India goes 'back to the Dark Ages' by banning gay sex — again

[Behind the Aegis]

India's Supreme Court on Wednesday threw out a 2009 ruling by a lower court that had decriminalized gay sex, in a major setback for the cause of gay rights in the world's largest democracy.

The top court stated that only India's parliament could change the law, by deleting a section of the penal code dating back to the 19th century, thus ruling that the Delhi High Court had overstepped its powers with its decision four years ago.

The move shocked gay rights activists, who had expected the court simply to rubber-stamp the earlier ruling. In recent years, India's Supreme Court has made progressive rulings on several rights issues.

"We see this as a betrayal of the very people the court is meant to defend and protect," said Arvind Narayan, one of the lawyers representing the consortium of gay rights groups that was defending the 2009 judgment.

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[Deep13]

1. Homosexuality wasn't much of an issue in the so-called dark ages.

It wasn't until the modern era that was it classified as deviant behavior with a real witch hunt to wipe it out. Also a product of modernity: witch hunts.

[Behind the Aegis]

2. Actually, it was pretty bad.

Though, there were some bright spots during the time, which many don't know about, including that in certain parts of Europe, same-sex marriage was not only legal, but allowed by the Church!

[Deep13]

4. The Latin (Catholic) Church never allowed same-sex marriage.

The general belief that it did is based on the writings of historian John Boswell. He read correspondence and medieval literature assuming the intimacies it described referred to erotic relationships. In fact they were describing fraternal, non-sexual, and very public affections. The letters between the future king Richard the Lionheart and Philip Augustus, for example, described a public, fraternal, love relationship, not a homosexual affair. The best rebuttal to Boswell is Stephen Jaeger's Ennobling Love.

Medieval people before the 13th c. considered sodomy to be sinful, but not greatly so. Starting in the 13th c. the Church and increasingly powerful royal authority began to treat it harshly. Even so, a concerted effort to wipe out homosexuality did not really happen until the Reformation era. The idea that people are gay rather than merely committing sodomy was not discovered until the 19th c. During the agrarian Middle Ages and up until the industrial revolution, the purpose of marriage really was to produce children in order to perpetuate the agrarian system. So, it probably would not have occurred to anyone to allow same-sex marriages.

[yeoman6987]

3. Dark ages

+1

[Smarmie Doofus]

5. They can "ban" it all they want. But it ain't a-goin' nowhere. n/t