Anti-Gay Marriage Protests in Western Europe. How They Emerged and Why They Failed

The question of gay marriage has occupied a prominent role in the political agenda of several Western countries over the past decade. While the academic scholarship has paid great attention to the mobilization of LGBT groups, the same has not been done for the activism of those actors that opposed gay marriage despite the strong mobilization in several countries. This Paper is aimed to provide a theoretical framework to study the outbreaks and outcomes of the protests against gay marriage in Western Europe. It hypothesises that a crucial variable for understanding the variations in protests is the level of institutionalization of religious values and how institutionalization has defined the roles of churches, political parties, and civil society. The Paper sustains the idea that limited social discontent against gay marriage happened in countries whose national political cultures tended to consider religious values as external to the political field (e.g. the UK, Scandinavian countries) or where religious ideals had undergone a dramatic process of deinstitutionalization (e.g. the Netherlands, Ireland). Instead, in those nations where religious ideals had a remarkable impact on leading political parties (e.g. Italy) or in civil society actors (e.g. France, Spain) there was strong resistance to the extension of gay marriage rights. The theoretical claims advanced by the Paper are supported by a comparative analysis of empirical material collected in four countries (e.g. France, the UK, Ireland, Italy) that have recently legalized gay marriage and in which the debate on this question followed paradigmatically different trajectories.