Personal Matters Turned State Matters
Have you wondered why Indonesians care so much about each others’ private matters? Whether or not someone’s married, why they’re child-free, what religion they practice, or what two consenting single adults do behind closed doors.
Partly it’s due to our collectivist culture, where interpersonal relations might often outweigh individual, private affairs. But our obsession seems to go beyond gossip or small talks. The government has been turning personal matters into state matters through regulations that intrude on citizens’ private lives.
For example, did you know that if your spouse cheats (extramarital sex), you can report them and they could face nine months in prison? Or that Indonesia nearly passed a bill which would’ve regulated relationships between spouses, parents, and children?
LGBTQ+ Culture Labeled As A Non-Military Threat?
Recently, (somehow) the internet’s flooded with news that back in October 2025, President Prabowo Subianto issued a National Defense policy through Presidential Regulation No. 111/2025. One clause categorized the spread of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) culture as a national non-military threat.
While the clause never directly condemned LGBTQ+ people in private spaces (eg. specific activities), activists such as Echa Waode warned that this clause could be misused to justify further violence, persecution, and intimidation against sexual and gender minorities. In fact, this has already incited witch hunts in Bogor and South Sulawesi, causing further violence among citizens.
So why is Indonesia so obsessed about something as private as sexual orientation? The answer might lie in a study on emancipative values.
Just What Are ‘Emancipative Values’?
In his book, Freedom Rising (2013), German political scientist Christian Welzel proposed that modernization has given rise to what he calls emancipative values, which studies four dimensions across people, countries, and regions:
He found these four dimensions to be highly correlated with each other, meaning that it’s highly unlikely that one of these values is held without the other. For instance, it’s unlikely to respect freedom of speech but not support gender equality, or to expect strict obedience from children while also valuing personal choice.
‘Emancipative Values’ As A Predictor of Prosperity
Welzel noted that his emancipative values framework correlates well with prosperity when measured as GDP per capita. It also has a 70% match with the World Bank’s Knowledge Index, which measures education, information access, scientific and technological productivity, and institutional integrity.
He argued this is because when basic needs are secured, emancipatory values naturally gain in importance. People would begin to prioritize freedom, diversity, autonomy, creativity, and individuality over survival-related values, such as security, uniformity, authority, and conformity. And it goes the other way.
When a country is ridden with poor education, corrupt institutions, inequality of access, and unproductive scientific ecosystem, the data seems to suggest that it creates more closed and intolerant values.
Democratic Countries Tend to be More Tolerant
A 2025 PLOS One study across 58 nations found that emancipative values correlate with democracy. Why? Because democratic countries protect diverse values; people wouldn’t need to share the majority’s beliefs to live safely.
But Indonesia, while democratic, now seems to be moving in an authoritative direction. Presidential Regulation No. 111/2025 even clashes with the 2006 Yogyakarta Principles, an international human rights framework guaranteeing LGBTQ+ protections—an international meeting held here, in our own country.
Unfortunately, this isn’t really new. Indonesia has a long history of legislating with private belief and identity, so this is merely the latest entry in a pattern that’s been building for decades.
Well, Where Does Indonesia Sit Democratically?
According to the same study, Indonesia is classified at a mid-to-high level of liberal democracy:
It also observed that countries scoring higher on liberal democracy tend to be wealthier, and that emancipative values correlate with how democratic a country is.
But it’s worth noting that values are personal, while democracy operates at the level of the state. So, perhaps this table is best read as showing how much a country enables these emancipative values to flourish, instead of definitively ranking how free-minded each country’s people are.
The Vagueness of ‘Indonesian Values’ As Legal Foundations
After the fall of Soeharto’s authoritarian regime, Indonesia simultaneously became more democratic and more religious. Consequently, laws would often be passed in the name of ‘democratic interests’ and upholding ‘Indonesian values’—even when they intrude on privacy.
The problem is that ‘Indonesian values’ remain loosely defined, and might shift depending on who you ask.
It becomes a catchall that uses religious sentiments to justify laws restricting freedoms. The 2022 Criminal Code (KUHP) revision, for example (as mentioned in earlier slide), criminalized extramarital sex if reported by the accused’s spouse, child, or parent. The United Nations (UN) had raised concerns that this provision threatened the exercise of human rights and fundamental freedoms.
Indonesia’s Emancipative Values Score Is Worryingly Low
According to Wave 7 (2017–2022) of the World Values Survey, Indonesia’s emancipative values score lags behind its neighbours like Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, despite being the most democratic.
This suggests Indonesia’s democracy can serve as a fertile soil for emancipative values, it’s just that citizens have yet to fully embrace them.
This is consistent with the PLOS One study’s findings that highly democratic societies would accommodate diverse values. However, Presidential Regulations No. 111/2025 m
Weak Emancipative Values Enables Authoritarianism
Welzel warned a lack of emancipative values makes people reluctant to stand up against authoritarian ideas. Specifically, he warned of ‘democracy redefinition’, where democracy is understood as solely being obedient to all the rules. This, of course, is a perverse doctrine that undermines core democratic values like freedom of speech, as well as the right to organize and protest.
Similarly, Welzel emphasizes that emancipative values, like ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘equal opportunities’, are precisely the ideals that inspired democracy.
For this reason, he argued that whenever democratic desires are separate from these values (e.g. promoting group supremacy, discrimination against minorities, silencing dissent), it means people want democracy for undemocratic reasons.
‘Democratic’ But Slowly Backsliding?
Caring about each other’s choices is human nature. But a healthy democracy recognizes boundaries. So when the state criminalizes certain beliefs, marginalizes minorities, or emboldens citizens to persecute minorities, it risks a democratic backslide.
The Human Rights Watch (HRW) documented a pattern: the 2006 religious harmony (FKUB) law, which enabled the vetoing of minority religions (since revised); the 2008 Ahmadiyah ban; the 2022 criminalization of sex outside marriage; and recently, the 2025 classification of LGBTQ+ culture as a national threat.
But emancipative values don’t work separately. Respect for personal choice, gender equality, imaginative childrearing, and freedom of speech are highly correlated. We cannot defend free speech while denying personal autonomy, or demand political freedom while accepting discrimination in private life. These values rise and fall together.
