The Comparison of the Differences Between Chinese and Western Attitudes Towards Homosexuality

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-062-6_127How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Homosexuality; Attitudes; China; Western countries; Public; Religion; Mass media; Legislation; culture; Law

Abstract

Homosexuality has been a controversial topic in the world. This article takes the attitudes towards homosexuality in China and the West and reviews the reasons for its formation to study the legalization of gay marriage from the relationship between law and morality. After reviewing previous literature, the main arguments of this paper are 1) During the past few decades in almost all western countries, the general public has gradually changed their attitude towards homosexuality from unacceptable to support because of the improvements in government legislation and the efforts of homosexual people to break traditional stereotype; 2) Different from Western, according to traditional Chinese Confucianism, the gay community in China is largely not accepted in the current society. They have been discriminated against varying degrees, but they have also received more tolerance and respect; 3) The reasons for negative attitudes toward homosexuality in China are Confucian religious ethics and a relatively lagging legal system for homosexuality, but many Western countries already allow same-sex marriage and have a relatively rich cultural background for homosexuality; 4) More relevant legislation and positive mess media have significant influence to the public opinion. In addition, individual religion and education level might lead to different opinions on homosexuality, but it may depend on other factors such as family background, age, and gender. Finally, this paper contributes to providing a comparative perspective to analyze the differences between Chinese and Western attitudes. Furthermore, this paper looks forward to the legalization of gay marriage from legislative and social aspects.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Yuxin Li
AU  - Tongtong Peng
AU  - Qianzhu Wang
AU  - Fan Wu
AU  - Wenqian Yang
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/07/11
TI  - The Comparison of the Differences Between Chinese and Western Attitudes Towards Homosexuality
BT  - Proceedings of the 2023 2nd International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities and Arts (SSHA 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 980
EP  - 989
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-062-6_127
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-062-6_127
ID  - Li2023
ER  -