The phrase "legalises gay sex" is surreal and otherworldly to me. We recent fought for marriage in Australia. Shocking to think they were and are still so backwards as to make that headline possible.
Well, historically, India was comfortable with and accepting of people of all sexualities. The laws that are being overturned were put on the books by the British. So, the backwardness depends on the time scale
In parts of india. It is a big place with a long history. There have been times and places in india where lgbt were persecuted long before colonial rule.
It’s a colonial era law that made LGBT “unnatural” in the country of Kamasutra. One of the many gifts the British left behind. Great we finally overcame it. Although we should have fixed it sooner.
I've heard that there are a number of US states in which some fairly common sex acts are officially illegal. The difference, of course, is that there is little chance of anyone being prosecuted for those offences in the US, while, if I've understood correctly, the Indian section 377 law was being used in practice.
Virginia § 18.2-345 was only repealed 5 years ago. Oral sex, sex in a car, and cohabitation of unmarried couples were all illegal. It was not necessarily enforced; but, the laws were still on the books.
There is more history to this. The introduction of the law relating to making gay sex illegal "... dating back to 1861, (that was) introduced during the British rule of India (modelled on the Buggery Act of 1533) criminalised sexual activities "against the order of nature", including homosexual activities"
It is the truth for a lot of countries that were under colonial rule. Colonial powers left their mark behind in so many unfortunate ways that are just too complex for countries to deal with even today. It is simple and lazy to label something "backward".
> It is simple and lazy to label something "backward".
Couldn't agree more. Having said that, I'm not sure the "blame the colonials" is vastly better. For at least 2 reasons:
1) One of the laws the Penal Code replaced required death by stoning as a punishment (unless you were a slave in which case you were just flogged). As poor as the law was, it wasn't really replacing an enlightened legal framework.
2) Post-colonial India didn't exactly rush to replace the law. The first attempt wasn't until 2009, and that was overturned.
The simple truth is that, even supposedly liberal, countries have made these changes disappointingly recently. Personally, I'm glad this is happening but blaming others for the slow progress is somewhat disingenuous.
It is simplistic and lazy to blame the colonials for all the ills of a society too. But the slow progress in fixing something like this is not so much because of a backwards attitude. Nation building takes time. Especially when things around the world are changing fast. There is a long long way to go. And it is definitely going to take a very long time getting there. Especially because there are way too many issues that need the attention of an already strained legal system.
> Colonial powers left their mark behind in so many unfortunate ways that are just too complex for countries to deal with even today.
What does that even mean? They are free countries. No one forced India to hold onto that law. No one forces other countries to hold onto colonial era laws. If they don't change it that's their choice, their decision and their problem in the end. Not that of some long gone boogeyman.
> What does that even mean? They are free countries. No one forced India to hold onto that law. No one forces other countries to hold onto colonial era laws. If they don't change it that's their choice, their decision and their problem in the end. Not that of some long gone boogeyman.
Not so easy. Once you have a law in place you have vested interests who want to oppose any changes to the law. Either you need a dictatorship to make any changes you desire or respect democratic principles. You can't have both. Once a law was codified, albeit in a previous era, that itself becomes an excuse for vested interests to latch onto and demand that the law continue to be in place.
In my opinion, no social norms should be codified as laws as societies change and so do people. That creates more harm than good. This should serve as a lesson to all that laws should be generic in nature and not targeted towards one community/religion/caste/creed (be it either as a benefit or otherwise). This is again a by-product of Colonialism as British crown used personal laws to keep the country divided. Hopefully India fixes that next by codifying the Uniform Civil Code[1].
Since the boogeyman has been "gone", the entire region (not just India) has gone through several wars, a very messy, violent and tumultuous process of nation building. The region is not even used to existing as one nation yet. It takes time. Not making excuses for slow progress. Just trying to make the point that there isn't a magic wand to make everything all nice and shiny. It takes time. And as we see from this supreme court ruling, the intention is good and it is there.
Making a country free doesn't make it immediately free from thoughts and misconceptions that come with a colonial rule. You will still find Indians who assume every white person they see is rich, smart and attractive. For example: YouTube India is full of people viewing 'Foreigner reactions' on Indian content.
Inferiority complex among Indians is sometimes surprising.
In Germany, the infamous §175a StGB that made gay sex illegal was only finally removed in 1994. I think it was practically ignored for some time before that, but that was only 24 years ago.
I thought we had a similar law in France until the 1980's but apparently I was at least partly mistaken:
>Although same-sex sexual activity was a capital crime that often resulted in the death penalty during the Ancien Régime, all sodomy laws were repealed in 1791 during the French Revolution. However, a lesser known indecent exposure law that often targeted homosexuals was introduced in 1960 before being repealed twenty years later.
That's not entirely accurate, because the 175 was changed quite a lot over time. Initially it was jail-for-sex, but then in the late 60s it was changed such that basically the age of consent for gays was 21 (IIRC a notable exception was that if _both_ partners were below 18 then it wasn't punishable anyway -- so only if one was younger than 18 and the other 18-21 it was punishable, which is very weird indeed). Then there was another reform which made it so that >18 having gay sex with <18 was illegal. And then, finally, with the abolishment of 175 in 94 everyone got the same age of consent.
1) Section 497 in The Indian Penal Code
Adultery.—Whoever has sexual intercourse with a person who is and whom he knows or has reason to believe to be the wife of another man, without the consent or connivance of that man, such sexual intercourse not amounting to the offence of rape, is guilty of the offence of adultery, and shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to five years, or with fine, or with both. In such case the wife shall not be punishable as an abettor.
2) 498. Enticing or taking away or detaining with criminal intent a married woman.—Whoever takes or entices away any woman who is and whom he knows or has reason to believe to be the wife of any other man, from that man, or from any person having the care of her on behalf of that man, with intent that she may have illicit intercourse with any person, or conceals or detains with that intent any such woman, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine, or with both.
3) Having consensual sex with someone you promised to marry becomes rape retrospectively if you renege on the promise of marriage
4) And of course - Marital rape is legal. A husband (even an enstranged one) cannot be charged with raping his wife
Note that same sex marriage is still not legalised! We still have a long way to go before the idea of a same-sex couple becomes commonplace in our society.
How so? That's generally how these things have progressed in most countries I'm aware of. First you make the simple fact of being homosexual not be illegal. Same-sex marriage often comes much later.
It's naive to think western liberal cultural change is a one-way street. This is the kind of thing that comes in waves.
Just look at the radical transformation of the pre-colonial Kingdom of Buganda into present-day Uganda with its sodomy laws and internet meme pastors, perhaps ironically catalysed by the west, a west that has since flipped the complete opposite direction. It's only a matter of time before the tables turn again.
LGBT is at its core a small minority interest. It's an unstable system, it all depends on what the majority population happens to be interested in in this particular century.
I think you are wrong. There are minor setbacks and reactions to liberalization of society, but ultimately the trend over the past many hundreds of years has been generally toward a more equitable and accepting society almost everywhere in the world.
Also, LGBT is definitely not a small minority interest and the more accepting society becomes, the more people realize that these issues are incredibly mainstream.
I think you should study history related to gay rights over the last few centuries. Whilst we are currently in a better situation in many western countries the course of change has been anything but a smooth set of improvements.
I would hardly call the introduction of this law that has finally been overturned a "minor setback". Nor would I call chemical castration which happened in the UK in the 20th century a "minor setback". These are both pretty big picture.
We'll probably consider freedom and equality good things int the next centuries, but our ideas of what to call freedom and equality seems to be changing drastically from time to time.
Not so long time ago people were fighting for more sexual freedom, it was even possible to produce a film about sexual love between underaged people (with underaged actors) for instance. Today we're introducing more rules about how people should sexually approach each other and paedophilia is an absolute taboo. And we consider this change a step towards freedom and equality again.
So I wouldn't be surprised if our definition of freedom would deny homosexuality at some later point.
The modern definition of "LGBT" is, for the most part, a cultural construct. Behavior we in the west would consider "homosexual" today, including the act of sex between persons of the same gender, was considered perfectly normal between "heterosexual" people in certain contexts and pre-Christian cultures. It wasn't that long ago that men kissing one another on the lips was a common practice of platonic affection.
If you look beyond the rather limited filter of "western liberal cultural change" you'll see that, while yes politics and societies shift over time, acceptance of same-sex relationships has been the norm in many cultures more often than your comment might suggest.
>acceptance of same-sex relationships has been the norm in many cultures
That's what was the case in Buganda. The Ugandan martyrs rebelled against that and were killed for it. Lauded by the west for their resistance at the time, with their spiritual successors demonised by the same west today.
> It's an unstable system, it all depends on what the majority population happens to be interested in in this particular century.
It doesn't work that way. Take Nazism for example:
The NSDAP won the 1933 election with 43.9% votes. Literally 43.9% of the German people believed and supported the Nazi policies of Hitler.
To think that the Germans would again revert back to Nazism would be insane. What happened was an aberration at best.
Any form of extremist thinking is what is considered an unstable system. Sure extremism will have it's day but not always. It's always the moderate values and living that triumphs and continues to provide stability. So what you say is exactly opposite to what the reality is. Aberrations don't provide stability.
In a historical context, tolerance of homosexuality is the aberration. And civilizations devolving from liberal/free to tyrannical has been a constant. Things seem good now because the vast majority of people have food and most other basic needs met. If that ever changes, things like equity for gays and transgenders will not even be on the radar.
In the case of your Nazi example, people supported Nazism because the economy was in a shambles. When you're not eating, you don't really care as much about the Jews.
The comment So you think that gay sex should be illegal? was made in the context of nothing whatsoever. That's the comment I'm shooting down. The assumption that
M_Bakhtiari thinks gay sex should be illegal; it is not supported in any way by M_Bakhtiari's comment "I don't think this will last, not even in the west".
"It won't last" is clearly an opinion about whether or not it will last. NOT a value judgement about whether the person wants it to last.
For example "We all die eventually" means "all humans die eventually" NOT "I want all humans dead".
Or in this case the GP is saying that they think that gay sex will be illegal again NOT that they want gay sex to be illegal again.
As someone that personally wants gay sex to be legal myself this is an important consideration. We are fortunate (in the West at least) to live in a fairly liberal society. We have to remember that freedoms have waxed and waned in human history and we should guard against steps which would lead to important freedoms being limited.
I get that this is a very emotive topic but it is important not to jump to conclusions - in fact it is part of the rules of this site to assume good faith.
Something to note here is that it is not just gay sex that is legalised - the prohibition was on "carnal intercourse against the order of nature" which included straight anal sex as well as oral sex. Of course, these are less important as this was never enforced, but weird to think that these things were technically illegal.
How about things like bestiality and Pedophilia? (1) Were they "against the order of nature" in the first place, and (2) are only specific practices allowed (The ones you mention) or just everything?
Edit: I'm not sure Wikipedia [1] agrees with you. The original law was:
> Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life
So bestiality seems to have been prohibited initially. The judgement [2] says:
> Section 377 of the Penal Code, in so far as it criminalises consensual
sexual conduct between adults of the same sex, is unconstitutional
So I'm not sure it decriminalizes anal and oral heterosexual sex as well.
Remarkable decision. Although, this is just a small step of a long road to a culture that understands and accepts the LGBT community, a step nonetheless. It's very fortunate that the democratic structure of India allows courts to make rational, liberal decisions. They are not encumbered by petty politics or vote banks.
Living in India is not easy. Every other day you have a reason to astonish over the regressiveness of people around you. Today, I get to have a momentary joy—at least there is something that works.
Are gays getting a bad reputation in India just because of being gay?
>I think homosexuality gets a bad rep in Kerala because of all those nasty ammavans (uncles) not-so-subtly molesting young boys at the back of buses and movie theatres.
As a gay Indian this is a great news! but it is one thing to decriminalize it legally and complete different thing for societal acceptance and leading a normal life as gay person in India. For an average gay person in India this doesn’t change much. There is still a long way to go. This law was never a problem for me but my family and relative and neighbors are. But it is a good progress.
The world is so weird. I never understood the motive behind tyrannizing other people. How is that winning at anything other than being an asshole? Why don't people just leave other people alone? Is it so much different to tyrannize a woman for being feminine, or just being attractive? Most of us are instinctively disgusted by that--or at least claim to be?
There are books that are outrageously famous that say that gay people are bad. Many people find these books so convincing that they adopt the books' views as their own.
Certain types of social orders depend on strict control of social mores. Hell, arguably all do to some extent - try walking down the street naked and see how that goes...
I mean, I guess what I was trying to ask is do people not know or feel that it is wrong to not just leave other people alone if they aren't, themselves, bothering anybody?
Why do people reject that? It's literally what freedom and liberty is, and it is the exact opposite of authority and oppression.
No, the original purpose of society is for its members to leverage each other to achieve more / be safer etc than as lone individuals.
Controlling access to sex was one of the ways societies found to achieve those goals.
For a simple example, communities with much laxer sex rules, found themselves frequently torn by relationship related feuds. Requiring (and punishing non-adherence) to sticking to some fixed husband/wife is what they found to prevent (not absolutely solve) such issues. They then invented religious and other justifications for the practice to normalize it further.
Certain kinds of marital arrangement also helped keep money in the same extended family, etc. Different such goals evolved different strategies to achieve them.
Are you certain about that thesis? "Lax sex rules" haven't torn apart the modern world and were probably quite prevalent through history.
Plausibly, in the good old days before washing machines when keeping a home together was a gargantuan task, the economic equilibrium just happened to be 1:1 male/female pairings.
Examining the substance of marriage law in England, for example, suggests that most of meat of law and custom revolves around inheritance law. People get swallowed up in the pageantry, but the legal trouble starts when assets are involved.
>Are you certain about that thesis? "Lax sex rules" haven't torn apart the modern world
For one, we now have more elaborate laws and enforcement of them, and people are much more docile and civilized.
We don't just go and beat each other up like in communities of yore. Try an extramarital affair in old rural community though (not even an ancient one), and watch what happens (e.g. the husband blowing your brain with a shotgun).
Second, depends on the definition of "torn apart". E.g.:
>and were probably quite prevalent through history.*
I you mean that some people always had all kinds of sex relations, yes (nobody said adherence and enforcement was or could be absolute or affect the powerful as much as the masses). If you mean that there were fringe societies (e.g. those studied by ethnology) that had lax sex rules, then also yes.
If you mean that big well known historical societies at large embraced and accepted lax sexual behaviors, that's wrong. E.g.:
It is human nature. Whenever we have moments of weakness, we tend to blame the "others" because it is easy to do so and makes you feel stronger than you actually are. Same goes with bullies. They are really weak inside and all it takes is one strong person to stand up to them.
I think it comes down to their own definition of being “normal” for someone. I think it is this attitude of “if they are not like me or do not meet my definition of normal they should be tyrannized” is the problem. It also has to do with not having seen examples of such people leading normal life.
How about “far-left communists”? Maybe because those are arbitrary definitions, defined by the opposite side. If Trump is a far-right fascist, what does that make Hitler?
What sort of tyrannization are you referring to those sects being subjected to? It doesn't seem like they're currently being subjected to anything worse than some verbal disparagement, which is hardly comparable to the kind of discrimination many other minorities suffer. Are you hypothesizing that right-wing extremists might come to be discriminated against in some consequential fashion comparable to criminalization of their everyday lives or even milder stuff like systemic economic inequality?
You can't work/belong to in most media companies, any major film/TV company, any major tech company, almost any university, many law societies and groups, many medical organizations. If you're discovered, you'll be fired, shamed, and blacklisted from the industry more broadly (see: James Damore).
You essentially can't have a normal career in tech, media, journalism, acting, law, medicine, or any academic field. You can sometimes have a career, but it'll be highly constrained by your identity as a hated Other for the power class.
You can have a little irrelevant job somewhere, but watch out: If any attention is drawn to you, you'll be fired there as well. One example is Tony Hovater:
He was fired from his job at a restaurant, couldn't pay rent, and people started posting his home address online. So he and his wife lost their home fleeing physical violence.
The Times article also notes he feared violence (specifically from armed thugs at his wedding). Which isn't surprising considering other violent incidents, like the guy who tried to gun down Steve Scalise at a baseball game, countless petty screaming and grabbings and punchings of anyone wearing a MAGA hat, etc.
It happens at every level, too. Not just Google developers telling Damore "I will keep hounding you until one of us is fired. Fuck you." But even high-level Democratic party politicans openly calling for Trump admin officials to be harassed in every public space:
> This is off the top of my head. There's lots more.
I'm sure there is. But there's no way to pretend that it at all approaches the scale of discrimination that women or blacks or gays have been subjected to. The mere existence of violent reprisals doesn't put their victimization on an equal footing with those who had to fear the KKK. Those events are currently far more exceptional than gay-bashing or lynching of blacks have been in the past.
And among your specific examples, all but Stanger were activists working in support of political causes that put other minorities in a very understandable defensive mood, given how government-supported white nationalism would obviously cause far more harm than white nationalists have been receiving from the riots they help incite. (This is not to say that they were deserving of violence because of their activism, but it means they aren't a representative sample of their political group as a whole.)
The picture I'm seeing isn't tyranny or even a trajectory leading to tyranny. It's outlier events at the fringe of a conflict that is overwhelmingly a peaceful albeit heated political conflict. Any disagreement at this scale will have outliers like this. More than one quarter of US adults voted for Trump. Are there any demographic measures by which they're collectively worse off than blacks during the Jim Crow era? Especially the ones who are no more active in promoting their beliefs than bumper stickers, yard signs, and voting in primaries? Are there actual statistics to support your assertions that they're being thoroughly shut out of so many career paths and industries, not just self-selecting to avoid institutions they view as full of bad people and bad morals? Is anyone who's not a public figure being subjected to this supposed tyranny?
Calling the current conditions for right-wing extremists in the US "tyranny" seems like a vast overreach (and one that offensively minimizes much worse historical oppressions), which is why I asked for clarification whether that was what was really meant.
>The world is so weird. I never understood the motive behind tyrannizing other people. How is that winning at anything other than being an asshole?
Well, read up on the evolution of moral systems and such. Those rules are not entirely arbitrary (even the ones coming from a religious origin, those are still manmade and follow certain rationales).
The problem is that such laws don't always make sense beyond their expiration date (when conditions changed etc), but can still be held in high esteem due to their existing stronghold.
What I am assuming is the golden rule: treat others as you would want to be treated. Don't you think the general population understands that? When people ignore it, we generally call that bad. When people don't understand that, we generally call them psychopaths. Is this really controversial?
I mean, as a thought experiment, do you really not internally know that bothering other people who are bot bothering you is wrong and ugly? Most people don't agree with that?
Edit: I am being downvoted, so this is apparently fairly controversial. That's unfortunate, in my mind. I personally believe that the democracy, liberty and prosperity that exists in the world today would not have been possible without America, its founders, and others who argued for this kind of liberty--most notably enlightenment figures. So I guess if you disagree with it, you're pretty lucky to happen to be here.
>What I am assuming is the golden rule: treat others as you would want to be treated. Don't you think the general population understands that? When people ignore it, we generally call that bad. When people don't understand that, we generally call them psychopaths. Is this really controversial?
No, but it doesn't settle much.
For one, it's not always about how people are treated, but also about stopping things you think are bad from happening.
If you think e.g. that forests are good, you'd want to punish people who burn them, even if they did nothing wrong to you.
Similarly, if you are an ancient citizen and think people engaging in gay sex weakens your society (e.g. because these people don't have kids and your community will have less people to continue it, and fight and protect it) you'll try to stop people from doing that.
>I personally believe that the democracy, liberty and prosperity that exists in the world today would not have been possible without America, its founders, and others who argued for this kind of liberty
And I believe that its influence has been overplayed and is insignificant (if not negative). Starting from the genocide of the native Americans, to slavery of blacks, way after Europe had put an end to it, to treatment of chinese and other immigrants up to early 20th century, to inheriting old European colonialism after WWII and extending it with neo-colonialism, to promoting puritanism, neoliberal policies, the "war on drugs", global interventions and befriending and establishing dictatorships and banana republics, promoting crappy mass culture, unhealthy food culture, and total consumerism without regard for the environment, and so on.). Plus the unbearable exceptionalism and nationalism.
>And I believe that its influence has been overplayed and is insignificant (if not negative)
This always comes up and it's just like the Russian phrase "and you are lynching negroes."
This basically same argument from Russia to the US boils down to: it doesn't matter that you have improved upon the world, and looking to further improve on it, because you were far from perfect yourself and doing some very bad things.
Those bad things should be criticized, but I am certain had you the choice to be born in the pre-enlightenment world that you would not take it.
>This always comes up and it's just like the Russian phrase "and you are lynching negroes."
I find nothing wrong with that argument.
In fact, the actual disingenuous Cold War practice of whataboutism was rather the accusation of whataboutism itself.
It was meant as a thought stopper, to only allow one-sized criticism and to prevent putting things into perspective that doesn't flatter the first side.
Knowing that both side X and Y did bad things is totally compatible with trying to fix them (in fact it's a prerequirement).
It also stops you from painting Y as some uniquely evil, while letting X get away scot-free.
But only hearing side X attack Y on some bad shit, and not the other side (because that would be "whataboutism"), just serves to hide what X itself does, and to portray Y as some uniquely evil figure.
>Those bad things should be criticized, but I am certain had you the choice to be born in the pre-enlightenment world that you would not take it.
It's more of a wash. There are tons of places and social classes I'd like to belong to enlightenment, and tons of places and social classes I'd like to avoid being enlightenment.
Homosexuality is disturbing to people because their brain cannot find relevant patterns that have to do with homosexuality-related experiences (sights, images etc).
And when the brain doesn't find good pattern matches, it alerts the person of something very strange and potentially dangerous going on.
Morality systems come on top of this fundamental fact, because morality systems are just the conscious justifications we give to our feelings.
> Homosexuality is disturbing to people because their brain cannot find relevant patterns that have to do with homosexuality-related experiences (sights, images etc).
I'd like to echo this. A while back, a coworker and friend of mine who is homosexual took me to a coffee shop that caters primarily to homosexual men. I had never been with him before in that social context, but his actions did fall within the stereotypes and I did feel myself uncomfortable with the situation. It wasn't that big of a deal, as I recognized my response.
What was more "eye-opening" was that later, he has the same reaction to those situations when he's with his heterosexual friends. He even went so far as to say he finds the concept of heterosexual sex as digusting.
I did feel myself uncomfortable with the situation
But was that discomfort specifically related to homosexuality or just the general discomfort one feels when one finds oneself in an entirely alien social context? If you where to go with him to that coffee shop twice a week for a couple of month do you think you'd still find it uncomfortable?
> Morality systems come on top of this fundamental fact, because morality systems are just the conscious justifications we give to our feelings.
This is a serious claim, one that moral philosophers (even those inclined towards moral fictionalism/nonrealism) have issues with. Just two of them:
* This account fails to distinguish between moral beliefs and cultural taboos. Individuals tend to think that they can justify both, but challenging taboos is more likely to result in confabulation -- individuals are willing to concede hypothetical concerns in their moral beliefs, but remain committed to their taboos even in the face of good evidence against them.
* Moral philosophy, as it exists today, doesn't seek to provide justification to homophobia, gender discrimination, &c. The dominant metaethical views don't give any consideration at all to these particulars, but rather accept as conclusions (via utilitarian calculus, via a supreme principle, &c) that homophobia and the rest are all morally unjustified. Where does this fit into the pattern matching to feelings to confabulated justifications pipeline?
Beyond the differences between a number of the religions, You can look at the results for "Sources of guidance on right and wrong by views about same-sex marriage". The clear majority of those who oppose it do so based on religion.
"Homosexuality is generally only disturbing to people who have been taught that it's supposed to be disturbing."
I believe it's much deeper than that, it's evolutionary.
Some codified 'teachings' i.e. religious or otherwise may push our instincts in one way or another.
FYI there would have been ancient religions very much in favour of 'same sex' though probably not same sex marriage.
I suggest that a little more than 1/2 of men are repulsed by the notion of gay sex (totally different for women though) and that it's instinctive.
More complicated issues like 'hate' or systematic social shame etc. are obviously culture. But my bet for the impetus of it all is on evolution, not just some arbitrary moral systems.
Just about every objectionable 'ism' and 'ary' has been given an alleged evolutionary justification at some point since the publication of The Origin of Species.
Could you possibly refrain from speculating along these lines unless you have actual evidence that there is an evolutionary basis for laws that criminalize gay sex?
Because otherwise, even if this isn't your intention, you're giving people who favor this kind of legislation the support of sciency-sounding justifications which some people could easily mistake for actual science.
I think the appeal to evolution helps more than it harms, because it serves to point out the feelings against homosexuality can be classified as a reaction to anything that used to hamper your ability to reproduce, like a lack of physical strength, hunting skills, slow running speed, lower environment sensitivity, etc.
If a society has moved beyond the ‘natural’ impulse to shun members with some evolutionary disadvantages, it must consider that it cannot shun members with any of them.
Homosexuality is always a subconscious threat, because until recently if you were homosexual your bloodline died with you. If your child was homosexual that’s one possible family tree gone, and if it was an only child that’s your bloodline gone again. So if feels like there’s always going to be some opposition as long it’s still connected to reproduction.
>I think the appeal to evolution helps more than it harms, because it serves to point out the feelings against homosexuality can be classified as a reaction to anything that used to hamper your ability to reproduce, like a lack of physical strength, hunting skills, slow running speed, lower environment sensitivity, etc.
It could be classified this way if there's scientific evidence to support that hypothesis. But throwing it out there as a speculation isn't helpful.
>like a lack of physical strength
Surely this shows how silly the argument is. Where are the cultures that criminalize having a lack of physical strength?
>Homosexuality is always a subconscious threat, because until recently if you were homosexual your bloodline died with you
No, because there's only a rough connection between sexuality and who you actually have sex with. Being gay doesn't stop you having sex with women, and you don't have to have sex many times in order to reproduce.
"Could you possibly refrain from speculating along these lines unless you have actual evidence that there is an evolutionary basis for laws that criminalize gay sex?"
I'm not remotely justifying laws that criminalizing anything.
Moreover, evolution and social evolution are very grey subjects wherein we have a great deal of difficulty proving things one way or another.
I don't think it's offensive, or even 'a stretch' to suggest that attitudes towards some kinds of behaviour are evolutionarily derived, at least partly. It's just an opinion, and maybe it's not super perfect position ... but it's not unreasonable or objectively offensive either.
And for the record, I'm glad that they've changed this law.
>Moreover, evolution and social evolution are very grey subjects wherein we have a great deal of difficulty proving things one way or another.
Yes! Exactly. So it is pointless and unhelpful to speculate about whether or not people find gay sex inherently repulsive for evolutionary reasons.
I think maybe you're having difficulty seeing this because you're not (I'm guessing) a member of one of the affected groups. Imagine that I made comments offering an "evolutionary" explanation for why people find tech nerds inherently sexually repulsive -- without, of course, providing any actual science to back it up. Wouldn't that be pretty close to just trolling?
Whatever your intentions, these kinds of speculations only serve to normalize anti-gay prejudices by providing a "natural" or "scientific" explanation for them. Unless you really have done some kind of scientific investigation of anti-gay prejudice, it would be best not to introduce these kinds of speculations into the discussion.
You have not provided a single piece of evidence that supports your theory, rather you are doubling down on what you "believe" as opposed to what research and polling shows.
>I suggest that a little more than 1/2 of men are repulsed by the notion of gay sex (totally different for women though) and that it's instinctive.
So men evolve, but women don't, huh?
Just because your own personal experience propositioning men for gay sex instinctively repulses 50% of them doesn't mean your anecdotal suggestion means anything about the rest of humanity. Maybe you just need to take a shower.
Not to assume too much about the commenter you replied to, but it's fairly common knowledge that women are more sexually fluid than men (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_fluidity#Males_versus_f...). I read "different for women" to mean "women are less repulsed by the notion of gay sex than men," which is borne out by evidence.
He's making this sweeping generalization about evolution by conveniently disregarding half of the population. Sounds like he's pre-disposed to believe his own conclusions that he thinks scientifically justify his own repulsive feelings, and wants to disregard the half of the evidence that contradicts his theory.
Great explanation, a sort of innate Bayesian inference for
the uncanny valley of attributes that a person associates to being a normal human being (much like themselves).
This filter applies to trans people as well as people with full face tattoos or piercings. Great discussion, thanks.
I think it is worth looking for the rational (that is to say, non-moralistic) cause. The fact the gays are pressured to act straight across in nearly every society in such similar and intense ways indicates that there's likely a common cause.
e.g. If one culture hates dogs and kills them on sight, you might say that culture has a prejudice against dogs. If 95% of cultures hated dogs and killed them on sight, you should start to think there is a deeper reason for that (especially considering how useful dogs can be).
In the case of gay-shaming, the obvious common cause is evolutionary: It's people trying to have more grandkids.
If your kid is gay, and decides to go off and have gay sex for the rest of his/her life, he/she won't reproduce. Your gene line ends.
However, if you pressure/shame/tyrannize your gay kid into a reproductive relationship, your genes replicate into grandkids (who likely won't be gay themselves). Your gene line continues.
This also applies to brothers, sisters, and other kin. The reproductive benefit of pressuring a gay relative to act straight is comparable to saving them from death, since the outcome of 'acting gay' and 'dead' is evolutionarily similar. (Of course a living gay relative can help other relatives raise their kids, so it's not identical to being dead. Some have argued that the "helpful gay uncle" effect would counteract the evolutionary cost of homosexuality. But the math doesn't work; a childless relative isn't so much more helpful than a relative with kids that deliberately childless individuals replicate their genes better than ones who have their own kids.) This explains why the pressure to act straight is so strong and vicious - it comes from the same place as the pressure to not die.
So, given a population of people, some who have a gene that makes them pressure gay kids to act straight, and some who don't, over time the pressuring gene will spread through the population. And here we are.
And just to ward off the reflexive moralizing and personal attacks: There's no moral content to our evolutionary history, any more than there's moral content to a lion eating a baby gazelle alive. Please don't fall for the naturalistic fallacy and start attacking as though I'm saying natural equals good. Lots of things that are natural are not good. Understanding the world requires us to be able to separate rational understanding what is, from a moral judgment of what we should do. We should be adult enough here to make that distinction.
> In the case of gay-shaming, the obvious common cause is evolutionary: It's people trying to have more grandkids.
I have to disagree. I don't think people who opposr and hate gay people are doing it for evolutionary purposes. I haven't met anybody who thinks this guy is gay which meand he won't be making any kids, so let's hate him. Hate comes from much more fundamental place than that.
For majority of people it's not "normal" hence different. And for majority what's different is scary. The same reason why immigrants of different skin color than majority population are hated.
The same reason applies to extremely short, extremely tall, people with deformities, person with vitiligo in black/brown countries etc are treated differently, made fun of.
> I don't think people who opposr and hate gay people are doing it for evolutionary purposes. I haven't met anybody who thinks this guy is gay which meand he won't be making any kids, so let's hate him.
That's not how evolution works. Unexpected movement on the ground near your feet doesn't scare you because you have carefully thought about how it will affect your chances to reproduce, but because the siblings of your ancestors didn't pay attention, were bitten by snakes and didn't get to reproduce.
"Hate comes from much more fundamental place than that.
For majority of people it's not "normal" hence different. And for majority what's different is scary. The same reason why immigrants of different skin color than majority population are hated."
I don't agree at all, and I agree with the original post.
I think a slight majority of men have an 'instinct' against gay sex that is not learned or socialized. The 'hate' is another thing , as something maybe more developed. I think at least 50% of the population has an emotional revulsion to the notion of 'male same sex' (not female same sex) and but only a tiny portion for whom that turns into something more aggressive.
Also 'gay' is not just 'different'. It's not like someone wearing a different hat.
Reproduction is at the core of the survival of the species, much like oxygen, food and water are at the core of your individual survival. Those instances are extremely powerful, the most powerful social motivators of all. So I actually do buy that 'moral shame' towards those who are seemingly 'opting out' of reproduction is part of a kind of darwinian social evolution.
FYI - it's mostly the same reason that people who are 'obviously abnormal', ill or deformed. Women and Men want healthy children, that's a very deep instinct. Nobody (and probably not you) is actually attracted to deformed or obviously ill individuals. We may feel sympathetic to them, and want to help them - but we are definitely not attracted to them. 'Mocking them' - that's just people being crude.
So obviously it's all armchair whatbout thinking ... but I'm inclined to think that this issue is deeply rooted in evolution and cultural evolution.
Personally I always assumed it is not about fear at all. Ask any bigoted moron and they won't say they are afraid of gay people and I believe them. I think it could be a few things. One possibility is that the person believes in a certain social hierarchy and is trying to enforce it (e.g. they believe gay people should be lower on the hierarchy than them and feel justified in letting them know it). Another alternative is someone who feels bad is trying to displace their own negative emotions and picking the easiest targets because they feel they are low in the hierarchy themselves. Probably there is also some merit to parents wanting grandkids and being upset if their child is gay. Another possibility is religious motivations - deeply religious people may worry their gay relative won't be accepted in to heaven or something like that.
> So, given a population of people, some who have a gene that makes them pressure gay kids to act straight, and some who don't, over time the pressuring gene will spread through the population. And here we are.
There's no gene like that, though. I'm skeptical of evolutionary explanations like this -- it's easy to come up with one for almost anything.
> In the case of gay-shaming, the obvious common cause is evolutionary: It's people trying to have more grandkids.
If this were the case, we'd have 'bred out' the gay, surely?
Acceptance of difference, including different sexual orientation, is higher in secular societies.
Religion seems to be a much more obvious, much more common, correlation to intolerance of homosexuality -- in no small part because the most popular written texts that form the basis of the bigger religions dictate an intolerance. The fact that reflects and feeds an innate distrust of different I think is important in the sense of maintenance of these beliefs, but can too easily conflate causality.
> If this were the case, we'd have 'bred out' the gay, surely?
This assumes that there is a gene that determines whether someone is gay or not. I was under the impression that gay and trans are an epigenetic phenomenon that occurs during early development. In the womb, a male brain develops too much along the female trajectory or female too much along the male trajectory, either due to presence of hormones that should not be there or the lack of hormones that should be there.
> This assumes that there is a gene that determines whether someone is gay or not.
This was evidently parent's assumption, per the claim that gay-shaming was evolutionary.
I've taken some liberty by inverting the former and conflating the latter (evolutionary / genetics) but my point is that there's no evidence for (and quite a bit against) the claim that any of this is 'evolutionary'.
There were quite a few cultures that accepted homosexuality, most famously the ancient Greeks. But also parts of India as well. They got their anti-sodomy laws from the British and just kept them until recently. I can’t speak to the cultural components however.
The Greeks also sent their young boys off to have sex sex with much older men, as part of their path to becoming adults.
We'd consider that repulsive by today's moral mores - so I'm not exactly sure that 'they once did it' makes it 'ok'.
They also had slaves and were cool with that.
But more broadly, the notion of sex, sexuality, social mores, relationships varies a lot and it's difficult to contextualize.
While the Romans had a lot of 'same sex' and generally mightn't have been ashamed of it, they didn't have same sex marriage and there's nothing to indicate that people thought it should be appropriate either. So we have to think a little bit about how a society with so much 'same sex' would have thought of 'same sex marriage' as utterly bizarre and possibly immoral.
Even in 2018 these things are still contextual from one place in the world to the next. That makes it hard.
I have always had issues with justifications of moral systems containing the word 'evolutionary', especially when it comes to things like homophobia.
First, because it sounds incredibly simplistic. Time after time new findings show that there's more to evolutionary processes than we thought, and there's more to the human brain than we thought, so imagine the sheer complexity of understanding both at the same time. It strikes me as suspcious, if not intellectually lazy, that an explanation for a phenomenon involving incredibly complex fields that have stumped generations of scientists can fit in a few sentences.
Second, because people using these kinds of arguments are not, in fact, biologists. As it happens, I know a fair few myself, and although it's not exactly the field of all of us, none are willing put this kind of argument forward. Not that it is necessarily wrong, but it speaks miles that people who would feel more qualified to give their opinion exercise much more caution than people who aren't.
Third, because many behaviors that don't make sense from an armchair evolutionary biologist's point of view are commonplace in nature. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_displaying_hom...
There are many more such kinds of behaviors and we don't really understand where they come from or why they exist (if there's even a reason).
I don't want you to take it wrongly or read my post as dismissing what you said off-hand with arguments of authority etc. Nor should you take it personally, as there are many posts like yours and I simply chose to reply to the more detailed one. Again, it's not necessarily completely wrong, but probably simplistic to the point of being harmful. Just please be mindful of that the next time you're invoking the word 'evolutionary' in an argument to justify something.
This is simply not true. There is no evolutionary cause that rationalizes prejudice against gay people. The simple fact that homosexuality has been observed by individuals in many species without similar reactions says a lot.
Ancient Greece and Rome did not have significant stigmas against homosexuality, although it may not have been as common as some stories would suggest. Native Americans tended to respect homosexuals because they contributed to the tribe and helped care for the tribe's children - they put in more than they received.
Prejudices against homosexuality coincide with the development of monotheistic religions, first with the Jews when the old testament was written, and this continued with the development of Christianity and Islam as they also consider the old testament to be a holy text. Modern Asia (specifically regarding China and Japan, but others as well) still has some issues with homosexuality despite not having the same religious influence, but those cultures tend to strongly emphasize conformity and not standing out. These cultures also tend to still expect the elderly to be taken care of by their children, while the Western world has moved towards helping the elderly retain as much independence as possible rather than mixing multiple generations together.
For an average gay person in India this doesn’t change much.
What it changes is that if someone who doesn't like you finds out you are gay, they can no longer turn you over to the authorities. This is actually pretty significant and allows gays to breath easier about the fact that they exist.
This fact means that over time the gay community can gradually work at being more open. If you take it gradually, it is likely to be easier for people to accept.
People need time to change. If you are realistic about that, things tend to work more smoothly.
If they can no longer turn you over to the authorities, they may feel compelled to gather a mob. A large part of the reason why we have criminal law is to suppress people's urge to take things into their own hands. When the legal system is unsatisfying, people turn to more instinctive methods of dealing with things.
At least the authorities were unlikely to torture you to death.
Sometimes, there is value in it being obvious that the people attacking you are in the wrong.
It may be a tragedy for that individual, but sometimes it helps the rest of society go WTF? and give more push back. Kind of like when that girl was brutally raped and murdered in Turkey and the men rose up and posted pictures of themselves on social media in mini skirts to protest the idea that a girl in a mini skirt was "asking for it."
Sometimes, when the people attacking you and ruining you are too polite and proper in how they shit all over you, it's harder to fight than if they are clearly brutal and horrible in their mistreatment of you.
> A large part of the reason why we have criminal law is to suppress people's urge to take things into their own hands
Well, yes, but largely by criminalizing taking things into your own hands (and enforcing that prohibition), whether or not those things are cognizable as crimes.
If your notional government is unable to constrain lynch mobs, and you are hated, then you are going to be subject to them whether or not the conduct which motivates antipathy toward you is legally cognizable as a crime, so you don't actually benefit from it being criminalized.
Before the US managed to get lynching under control, the fact that targets were charged with crimes (or actually detained in jail waiting trial for them) did not stop then from being lynched, often with the cooperation of public authorities.
This article explains my point with many anecdotes! https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-45430953
The article has anecdotes from rural India but it is not uncommon to hear such stories from urban parts too.
This is great, though it also illustrates how much farther India (and other countries) have to go in legal protection of LGBT people.
Also, a bit off-topic here, but it also reveals how stupid and hypocritical California's policy is, forbidding travel of state employees to US states that don't grant certain protections to transgender people. You can't go to Oklahoma because they don't have self-selection for bathrooms, but travel to places like India and China is just fine, for some reason.
Umm, the Indian Supreme Court legally recognized the "third gender"; quoting from the article [1]:
"When the Indian Supreme Court acknowledged that gender is a non-binary form of identity that goes beyond male and female, the victory came as a nice surprise to many."
[2]:
"India's Supreme Court has recognised transgender people as a third gender, in a landmark ruling that may offer gay people a glimmer of hope. It is the right of every human being to choose their gender," the court said in granting rights to those who identify themselves as neither male nor female. The court ordered the government to provide transgender people with quotas in jobs and education in line with other minorities, as well as key amenities."
There are many issues that need to be fixed in India. But there are also many areas where India is far far more progressive than the US, at the very least.
And this change has been accompanied by a social movement; should be faster, but change is happening.
Excuse me, I wasn't addressing whether or not India protected the rights of transgender people. I was pointing out that until yesterday, gay sex in India was actually _illegal_, yet there was no ban on traveling there for California state employees. Which seems horribly hypocritical and basically an exercise in virtue signaling.
The headline is weird - instead of legalising, it should say "decriminalises" in my opinion. Someone made it illegal at some point. The headline now seems to indicate "we've made a new law that allows it", but that makes it like it's an exception.
Decriminalization AFAIK is a reducement in criminal penalties while not necessarily making the act in question legal, while legalization is an outright removal of the crime status. I'm not sure whether it makes a difference that this legalization hinges on a new supreme court ruling, not legislative action.
No, "decriminalize" means "reduce or eliminate the penalties/enforcement for a criminal act (but it is still against the law)" while "legalize" means "make a criminal act no longer criminal (it is no longer against the law)". Oddly enough, this means that "criminalize" is not the opposite of "decriminalize" but of "legalize".
Criminal law is not a neat container. A crime is simply anything which is defined as being a criminal act within a given piece of legislation.
You can "decriminalise" something either by eliminating the entire piece of legislation, or by amending it to remove the criminal act within it. In the case of the latter, that leaves open the option of replacing it with other words that might indicate civil penalties. If that happens, that is still decriminalisation, and would be distinct from legalisation.
Legalised is more or less correct in this case. Decriminialising something means it could still be illegal, as a civil offense.
Importantly, like the US, UK and Australia, India is a "Common Law" nation. That means court rulings set binding legal precedents which can only be overruled by higher courts or actual legislation introduced later. In short: A judgement becomes law.
This is opposed to "Civil Law" societies (most of the rest) where court rulings do not set legal precedent, and might only be "persuasive" to other judges in other cases. Plenty of exceptions depending on the country, which court, etc. but that's a general overview.
Perhaps for people from Civil Law countries it would be odd to hear that a court has legalised something.
I'm pretty sure that this is not an example of irony. There's no unexpected or ambiguous element in the British covering news in India, as they have had an interest in the subcontinent since 1600.
I think the OPs point was that out of 1000s of other news channels writing about it, a BBC link will come up on HN.
Last week BBC posted a story titled, "Rocket woman: How to cook curry and get a spacecraft into Mars orbit", about women scientists in Indian Space Research Orginisation. That's how ridiculously biased and condescending they continue to be. And that's why many of us get irritated by their news.
I'm talking about the kingdom not the individuals. If Trump does something bad, for the rest of the world it's just the USA and not just Trump or his party.
So here it's the kingdom which made it illegal is talking with a moral high ground now. That looks ironical to me! Thats all man!
The concept of only a few deciding on societal mores, which we also saw in the US, should be seen as a real problem, even if you agree with the position of the "black-robed tyrants"...
A vigorous debate in society, which should have occurred, has been short-circuited.
I agree it's a societal issue: does your society rob individuals of their most basic rights or is your society ready to sacrifice and beat people into submission?
You require society's permission for every sex act you participate in? Just curious how you go about that.
Do you knock on the doors of all of your neighbors so you can explain in detail your sexual plans and get their approval? Do you have them sign something or is verbal approval enough?
I'm a part of society. Do I get a say in how you pursue your sex life? In that case: I completely don't approve. I'd simply prefer if you never had sex. Because it's just my belief. And if you don't support my belief, you're intolerant.
Anyway. Sounds cumbersome for what should simply be a private act between two consenting adults.
The __actual__ reality, not the theory, is that every single society that has ever existed, that we have records of, has regulated (in some form) both male and female sexuality, including sexual behavior with whom and when.
(Whether there has been a lot of hypocrisy about it or not, is not relevant.)
You seem to be making the argument that you feel you should have some say about what goes on in other people's bedrooms. My only question was whether you live up to that ideal by making sure that the people around you are okay with your sex acts and the people you enjoy them with.
Are they? Have you made sure they're informed so they can judge you properly?
This is a welcome step. It was good to see the Government not being a road-block in this case[1]. Hopefully, future decisions which make life easier for LGBT folks will be taken in the Parliament and Legislative Assemblies instead of courtrooms.
I think Government cannot do anything here. Few months back, Supreme court recognise Privacy has a fundamental right and said privacy and protection of sexual orientation lie at the core of the fundamental rights under Article 14, 15 and 21.
This case was just a formality. Any thing done by govt against LGBT will going to be struck down by the court unless they decided to change the Article 14, 15 and 21. In that case they will need 2/3 votes in both houses and president sign.
I'd like to genuinely ask HN community why they recognize this as a good thing. I mean why would they criminalize sex with animals. If one wants to have sex with a goat, why not?
Kavanaugh wouldn't be great for gay rights, obviously, but fortunately, even if he supported overturning Lawrence v. Texas, Roberts would be unlikely to. It's possible Trump will have another opportunity to appoint a justice to replace someone on the liberal wing, and that might mean there would be enough votes to overturn Lawrence v. Texas.
Even overturning Lawrence v. Texas wouldn't make gay sex illegal everywhere in the U.S., just in states with lingering sodomy laws.
This is a big deal, though it might seem like nothing has changed on the ground (as one commenter here has put it). It may take longer for society to accept it, depending on the city/town/village, but there is now a strong legal basis for not being harassed by the police.
I don't see the current central government doing anything in terms of legislation on gay marriage or related aspects, but we will get there.
There's a long way to go to ensure that LGBTQIA people are also treated as humans, but it was also long overdue to get such a landmark judgment, and by no less than a constitutional bench!
The judicary is independent from the government. That's why inspite of the current ruling party BJP being so outspokennly against LGBT, it got legalized. Thanks to the judicary department.
177 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadYou do know that sex without marriage is possible, right? How is it that if you are so advanced, that you had to fight for marriage "recently"?, mate!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_377_of_the_Indian_Pena...
It is the truth for a lot of countries that were under colonial rule. Colonial powers left their mark behind in so many unfortunate ways that are just too complex for countries to deal with even today. It is simple and lazy to label something "backward".
Couldn't agree more. Having said that, I'm not sure the "blame the colonials" is vastly better. For at least 2 reasons:
1) One of the laws the Penal Code replaced required death by stoning as a punishment (unless you were a slave in which case you were just flogged). As poor as the law was, it wasn't really replacing an enlightened legal framework.
2) Post-colonial India didn't exactly rush to replace the law. The first attempt wasn't until 2009, and that was overturned.
The simple truth is that, even supposedly liberal, countries have made these changes disappointingly recently. Personally, I'm glad this is happening but blaming others for the slow progress is somewhat disingenuous.
It is simplistic and lazy to blame the colonials for all the ills of a society too. But the slow progress in fixing something like this is not so much because of a backwards attitude. Nation building takes time. Especially when things around the world are changing fast. There is a long long way to go. And it is definitely going to take a very long time getting there. Especially because there are way too many issues that need the attention of an already strained legal system.
What does that even mean? They are free countries. No one forced India to hold onto that law. No one forces other countries to hold onto colonial era laws. If they don't change it that's their choice, their decision and their problem in the end. Not that of some long gone boogeyman.
Not so easy. Once you have a law in place you have vested interests who want to oppose any changes to the law. Either you need a dictatorship to make any changes you desire or respect democratic principles. You can't have both. Once a law was codified, albeit in a previous era, that itself becomes an excuse for vested interests to latch onto and demand that the law continue to be in place.
In my opinion, no social norms should be codified as laws as societies change and so do people. That creates more harm than good. This should serve as a lesson to all that laws should be generic in nature and not targeted towards one community/religion/caste/creed (be it either as a benefit or otherwise). This is again a by-product of Colonialism as British crown used personal laws to keep the country divided. Hopefully India fixes that next by codifying the Uniform Civil Code[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_civil_code
Since the boogeyman has been "gone", the entire region (not just India) has gone through several wars, a very messy, violent and tumultuous process of nation building. The region is not even used to existing as one nation yet. It takes time. Not making excuses for slow progress. Just trying to make the point that there isn't a magic wand to make everything all nice and shiny. It takes time. And as we see from this supreme court ruling, the intention is good and it is there.
And yes, it feels just as unreal to me.
>Although same-sex sexual activity was a capital crime that often resulted in the death penalty during the Ancien Régime, all sodomy laws were repealed in 1791 during the French Revolution. However, a lesser known indecent exposure law that often targeted homosexuals was introduced in 1960 before being repealed twenty years later.
So vive la révolution I guess.
1) Section 497 in The Indian Penal Code Adultery.—Whoever has sexual intercourse with a person who is and whom he knows or has reason to believe to be the wife of another man, without the consent or connivance of that man, such sexual intercourse not amounting to the offence of rape, is guilty of the offence of adultery, and shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to five years, or with fine, or with both. In such case the wife shall not be punishable as an abettor.
2) 498. Enticing or taking away or detaining with criminal intent a married woman.—Whoever takes or entices away any woman who is and whom he knows or has reason to believe to be the wife of any other man, from that man, or from any person having the care of her on behalf of that man, with intent that she may have illicit intercourse with any person, or conceals or detains with that intent any such woman, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine, or with both.
3) Having consensual sex with someone you promised to marry becomes rape retrospectively if you renege on the promise of marriage
4) And of course - Marital rape is legal. A husband (even an enstranged one) cannot be charged with raping his wife
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Australia#Decri...
That's so un-Indian-like
Just look at the radical transformation of the pre-colonial Kingdom of Buganda into present-day Uganda with its sodomy laws and internet meme pastors, perhaps ironically catalysed by the west, a west that has since flipped the complete opposite direction. It's only a matter of time before the tables turn again.
LGBT is at its core a small minority interest. It's an unstable system, it all depends on what the majority population happens to be interested in in this particular century.
Also, LGBT is definitely not a small minority interest and the more accepting society becomes, the more people realize that these issues are incredibly mainstream.
Not so long time ago people were fighting for more sexual freedom, it was even possible to produce a film about sexual love between underaged people (with underaged actors) for instance. Today we're introducing more rules about how people should sexually approach each other and paedophilia is an absolute taboo. And we consider this change a step towards freedom and equality again.
So I wouldn't be surprised if our definition of freedom would deny homosexuality at some later point.
If you look beyond the rather limited filter of "western liberal cultural change" you'll see that, while yes politics and societies shift over time, acceptance of same-sex relationships has been the norm in many cultures more often than your comment might suggest.
This comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_God,_Help_Me_to_Survive_Thi...
That's what was the case in Buganda. The Ugandan martyrs rebelled against that and were killed for it. Lauded by the west for their resistance at the time, with their spiritual successors demonised by the same west today.
It doesn't work that way. Take Nazism for example:
The NSDAP won the 1933 election with 43.9% votes. Literally 43.9% of the German people believed and supported the Nazi policies of Hitler.
To think that the Germans would again revert back to Nazism would be insane. What happened was an aberration at best.
Any form of extremist thinking is what is considered an unstable system. Sure extremism will have it's day but not always. It's always the moderate values and living that triumphs and continues to provide stability. So what you say is exactly opposite to what the reality is. Aberrations don't provide stability.
In the case of your Nazi example, people supported Nazism because the economy was in a shambles. When you're not eating, you don't really care as much about the Jews.
Edit to update: The cup of did indeed did not last, and is now gone. I still don't think a cup of tea should be illegal.
For example "We all die eventually" means "all humans die eventually" NOT "I want all humans dead".
Or in this case the GP is saying that they think that gay sex will be illegal again NOT that they want gay sex to be illegal again.
As someone that personally wants gay sex to be legal myself this is an important consideration. We are fortunate (in the West at least) to live in a fairly liberal society. We have to remember that freedoms have waxed and waned in human history and we should guard against steps which would lead to important freedoms being limited.
I get that this is a very emotive topic but it is important not to jump to conclusions - in fact it is part of the rules of this site to assume good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: I'm not sure Wikipedia [1] agrees with you. The original law was:
> Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life
So bestiality seems to have been prohibited initially. The judgement [2] says:
> Section 377 of the Penal Code, in so far as it criminalises consensual sexual conduct between adults of the same sex, is unconstitutional
So I'm not sure it decriminalizes anal and oral heterosexual sex as well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_377_of_the_Indian_Pena...
[2] https://www.sci.gov.in/supremecourt/2016/14961/14961_2016_Ju... page 442 (labelled 180)
>The court said other aspects of section 377 dealing with unnatural sex with animals and children would remain in force.
next stop, feminism.
Living in India is not easy. Every other day you have a reason to astonish over the regressiveness of people around you. Today, I get to have a momentary joy—at least there is something that works.
>I think homosexuality gets a bad rep in Kerala because of all those nasty ammavans (uncles) not-so-subtly molesting young boys at the back of buses and movie theatres.
Some reddit users share their experience:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Kerala/comments/9dfskv/sc_decrimina...
Why do people reject that? It's literally what freedom and liberty is, and it is the exact opposite of authority and oppression.
Controlling access to sex was one of the ways societies found to achieve those goals.
For a simple example, communities with much laxer sex rules, found themselves frequently torn by relationship related feuds. Requiring (and punishing non-adherence) to sticking to some fixed husband/wife is what they found to prevent (not absolutely solve) such issues. They then invented religious and other justifications for the practice to normalize it further.
Certain kinds of marital arrangement also helped keep money in the same extended family, etc. Different such goals evolved different strategies to achieve them.
Plausibly, in the good old days before washing machines when keeping a home together was a gargantuan task, the economic equilibrium just happened to be 1:1 male/female pairings.
Examining the substance of marriage law in England, for example, suggests that most of meat of law and custom revolves around inheritance law. People get swallowed up in the pageantry, but the legal trouble starts when assets are involved.
For one, we now have more elaborate laws and enforcement of them, and people are much more docile and civilized.
We don't just go and beat each other up like in communities of yore. Try an extramarital affair in old rural community though (not even an ancient one), and watch what happens (e.g. the husband blowing your brain with a shotgun).
Second, depends on the definition of "torn apart". E.g.:
https://www.ijsr.net/archive/v3i9/U0VQMTQ0MA==.pdf https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=1673... https://digitalcommons.olivet.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175606161... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2593091/
And let's not even add "crimes of passion" (what those societies tried to avoid). E.g.:
In New York City, 1 in 4 homeless households became homeless because of domestic violence or crimes of passion.
Nearly 15% of women have been injured by an act that could be classified as a crime of passion.
https://brandongaille.com/27-intriguing-crimes-of-passion-st...
>and were probably quite prevalent through history.*
I you mean that some people always had all kinds of sex relations, yes (nobody said adherence and enforcement was or could be absolute or affect the powerful as much as the masses). If you mean that there were fringe societies (e.g. those studied by ethnology) that had lax sex rules, then also yes.
If you mean that big well known historical societies at large embraced and accepted lax sexual behaviors, that's wrong. E.g.:
https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-myth-of-the-anc...
You essentially can't have a normal career in tech, media, journalism, acting, law, medicine, or any academic field. You can sometimes have a career, but it'll be highly constrained by your identity as a hated Other for the power class.
You can have a little irrelevant job somewhere, but watch out: If any attention is drawn to you, you'll be fired there as well. One example is Tony Hovater:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/us/ohio-hovater-white-nat...
He was fired from his job at a restaurant, couldn't pay rent, and people started posting his home address online. So he and his wife lost their home fleeing physical violence.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/11/2...
The Times article also notes he feared violence (specifically from armed thugs at his wedding). Which isn't surprising considering other violent incidents, like the guy who tried to gun down Steve Scalise at a baseball game, countless petty screaming and grabbings and punchings of anyone wearing a MAGA hat, etc.
It happens at every level, too. Not just Google developers telling Damore "I will keep hounding you until one of us is fired. Fuck you." But even high-level Democratic party politicans openly calling for Trump admin officials to be harassed in every public space:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/rep-waters-dr...
This sort of thing filters up and down; Maxine Waters said that because it's a fairly normal attitude in her peer group.
Another example - the violent mobbing of Charles Murray and Allison Stanger. Stanger ended up in the hospital in a neck brace.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/middleb...
This is off the top of my head. There's lots more.
I'm sure there is. But there's no way to pretend that it at all approaches the scale of discrimination that women or blacks or gays have been subjected to. The mere existence of violent reprisals doesn't put their victimization on an equal footing with those who had to fear the KKK. Those events are currently far more exceptional than gay-bashing or lynching of blacks have been in the past.
And among your specific examples, all but Stanger were activists working in support of political causes that put other minorities in a very understandable defensive mood, given how government-supported white nationalism would obviously cause far more harm than white nationalists have been receiving from the riots they help incite. (This is not to say that they were deserving of violence because of their activism, but it means they aren't a representative sample of their political group as a whole.)
The picture I'm seeing isn't tyranny or even a trajectory leading to tyranny. It's outlier events at the fringe of a conflict that is overwhelmingly a peaceful albeit heated political conflict. Any disagreement at this scale will have outliers like this. More than one quarter of US adults voted for Trump. Are there any demographic measures by which they're collectively worse off than blacks during the Jim Crow era? Especially the ones who are no more active in promoting their beliefs than bumper stickers, yard signs, and voting in primaries? Are there actual statistics to support your assertions that they're being thoroughly shut out of so many career paths and industries, not just self-selecting to avoid institutions they view as full of bad people and bad morals? Is anyone who's not a public figure being subjected to this supposed tyranny?
Calling the current conditions for right-wing extremists in the US "tyranny" seems like a vast overreach (and one that offensively minimizes much worse historical oppressions), which is why I asked for clarification whether that was what was really meant.
Well, read up on the evolution of moral systems and such. Those rules are not entirely arbitrary (even the ones coming from a religious origin, those are still manmade and follow certain rationales).
The problem is that such laws don't always make sense beyond their expiration date (when conditions changed etc), but can still be held in high esteem due to their existing stronghold.
I mean, as a thought experiment, do you really not internally know that bothering other people who are bot bothering you is wrong and ugly? Most people don't agree with that?
Edit: I am being downvoted, so this is apparently fairly controversial. That's unfortunate, in my mind. I personally believe that the democracy, liberty and prosperity that exists in the world today would not have been possible without America, its founders, and others who argued for this kind of liberty--most notably enlightenment figures. So I guess if you disagree with it, you're pretty lucky to happen to be here.
No, but it doesn't settle much.
For one, it's not always about how people are treated, but also about stopping things you think are bad from happening.
If you think e.g. that forests are good, you'd want to punish people who burn them, even if they did nothing wrong to you.
Similarly, if you are an ancient citizen and think people engaging in gay sex weakens your society (e.g. because these people don't have kids and your community will have less people to continue it, and fight and protect it) you'll try to stop people from doing that.
>I personally believe that the democracy, liberty and prosperity that exists in the world today would not have been possible without America, its founders, and others who argued for this kind of liberty
And I believe that its influence has been overplayed and is insignificant (if not negative). Starting from the genocide of the native Americans, to slavery of blacks, way after Europe had put an end to it, to treatment of chinese and other immigrants up to early 20th century, to inheriting old European colonialism after WWII and extending it with neo-colonialism, to promoting puritanism, neoliberal policies, the "war on drugs", global interventions and befriending and establishing dictatorships and banana republics, promoting crappy mass culture, unhealthy food culture, and total consumerism without regard for the environment, and so on.). Plus the unbearable exceptionalism and nationalism.
This always comes up and it's just like the Russian phrase "and you are lynching negroes."
This basically same argument from Russia to the US boils down to: it doesn't matter that you have improved upon the world, and looking to further improve on it, because you were far from perfect yourself and doing some very bad things.
Those bad things should be criticized, but I am certain had you the choice to be born in the pre-enlightenment world that you would not take it.
I find nothing wrong with that argument.
In fact, the actual disingenuous Cold War practice of whataboutism was rather the accusation of whataboutism itself.
It was meant as a thought stopper, to only allow one-sized criticism and to prevent putting things into perspective that doesn't flatter the first side.
Knowing that both side X and Y did bad things is totally compatible with trying to fix them (in fact it's a prerequirement).
It also stops you from painting Y as some uniquely evil, while letting X get away scot-free.
But only hearing side X attack Y on some bad shit, and not the other side (because that would be "whataboutism"), just serves to hide what X itself does, and to portray Y as some uniquely evil figure.
>Those bad things should be criticized, but I am certain had you the choice to be born in the pre-enlightenment world that you would not take it.
It's more of a wash. There are tons of places and social classes I'd like to belong to enlightenment, and tons of places and social classes I'd like to avoid being enlightenment.
And when the brain doesn't find good pattern matches, it alerts the person of something very strange and potentially dangerous going on.
Morality systems come on top of this fundamental fact, because morality systems are just the conscious justifications we give to our feelings.
I'd like to echo this. A while back, a coworker and friend of mine who is homosexual took me to a coffee shop that caters primarily to homosexual men. I had never been with him before in that social context, but his actions did fall within the stereotypes and I did feel myself uncomfortable with the situation. It wasn't that big of a deal, as I recognized my response.
What was more "eye-opening" was that later, he has the same reaction to those situations when he's with his heterosexual friends. He even went so far as to say he finds the concept of heterosexual sex as digusting.
But was that discomfort specifically related to homosexuality or just the general discomfort one feels when one finds oneself in an entirely alien social context? If you where to go with him to that coffee shop twice a week for a couple of month do you think you'd still find it uncomfortable?
This is a serious claim, one that moral philosophers (even those inclined towards moral fictionalism/nonrealism) have issues with. Just two of them:
* This account fails to distinguish between moral beliefs and cultural taboos. Individuals tend to think that they can justify both, but challenging taboos is more likely to result in confabulation -- individuals are willing to concede hypothetical concerns in their moral beliefs, but remain committed to their taboos even in the face of good evidence against them.
* Moral philosophy, as it exists today, doesn't seek to provide justification to homophobia, gender discrimination, &c. The dominant metaethical views don't give any consideration at all to these particulars, but rather accept as conclusions (via utilitarian calculus, via a supreme principle, &c) that homophobia and the rest are all morally unjustified. Where does this fit into the pattern matching to feelings to confabulated justifications pipeline?
https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/uterine+cal...
Just looking at same-sex marriage allows you to clearly see correlations in approval of same-sex marriage based on religious beliefs: http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/views-abou...
Beyond the differences between a number of the religions, You can look at the results for "Sources of guidance on right and wrong by views about same-sex marriage". The clear majority of those who oppose it do so based on religion.
I believe it's much deeper than that, it's evolutionary.
Some codified 'teachings' i.e. religious or otherwise may push our instincts in one way or another.
FYI there would have been ancient religions very much in favour of 'same sex' though probably not same sex marriage.
I suggest that a little more than 1/2 of men are repulsed by the notion of gay sex (totally different for women though) and that it's instinctive.
More complicated issues like 'hate' or systematic social shame etc. are obviously culture. But my bet for the impetus of it all is on evolution, not just some arbitrary moral systems.
Could you possibly refrain from speculating along these lines unless you have actual evidence that there is an evolutionary basis for laws that criminalize gay sex?
Because otherwise, even if this isn't your intention, you're giving people who favor this kind of legislation the support of sciency-sounding justifications which some people could easily mistake for actual science.
If a society has moved beyond the ‘natural’ impulse to shun members with some evolutionary disadvantages, it must consider that it cannot shun members with any of them.
Homosexuality is always a subconscious threat, because until recently if you were homosexual your bloodline died with you. If your child was homosexual that’s one possible family tree gone, and if it was an only child that’s your bloodline gone again. So if feels like there’s always going to be some opposition as long it’s still connected to reproduction.
It could be classified this way if there's scientific evidence to support that hypothesis. But throwing it out there as a speculation isn't helpful.
>like a lack of physical strength
Surely this shows how silly the argument is. Where are the cultures that criminalize having a lack of physical strength?
>Homosexuality is always a subconscious threat, because until recently if you were homosexual your bloodline died with you
No, because there's only a rough connection between sexuality and who you actually have sex with. Being gay doesn't stop you having sex with women, and you don't have to have sex many times in order to reproduce.
I'm not remotely justifying laws that criminalizing anything.
Moreover, evolution and social evolution are very grey subjects wherein we have a great deal of difficulty proving things one way or another.
I don't think it's offensive, or even 'a stretch' to suggest that attitudes towards some kinds of behaviour are evolutionarily derived, at least partly. It's just an opinion, and maybe it's not super perfect position ... but it's not unreasonable or objectively offensive either.
And for the record, I'm glad that they've changed this law.
Yes! Exactly. So it is pointless and unhelpful to speculate about whether or not people find gay sex inherently repulsive for evolutionary reasons.
I think maybe you're having difficulty seeing this because you're not (I'm guessing) a member of one of the affected groups. Imagine that I made comments offering an "evolutionary" explanation for why people find tech nerds inherently sexually repulsive -- without, of course, providing any actual science to back it up. Wouldn't that be pretty close to just trolling?
Whatever your intentions, these kinds of speculations only serve to normalize anti-gay prejudices by providing a "natural" or "scientific" explanation for them. Unless you really have done some kind of scientific investigation of anti-gay prejudice, it would be best not to introduce these kinds of speculations into the discussion.
So men evolve, but women don't, huh?
Just because your own personal experience propositioning men for gay sex instinctively repulses 50% of them doesn't mean your anecdotal suggestion means anything about the rest of humanity. Maybe you just need to take a shower.
This filter applies to trans people as well as people with full face tattoos or piercings. Great discussion, thanks.
e.g. If one culture hates dogs and kills them on sight, you might say that culture has a prejudice against dogs. If 95% of cultures hated dogs and killed them on sight, you should start to think there is a deeper reason for that (especially considering how useful dogs can be).
In the case of gay-shaming, the obvious common cause is evolutionary: It's people trying to have more grandkids.
If your kid is gay, and decides to go off and have gay sex for the rest of his/her life, he/she won't reproduce. Your gene line ends.
However, if you pressure/shame/tyrannize your gay kid into a reproductive relationship, your genes replicate into grandkids (who likely won't be gay themselves). Your gene line continues.
This also applies to brothers, sisters, and other kin. The reproductive benefit of pressuring a gay relative to act straight is comparable to saving them from death, since the outcome of 'acting gay' and 'dead' is evolutionarily similar. (Of course a living gay relative can help other relatives raise their kids, so it's not identical to being dead. Some have argued that the "helpful gay uncle" effect would counteract the evolutionary cost of homosexuality. But the math doesn't work; a childless relative isn't so much more helpful than a relative with kids that deliberately childless individuals replicate their genes better than ones who have their own kids.) This explains why the pressure to act straight is so strong and vicious - it comes from the same place as the pressure to not die.
So, given a population of people, some who have a gene that makes them pressure gay kids to act straight, and some who don't, over time the pressuring gene will spread through the population. And here we are.
And just to ward off the reflexive moralizing and personal attacks: There's no moral content to our evolutionary history, any more than there's moral content to a lion eating a baby gazelle alive. Please don't fall for the naturalistic fallacy and start attacking as though I'm saying natural equals good. Lots of things that are natural are not good. Understanding the world requires us to be able to separate rational understanding what is, from a moral judgment of what we should do. We should be adult enough here to make that distinction.
I have to disagree. I don't think people who opposr and hate gay people are doing it for evolutionary purposes. I haven't met anybody who thinks this guy is gay which meand he won't be making any kids, so let's hate him. Hate comes from much more fundamental place than that.
For majority of people it's not "normal" hence different. And for majority what's different is scary. The same reason why immigrants of different skin color than majority population are hated.
The same reason applies to extremely short, extremely tall, people with deformities, person with vitiligo in black/brown countries etc are treated differently, made fun of.
That's not how evolution works. Unexpected movement on the ground near your feet doesn't scare you because you have carefully thought about how it will affect your chances to reproduce, but because the siblings of your ancestors didn't pay attention, were bitten by snakes and didn't get to reproduce.
For majority of people it's not "normal" hence different. And for majority what's different is scary. The same reason why immigrants of different skin color than majority population are hated."
I don't agree at all, and I agree with the original post.
I think a slight majority of men have an 'instinct' against gay sex that is not learned or socialized. The 'hate' is another thing , as something maybe more developed. I think at least 50% of the population has an emotional revulsion to the notion of 'male same sex' (not female same sex) and but only a tiny portion for whom that turns into something more aggressive.
Also 'gay' is not just 'different'. It's not like someone wearing a different hat.
Reproduction is at the core of the survival of the species, much like oxygen, food and water are at the core of your individual survival. Those instances are extremely powerful, the most powerful social motivators of all. So I actually do buy that 'moral shame' towards those who are seemingly 'opting out' of reproduction is part of a kind of darwinian social evolution.
FYI - it's mostly the same reason that people who are 'obviously abnormal', ill or deformed. Women and Men want healthy children, that's a very deep instinct. Nobody (and probably not you) is actually attracted to deformed or obviously ill individuals. We may feel sympathetic to them, and want to help them - but we are definitely not attracted to them. 'Mocking them' - that's just people being crude.
So obviously it's all armchair whatbout thinking ... but I'm inclined to think that this issue is deeply rooted in evolution and cultural evolution.
But yes it's good news for gay Indians.
There's no gene like that, though. I'm skeptical of evolutionary explanations like this -- it's easy to come up with one for almost anything.
If this were the case, we'd have 'bred out' the gay, surely?
Acceptance of difference, including different sexual orientation, is higher in secular societies.
Religion seems to be a much more obvious, much more common, correlation to intolerance of homosexuality -- in no small part because the most popular written texts that form the basis of the bigger religions dictate an intolerance. The fact that reflects and feeds an innate distrust of different I think is important in the sense of maintenance of these beliefs, but can too easily conflate causality.
This assumes that there is a gene that determines whether someone is gay or not. I was under the impression that gay and trans are an epigenetic phenomenon that occurs during early development. In the womb, a male brain develops too much along the female trajectory or female too much along the male trajectory, either due to presence of hormones that should not be there or the lack of hormones that should be there.
This was evidently parent's assumption, per the claim that gay-shaming was evolutionary.
I've taken some liberty by inverting the former and conflating the latter (evolutionary / genetics) but my point is that there's no evidence for (and quite a bit against) the claim that any of this is 'evolutionary'.
We'd consider that repulsive by today's moral mores - so I'm not exactly sure that 'they once did it' makes it 'ok'.
They also had slaves and were cool with that.
But more broadly, the notion of sex, sexuality, social mores, relationships varies a lot and it's difficult to contextualize.
While the Romans had a lot of 'same sex' and generally mightn't have been ashamed of it, they didn't have same sex marriage and there's nothing to indicate that people thought it should be appropriate either. So we have to think a little bit about how a society with so much 'same sex' would have thought of 'same sex marriage' as utterly bizarre and possibly immoral.
Even in 2018 these things are still contextual from one place in the world to the next. That makes it hard.
First, because it sounds incredibly simplistic. Time after time new findings show that there's more to evolutionary processes than we thought, and there's more to the human brain than we thought, so imagine the sheer complexity of understanding both at the same time. It strikes me as suspcious, if not intellectually lazy, that an explanation for a phenomenon involving incredibly complex fields that have stumped generations of scientists can fit in a few sentences.
Second, because people using these kinds of arguments are not, in fact, biologists. As it happens, I know a fair few myself, and although it's not exactly the field of all of us, none are willing put this kind of argument forward. Not that it is necessarily wrong, but it speaks miles that people who would feel more qualified to give their opinion exercise much more caution than people who aren't.
Third, because many behaviors that don't make sense from an armchair evolutionary biologist's point of view are commonplace in nature. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_displaying_hom... There are many more such kinds of behaviors and we don't really understand where they come from or why they exist (if there's even a reason).
I don't want you to take it wrongly or read my post as dismissing what you said off-hand with arguments of authority etc. Nor should you take it personally, as there are many posts like yours and I simply chose to reply to the more detailed one. Again, it's not necessarily completely wrong, but probably simplistic to the point of being harmful. Just please be mindful of that the next time you're invoking the word 'evolutionary' in an argument to justify something.
Ancient Greece and Rome did not have significant stigmas against homosexuality, although it may not have been as common as some stories would suggest. Native Americans tended to respect homosexuals because they contributed to the tribe and helped care for the tribe's children - they put in more than they received.
Prejudices against homosexuality coincide with the development of monotheistic religions, first with the Jews when the old testament was written, and this continued with the development of Christianity and Islam as they also consider the old testament to be a holy text. Modern Asia (specifically regarding China and Japan, but others as well) still has some issues with homosexuality despite not having the same religious influence, but those cultures tend to strongly emphasize conformity and not standing out. These cultures also tend to still expect the elderly to be taken care of by their children, while the Western world has moved towards helping the elderly retain as much independence as possible rather than mixing multiple generations together.
(I mean to comment very narrowly about looking to other species for shaming behaviors, I'm not trying to argue the broader issue either way)
What it changes is that if someone who doesn't like you finds out you are gay, they can no longer turn you over to the authorities. This is actually pretty significant and allows gays to breath easier about the fact that they exist.
This fact means that over time the gay community can gradually work at being more open. If you take it gradually, it is likely to be easier for people to accept.
People need time to change. If you are realistic about that, things tend to work more smoothly.
If they can no longer turn you over to the authorities, they may feel compelled to gather a mob. A large part of the reason why we have criminal law is to suppress people's urge to take things into their own hands. When the legal system is unsatisfying, people turn to more instinctive methods of dealing with things.
At least the authorities were unlikely to torture you to death.
It may be a tragedy for that individual, but sometimes it helps the rest of society go WTF? and give more push back. Kind of like when that girl was brutally raped and murdered in Turkey and the men rose up and posted pictures of themselves on social media in mini skirts to protest the idea that a girl in a mini skirt was "asking for it."
Sometimes, when the people attacking you and ruining you are too polite and proper in how they shit all over you, it's harder to fight than if they are clearly brutal and horrible in their mistreatment of you.
Well, yes, but largely by criminalizing taking things into your own hands (and enforcing that prohibition), whether or not those things are cognizable as crimes.
If your notional government is unable to constrain lynch mobs, and you are hated, then you are going to be subject to them whether or not the conduct which motivates antipathy toward you is legally cognizable as a crime, so you don't actually benefit from it being criminalized.
Before the US managed to get lynching under control, the fact that targets were charged with crimes (or actually detained in jail waiting trial for them) did not stop then from being lynched, often with the cooperation of public authorities.
Also, a bit off-topic here, but it also reveals how stupid and hypocritical California's policy is, forbidding travel of state employees to US states that don't grant certain protections to transgender people. You can't go to Oklahoma because they don't have self-selection for bathrooms, but travel to places like India and China is just fine, for some reason.
"When the Indian Supreme Court acknowledged that gender is a non-binary form of identity that goes beyond male and female, the victory came as a nice surprise to many."
[2]:
"India's Supreme Court has recognised transgender people as a third gender, in a landmark ruling that may offer gay people a glimmer of hope. It is the right of every human being to choose their gender," the court said in granting rights to those who identify themselves as neither male nor female. The court ordered the government to provide transgender people with quotas in jobs and education in line with other minorities, as well as key amenities."
There are many issues that need to be fixed in India. But there are also many areas where India is far far more progressive than the US, at the very least.
And this change has been accompanied by a social movement; should be faster, but change is happening.
[1]https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-history-of-indias-t...
[2]https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/04/16/india-transgende...
You can "decriminalise" something either by eliminating the entire piece of legislation, or by amending it to remove the criminal act within it. In the case of the latter, that leaves open the option of replacing it with other words that might indicate civil penalties. If that happens, that is still decriminalisation, and would be distinct from legalisation.
Importantly, like the US, UK and Australia, India is a "Common Law" nation. That means court rulings set binding legal precedents which can only be overruled by higher courts or actual legislation introduced later. In short: A judgement becomes law.
This is opposed to "Civil Law" societies (most of the rest) where court rulings do not set legal precedent, and might only be "persuasive" to other judges in other cases. Plenty of exceptions depending on the country, which court, etc. but that's a general overview.
Perhaps for people from Civil Law countries it would be odd to hear that a court has legalised something.
I encourage everyone to post and up/down vote according to the best traditions of HN.
Anyway, a great step in the right direction!
Last week BBC posted a story titled, "Rocket woman: How to cook curry and get a spacecraft into Mars orbit", about women scientists in Indian Space Research Orginisation. That's how ridiculously biased and condescending they continue to be. And that's why many of us get irritated by their news.
A vigorous debate in society, which should have occurred, has been short-circuited.
Do you knock on the doors of all of your neighbors so you can explain in detail your sexual plans and get their approval? Do you have them sign something or is verbal approval enough?
I'm a part of society. Do I get a say in how you pursue your sex life? In that case: I completely don't approve. I'd simply prefer if you never had sex. Because it's just my belief. And if you don't support my belief, you're intolerant.
Anyway. Sounds cumbersome for what should simply be a private act between two consenting adults.
(Whether there has been a lot of hypocrisy about it or not, is not relevant.)
Are they? Have you made sure they're informed so they can judge you properly?
1. https://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/et-commentary/sec...
This case was just a formality. Any thing done by govt against LGBT will going to be struck down by the court unless they decided to change the Article 14, 15 and 21. In that case they will need 2/3 votes in both houses and president sign.
I can't ask questions here anymore? I wanted to know how people rationalize that this okay?
The world is upside down.
Even overturning Lawrence v. Texas wouldn't make gay sex illegal everywhere in the U.S., just in states with lingering sodomy laws.
I don't see the current central government doing anything in terms of legislation on gay marriage or related aspects, but we will get there.
There's a long way to go to ensure that LGBTQIA people are also treated as humans, but it was also long overdue to get such a landmark judgment, and by no less than a constitutional bench!