Prashant,
I have read with interest most of your emails to the various gay mailing lists.
I have a few requests to make, in common to all your emails till now -
1) There have been repeated requests that some of the content of your emails
could be quoted in the current Sec 377 case in a way that harms our community.
As the wise have said, no freedom is absolute and is tempered by a
corresponding duty or responsibility. Assuming you are interested in the
greater good of the gay community in India, will you please heed these requests
and not make the job of our activist friends more difficult than it already is
? You can help by not making the current DHC judgment sound foolish, for
example. I am not saying you do not have the right to your opinion, neither am
I saying I agree or disagree with it, I am simply saying the greater good might
be served at simply the cost of you not getting to write an email to a group,
which seems a good deal to me.
2) There are repeated references in your emails to some personal beliefs which
you tend to state in the manner of proven fact, which they are not. As you are
aware, the large majority of members on these mailing lists do not write but
only read the postings. It is possible that they may read the wrong information
posted by you but not the correction posted by one of the lawyers or doctors.
Can you please desist from writing about topics which needs specialist
understanding either legal or medical in nature. I also suggest that you do
more research before you post - many of your errors can be easily avoided if
you bothered to read up first. For example you wondered why the DHC should be
considered a landmark though the sodomy legalising bill passed in the UK in
1967 was not considered a landmark. If you had bothered to read a bit you would
find that the 1967 bill was indeed a sorry piece of legislation compared to the
unequivocal rejection of
discrimination that the DHC judgment delivers. For example, google would have
directed you to the following passage and improved your understanding :
"(as a result of the 1967 judgment) ,while gay sex may have been legal, most of
the things that might lead to
it were still classified as 'procuring' and 'soliciting'. 'It remained
unlawful for two consenting adult men to chat up each other in any
non-private location,' Tatchell says. 'It was illegal for two men even
to exchange phone numbers in a public place or to attempt to contact
each other with a view to having sex.' Thus the 1967 law established
the risible anomaly that to arrange to do something legal was itself
illegal". In summary, please write only about stuff you know about - don't just
shoot your mouth off.
Cheers
Salil
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