One organization we worked on particularly was the World Congress of Families, which by now has become an organization that is studied by many scholars who look at conservative normal organizations. It’s an American NGO that was founded in the 1990s by an American and by a Russian, and it seeks to promote traditional family values by organizing global conferences on a regular level by lobbying politicians. And so what I find very striking about the World Congress of Families is not only that it has existed for so many years rather successfully, but that really the point of the whole organization is to weave a narrative. To weave a narrative according to which liberal values are damaging to society, they’re damaging to family, and they have to be resisted. And it’s really very much about liberalism in a broad sense. It’s not only about LGBTI rights. So when you attend these conferences or also when you talk to people, there is always this sense of how they feel that they are on a slippery slope. So the moment you give up on traditional gender roles, women leave the family and have a workplace, then eventually you’ll have a disintegrating family, and then it will get worse, and then you will have same-sex marriage. And they feel like on a slippery slope very much. And this was a way of seeing the world and seeing moral problems that was new for me. It’s something that I, in a way, learned by being exposed to the environment very long, doing lots of interviews, trying to understand how people were reasoning.
[Clip] What was striking about the World Congress of Families
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