While homophobic undertones can sometimes be detected in society, young people are showing themselves to be more and more tolerant with regard to gays and lesbians. A European survey, conducted among thousands of students and supervised by Salvatore D’Amore, a researcher at the University of Liege, shows that three quarters of them are in favor of marriage between same-sex couples and to a lesser extent, same-sex parenting. Belgians were seen to be particularly open-minded, even though religion and political conservatism is still evident. 

The Champ-de-Mars was black with people on February 13^th 2013. Between 340,000 and 800,000 French people (depending on whether you believe the official police figure or that given by the organizers demonstrated against marriage for everyone and adoption by same-sex parents.  The protest lasted several months, and continued even after promulgation of the law on May 18th of the same year.

In Belgium, where a similar text has been applied for more than ten years, such demonstrations have also fanned the flames of emotion. Some members of the public find it intolerable that some people should be so vehemently opposed to granting the same rights they enjoy to other people, while others continue to fan the flames of this emotional debate that was thought to have calmed down.

Calmed down? The word hardly seems inappropriate if we look at such tragic events as the death of Ihsane Jarfi, who was beaten to death by four men he met by chance or the death of Jacques Kotnik, killed by six blows from a hammer by Raphaël Wargnies, who wanted to “take revenge on homosexuals”. In June 2011, a young man was brutally beaten with the legs of a chair simply because of his sexual orientation. And then there are the insults, the harassment, the physical attacks and discrimination against associations that defend the rights of ‘holebis’ (gays, lesbians, transsexuals and transgender individuals).

There seems to be a general air of homophobia. Yet things are not as black as they seem. “The French situation has given voice to certain opinions, but Belgium remains a tolerant country”, observes Salvatore D’Amore, who is a psychologist and lecturer at the University of Liege. “Homosexual identity is becoming more and more normalized. Many well-known people have ‘come out’, the subject has been well discussed in the press and in all American and European television series there is a homosexual person!”    

Young people in particular are showing themselves to be more and more tolerant of homosexuality. This is the main and first conclusion of a broad study being conducted by the Liege-based researcher, in collaboration with Professor Robert-Jay Green (California school of professional psychology, Alliant university of San Francisco), focussing on heterosexual attitudes to couples and homosexual parenting.