Jakarta – The LGBTQ community has never had it easy: online harassment and offline raids have long been recurring features of public life. But under Presidential Regulation No. 111/2025, which places "the spread of LGBTQ culture" among the state's catalog of nonmilitary threats alongside terrorism, separatism and drug trafficking, that persecution carries something new: the state's imprimatur.
The regulation doesn't create new crimes, but laws rarely need to criminalize something explicitly for people to feel empowered to punish it. The presidency's labeling a group of citizens a threat to "national sovereignty" and "the erosion of nationalism" is essentially a blank check: for police to treat suspicion as patriotism, for local administrations to treat discrimination as defense and for vigilantes to treat intimidation as duty.
The stated intent may be to "contain" something, but containment measures rarely stay contained. They are read by everyone and acted upon by anyone who was looking for a reason.
That downstream reaction is already visible.
Human Rights Watch has documented a sharp escalation in the harassment of LGBTQ university students, including doxing campaigns against a student press outlet that posted about Pride Month.
The Religious Affairs Ministry is now drafting a curriculum amendment that discourages LGBTQ "behavior" in schools. The Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) has gone further by preparing a draft criminal bill, at the House of Representatives' invitation, that would punish not just same-sex conduct but also advocating for LGBTQ rights.
None of this exists in a vacuum; all of it draws oxygen from Perpres No. 111.
In effect, President Prabowo Subianto is no longer a bystander to the anti-LGBTQ movement but its most powerful patron. A decade-long groundswell driven largely by conservative religious groups now has the head of state at its front, lending it the framework of a national defense policy.
That is a different order of danger than a bylaw or a fatwa, which is nonbinding. It is the state declaring an entire category of its own citizens a public enemy.
It's worth recalling what Prabowo swore to do. The presidential oath commits to uphold the 1945 Constitution "as honestly and justly as possible" to protect all citizens. A regulation that places a minority group alongside terrorism and separatism is hard to square with that, even when couched as "moral degradation".
Indonesians old enough to remember the late 1990s and early 2000s may find this disorienting. This country was once cited regionally for relative tolerance of sexual orientation and gender identity, where LGBTQ people held visible roles in public life. That era gave way to a surge in anti-LGBTQ sentiment around 2016.
The presidential regulation didn't begin that decline but codifies it, turning informal hostility into defense doctrine. Many LGBTQ Indonesians are now retreating further into invisibility, avoiding public gatherings, staying off campus media. Perpres No. 111 doesn't create this fear from nothing; it confirms the fear is justified.
President Prabowo is arguably the only figure with the standing to reverse this trajectory before it hardens into law. Yes, this would cost him something: anti-LGBTQ sentiment currently commands loud support across religious organizations, the legislature and his own coalition, and 2029 is not so far off that the election doesn't enter into the calculation.
But governing by the loudest constituency at present is not the same as governing by the Constitution. A president who bends to whoever shouts loudest about a minority's rights is not defending national resilience; he is outsourcing it.
The solution isn't complicated, even if the politics is.
The President should remove the LGBTQ reference from "nonmilitary threats" in Perpres No. 111 and make clear, by word and action, that constitutional protection extends to every citizen, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.
Otherwise, the matter should be taken to the Supreme Court: the last resort to check a regulation that reads less like defense policy than as a declaration of who actually counts as a citizen in Prabowo's Indonesia.
Source: https://asianews.network/state-sanctioned-intolerance-the-jakarta-post