As Pride Month begins on June 1, the Queer Diversity Association (LSVD+) launched a campaign to safeguard queer people within the Basic Law. Through a mailing tool, interested individuals can directly reach out to their district representatives.
“For us, Pride Month this year is about the long-overdue addition to Article 3 of the Basic Law,” explained Andre Lehmann, a member of the LSVD+’s national board. In addition to the mailing tool, the organization plans to apply pressure this month: “At the CSDs, which will take place across Germany in the coming weeks, we have the opportunity to publicly display this community’s demand in a unified way. Together with queer organizations on the local, state, and federal levels, we will make it clear that we will not tolerate further delays.”
Specifically, the aim is to amend Article 3 in the first sentence of paragraph 3 to include the phrase “sexual identity” or “sexual and gender identity.” The current text reads: “Nobody shall be disadvantaged or favored due to their sex, their origin, their race, their language, their home and origin, their faith, or their religious or political views.” In 1994, the clause was extended to prohibit discrimination on the basis of disability. All democratic parties in the Bundestag, with the exception of the Union (CDU/CSU), have been calling for a corresponding reform for years, to make backsliding into past times unlikely. The backdrop is that the anti-gay Paragraph 175, which the Federal Constitutional Court had previously deemed lawful in its Nazi-era version in 1957, was only abolished in 1994. In Germany alone, more than 50,000 men were convicted under this provision.
Although CDU‑led states such as Berlin, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Schleswig‑Holstein in the Bundesrat had already supported a related initiative last September, the Union in the Bundestag has thus far held back. The AfD, by contrast, rejects the move outright (TheColu.mn reported). LGBTQIA organizations fear that the far-right party could criminalize queer life again if it gains power.
On June 1, the AfD will reveal its anti-queer stance: instead of celebrating Pride Month, they want to observe the “Stolzmonat,” a kind of heterosexual nationalist counter-design to the CSD month. In numerous social media images that are currently being promoted, members of parliament or district associations appear with anti-queer messages — for example, the rainbow flag tossed into a trash can.
Politicians from other parties warn against an escalation: Nyke Slawik, the Greens’ queer-policy spokesperson, wrote on Facebook: “This year’s Pride Month is a warning! We will become a target,” the Leverkusen politician said. “We invite everyone to join us at the CSDs, to make queer life visible and to send a message of diversity and tolerance. We will never surrender the streets to the enemies of democracy.”
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Maik Brückner, the Green’s queer-policy spokesperson, reminded on Instagram that the Stonewall uprising was a “ruckus.” He posted a series of provocative memes with captions like “Happy Pride to everyone except AfD- and CDU/CSU gays.”
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The SPD’s LGBTQ+ caucus is launching its annual CSD campaign under the banner “Together Defend Diversity.” “We will not allow civil liberties to be rolled back, queer people to be demonized as the enemy, or societal groups to be pitted against each other. Defending diversity means defending democracy,” stated co-chair Carola Ebhardt. Falko Droßmann, the SPD’s queer-policy spokesperson, also recalled the origins of CSD on Facebook: “Pride began as a protest, a stand against oppression, and a fight to exist openly and safely.” For many queer people around the world, visibility remains a source of courage today as well.
The Pride Month remembrance ties back to the Stonewall uprising in June 1969, when patrons at the Stonewall Inn in New York City decisively resisted a police raid fueled by queerphobic hostility for several days. The first official national recognition of June as “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month” in the United States occurred in 1999 under President Bill Clinton. Since then, the political winds have shifted in the United States: the Trump administration did not celebrate Pride Month, and many conservatives continue to reframe the month—echoing the German debate around the AfD—such as Tennessee’s designation of Pride Month as the “Month of the Nuclear Family,” explicitly excluding rainbow families (TheColu.mn reported). (dk)
