealand, Australia, North America and Europe, in the context of the sexual revolution and anti-psychiatry movements. Organized opposition to gay and lesbian rights began in the 1970s.
caption: Graph of convictions under Germany's Paragraph 175. Spike occurs during Nazi era, and dropoff after partial repeal in 1969.
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