On the lawn in front of the Bundestag, activists set up more than 1,051 rainbow flags on Basic Law Day on May 23. It is the number of crimes registered against queer people in the past year. This is a significant increase compared to the previous year, when there were 782 crimes. A high number of unreported cases can be assumed.
The campaign was initiated by the Basic Law for All (GFA) initiative, which advocates that Article 3 of the Basic Law also includes a variety of sexual and gender identities. The paragraph prohibits discrimination based on origin, skin color, belief, disability or political opinion.
“One would think that the Basic Law, our constitution, protects the rights of all people equally. Unfortunately it doesn’t. In contrast to their heterosexual, cisgender fellow human beings, queer people have not experienced any constitutional protection to this day,” says Chris*tian Gaa, initiator of the GFA initiative.
The Basic Law has been in force since 1949. An amendment to Article 3 is currently also being discussed because of the term “race”, which was included in the constitution as a reaction to the racist policies of the Nazi regime. However, there are no human races, the term itself is racist.
The GFA initiative was founded in February 2021 to advance the amendment of Article 3. It is an association of more than 200 nationwide active queer organizations, companies and celebrities such as Anne Will, Udo Lindenberg and Rosa von Praunheim, as well as numerous members of the Bundestag who demand explicit protection of sexual and gender identity by amending Article 3, Paragraph 3 .
Chris*tian Gaa says: “If we want to stick together as a society, our constitution must not leave anyone out. What use are our hard-won rights if they can be taken away from us tomorrow? We need a constitution that offers all people and their fundamental rights reliable protection.”
The coalition agreement of the traffic light coalition promises that progress could be made in the near future. It contains the sentence: “We want to add a ban on discrimination based on sexual identity to the equal treatment article of the Basic Law (Article 3 Paragraph 3 GG) and replace the term ‘race’ in the Basic Law.” However, gender identity is missing here – the GFA activist * inside will certainly draw the government’s attention to this.
