Word: gay
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...European Difference Europe's political landscape has not always been so welcoming. Thirty years ago, as Sigurdardottir began her political career, "Iceland was extremely homophobic," says Baldur Thorhallsson, a political scientist at the University of Iceland. Education changed that. Over the last 30 years Samtokin '78, a Reykjavik-based gay-rights organization, worked with the national media to produce news programs that gave gay men and women a human face, and acquainted the public with the prejudice gays encounter. Activists visited high schools to create gay role models and counter stereotypes. By 1996 the country had legalized gay civil unions...
...larger countries like Britain, with relatively deeper pockets of conservatism, progress has come more slowly. In 1988, Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government passed a Local Government Act, Section 28 of which barred the "promotion of homosexuality" in schools and defined gay partnerships as "pretended family relationships." Such homophobia emboldened both gay-rights advocates and future politicians. "People came out who otherwise wouldn't have, and it woke up our heterosexual friends and family," says Michael Cashman, now a Labour Member of the European Parliament. In 1989, Cashman and actor Ian McKellen co-founded campaign group Stonewall. Around the same time...
...when Tony Blair's Labour government came to power, the ground was shifting. Chris Smith, the only out MP for 14 years, was named Minister of Culture. "The really astonishing thing was that no one pointed out a gay man had been appointed to the Cabinet," he says from Britain's Environment Agency, which he now runs. The same year in Exeter, a constituency in southwestern England, Conservative party candidate Adrian Rogers attacked his openly gay opponent Ben Bradshaw by describing homosexuality as "a sterile, disease-ridden and godforsaken occupation." Voters awarded Bradshaw the seat, in one of the biggest...
...Gay-baiting has proved equally ineffective in Germany. Andreas Heilmann, a social scientist at Berlin's Humboldt University, believes that a politician who discloses his sexual orientation is insulated from criticism. "They embody a certain authenticity and credibility because they're open," he says. By contrast, opponents who make sexuality an issue are typically viewed as mean-spirited and politically incompetent. When Hamburg's former vice mayor Ronald Schill outed the city's Mayor Ole von Beust at a press conference in 2003, Germans mocked Schill, and Von Beust went on to win the 2004 elections in a landslide...
...helps that Europe's liberal laws - 18 European countries allow gay marriage or same-sex civil unions, and gay couples in nine countries can adopt children - have largely normalized perceptions of gays. Christophe Girard, the deputy mayor of Paris, believes the legal framework for gay partnerships has "forced respect." (Girard is in a civil partnership with his partner of 13 years and has two children). "Gays are no longer just seen as partiers, but also as parents," he says. Paris, of course, is not rural France. But even in Barsac, a village of 2,200 people in the country...