You’re quite right, I’ve spent a day looking at the evidence and I can’t support the link I suggested between poverty and homophobia.

@ Eric

Yeah, that’s what I’ve been seeing today. It’s the end of church dominated politics that’s the kicker. That there’s a link between better welfare provision and the diminishing power of the church due to people not having to rely on the church for support has been well documented.

“So if you’re a politician or religious leader who hopes to gain power via the mob, you attack programs that make the mob less likely. If that’s too cynical a view, then you can say that politicians that actively dismantle such programs innocently because of economic ideology get support from the mob and the mobs grows because of the lack of such programs, increasing their ability to attack the programs yet again through positive feedback.”

But the mobs you speak of don’t want welfare and education dismantled because they benefit from them. What these mobs want is a scapegoat for their problems that the leaders cannot quickly fix. Furthermore, this does not properly address the motives of the politicians and religious leaders who promote racism and homophobia. That is not an economic ideology but a religious and sectarian one. The countries that you note are more liberal and economically adjusted have one other thing in common (something the United States does not share). They are much more secular.

I’ve provided ample evidence of that.

I can accept that places like Singapore and the US have high GDP and yet have high levels of homophobia, but they are also countries with high levels of income disparity. Poverty can be considered relative when considered by a country by country basis.

Rich countries with a low GINI co-efficient tend to be more liberal and less homophobic. Where Rich countries with a higher co-efficient can be as extremist as countries with a low GDP.

As GDP goes go up, along with equalising measures such as education, welfare and the chances of having a good job, which increase the standard of living, the country tends to be more liberal.

It’s not the immigrant’s fault that BNP voters are badly educated

As far as the UK goes, the BNP is linked explicitly with the white working class people with low paid/part-time/contractual work who believe they are threatened by immigration, who have had poor education and live in areas with low integration. This is the largest extremist Party in the UK with well documented homophobic and racist views.

You’re partially correct. Economic desperation tends to create a breeding ground for bigotry. That has been demonstrated throughout history, and it explains a lot of what’s going on in Uganda now.

But it’s U.S. evangelicals who deserve the blame for helping to channel that bigotry toward GLBT people and amplifying it with anti-gay conferences and prayer revivals and distribution of disinformation, working off of homophobic ground laid by the Christian missionaries who accompanied European colonizers in earlier times.

I’m not against education and poverty relief, of course, but I’m not sure how much it would help the GLBT people there, at least not within the next several decades. After all, Botswana is a middle-income country, and it still has sodomy laws on the books; Singapore is one of the richest countries in the world, and homophobia is still a big issue there and a major reason why it hasn’t repealed the old British sodomy law.