This is kind of old news
Anyway, in the start of the year, a few private companies conducted polls that showed that the Brazilian population was mainly against the distribution of the material. Unfortunately, the Brazilian population is still too conservative.
And the material itself (nicknamed the "gay kit" in Brazil) was pretty much retarded. I was never opposed to its distribution, but I do think it would be a massive waste of money. Not because I am against a better anti-homophobic policy, but because the material itself didn't help much. Anyone who has attended a public school in Brazil knows how terrible the kind of material distributed by the Ministry of Education is. The gay kit had some really stupid situations and they preferred not to include a gay kiss in the videos that accompanied it. In fact, the team that produced the kit stated they took 3 months to decide whether or not to include the gay kiss because they were not aware of how much the tongue could be inserted into the mouth in order for it not to be considered porn
And the evangelicals were not the only problem. All religious bodies and conservatives were opposed to it, even the non-religious ones. The ultra-conservative Brazilian Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) and the Plineo Correa de Oliveira Institute (IPCO), which are two very well known catholic ultraconservative associations, both campaigned against it. So did the CNBB, which is the main conference of catholic bishops around here.
The media just focused on the evangelicals because they have their own parliamentary front. Parliamentary politics is something really weird in Brazil. The parties don't really work properly, so the MPs gather in "parliamentary fronts", which are basically pseudo-parties, but that include politicians from multiple official parties (most of the times, including politicians from both the government base and the opposition). One of these fronts is the evangelical one, which opposed the "gay kit".
There is another front called the "Ruralist Front", which exists to support the interests of the rich farmers and landowners in the country. It is composed basically by catholic conservatives, and most ruralists also campaigned against the kit. Together, evangelicals, ruralists and some other conservatives make up a majority in Congress, and that has been the case since the current constitution was adopted. So that is another good indicator of how conservative the Brazilian society actually is.
Anyway, the biggest problem there is actually something else. How the president from a leftist party in a country that works under the presidential system can take such a conservative action? The answer is simple: Brazil is not fully presidential. The Brazilian system of government has been referred in the academia by "coalition-based presidential system" (
"presidencialismo de coalisão" in Portuguese). It is essentially different from "full" presidential systems, like the US one, because coalitions are the norm around here. No president can govern without a majority in the congress. This led to this weird situation that we have been in since 2002, in which the government is led by a socialist party, but the coalition actually includes a lot of conservatives. Without the conservatives, the socialist government has no clear majority in the Congress, so they need to concede on several points. Dilma needed her budget and her programs to be approved in Congress. The conservatives (evangelicals and ruralists) threatened to block it and vote with the opposition, so she went ahead and vetoed it, guaranteeing that her most important programs (i.e. the ones that will most likely get her reelected) would continue..
PoFo ethnic party statistics: http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8&p=14042520#p14042520
- By ingliz
- By Doug64
- By JohnRawls