by JACK BUEHRER
It’s a popular notion across Europe that the Czech Republic is known for being liberal in matters of certain social taboos, namely drugs and sex.
But despite the country’s even more deserved reputation as one of the world’s most secular – and apathetic – nations, a recent study from the University of Chicago shows rather strong opinions about homosexuality.
Since 1994, Czechs’ overall acceptance of homosexuality, specifically the act of sex between two men or two women, has declined, making it one of only four of the 42 countries polled to experience such a drop.
The study was conducted over five rounds of surveys between 1988 and 2008 by the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) on behalf of the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. It took data collected by researchers from around the world to determine individual countries’ attitudes toward homosexuality.
The survey began by asking people in just 16 countries their thoughts on gay marriage. But starting in 1994, they were asked if they thought sex between two adults of the same gender was: always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes or not wrong at all.
The Czech Republic joined the study in 1994, and while they never finished in the bottom 10 in any of their three surveys (additional surveys were completed in 1998 and 2008), Czechs were one of just four countries whose instances of the answer “not wrong at all” declined in all three surveys. Cyprus, Latvia and Russia also saw similar results. Additionally, the instances of Czechs claiming gay sex is “always wrong” went up in each of the three surveys, a distinction shared with only two other countries: Russia and Latvia.
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