I've noticed that many countries in Western and Northern Europe, and countries like Canada, New Zealand, and Australia banned anti-gay hate speech. How exactly does the government enforce that law?
If someone shouts "faggots!" at a gay couple and a complaint is made to the police or a bobby hears it then the shouter is in trouble. I've probably oversimplified it but that's the gist of it.
If you make a threatening homophobic statement (most goes un-noticed; you can say we're going to hell and so on), you can be fined. It mostly applies for situations inciting violence, but the Cronulla Riots (against Arabs, especially Lebanese) show that hate-speech laws mean nothing when the police and prosecution don't care. Sydney's LGBT Mardi Gras has also had police brutally beat up (effeminate) gay men with no consequence. I've never actually seen it enforced; we have several prominent figures who have even called for the recriminalisation of homosexuality. It's just for really severe cases. You can call for our death hypothetically, but you can't demand people actively go into riots to kill us.
Pretty inconsistently, but still better than if there were no such laws. As far as I know, the following is the situation in Belgium: First off: there isn't some sort of speech police or thought police put in place. Two straight guys in a bar, making homophobic jokes? Even if a police officer is in that same bar, they won't interfere. By a strict reading of the law I'm sure they technically could, but they generally tend to have more urgent stuff to do than police every remark. Someone shouting insults at a gay couple just walking down the street? Kind of depends. Usually unless one of them (or both) issues a complaint, nothing much will happen. If a complaint is issued, usually nothing much comes of it, since it's usually impossible to backtrack who was yelling insults and whether the complaint was justified. It might still make its way into some statistics on "homophobic hate being on the rise" and might still be of indirect use. A politician (or celebrity) spouting hate speech in an interview? Lawsuit will be incoming. There are organisations who make it their business to respond with legal prejudice to such things. And the law allows them to at least get the offender fined or publicly reprimanded. All in all, I do think there'd be ways of improving it, but I do think it's a valuable tool in speaking up against bigotry and hate. Only one tool, mind, but it does its work for what it's worth.
