Homosexuality has been in the news in India recently with the Delhi High Court outlawing an old seldom-enforced colonial-era law criminalizing gay sex. The media debate has some remarkable similarities to views expressed on the same subject in the 1960's in the US. Here's a couple of interesting articles:
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090710/jsp/opinion/story_11219092.jsp India may not have experienced the virulent homophobia that was a feature of many Western and Islamic societies but there was no social acceptance of homosexuality. It was, at best, seen as a fringe phenomenon which had to be tolerated as long as the “deviants” kept their sexuality private and didn’t disrupt society. There was a special status and role for hijras, the “third sex”, but this institutionalized accommodation on the fringes of society wasn’t extended to gays. The IPC superimposed a law on an unwritten social code marked by both passive intolerance and generosity. In any case, it is important to note that the law existed merely on paper. Actual prosecution under Section 377 had ceased long before the Delhi High Court judgment. In justifying the decriminalizing of gay sex, the high court argued that “Constitutional morality” must take precedence over theology and public opinion, “even if it be the majoritarian view”. The point was well made but is fraught with a wider significance. Can gays now plead for a redefinition of marriage on the grounds that a man-woman arrangement is inherently discriminatory towards those who prefer a same-sex bonding? That’s only the tip of the iceberg. If the criminal ban on homosexuality violates the fundamental rights and dignity of some individuals, it follows that all personal laws must be tested against this principle. If equality becomes the litmus test, can the existing Muslim personal laws relating to divorce and polygamy withstand impartial judicial scrutiny? Can the principle of inclusiveness extend to gays but not to Muslim women? Can the government enact Shah Bano-type legislation if it violates a fundamental right of the Constitution? The Supreme Court will have to consider these questions when it hears Baba Ramdev’s appeal against the high court verdict. The Times may have been prescient after all. Eschewing the rules (of nature) may well open the floodgates of a wider churning. Why confine the legacy of Keynes to the fiscal deficit alone? http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,835069,00.html There is no denying the considerable talent of a great many homosexuals, and ideally, talent alone is what should count. But the great artists so often cited as evidence of the homosexual's creativity—the Leonardos and Michelangelos —are probably the exceptions of genius. For the most part, thinks Los Angeles Psychiatrist Edward Stainbrook, homosexuals are failed artists, and their special creative gift a myth. No less an authority than Somerset Maugham felt that the homosexual, "however subtly he sees life, cannot see it whole," and lacks "the deep seriousness over certain things that normal men take seriously ... He has small power of invention, but a wonderful gift for delightful embroidery. He has vitality, brilliance, but seldom strength." Homosexual ethics and esthetics are staging a vengeful, derisive counterattack on what deviates call the "straight" world. This is evident in "pop," which insists on reducing art to the trivial, and in the "camp" movement, which pretends that the ugly and banal are fun. It is evident among writers, who used to disguise homosexual stories in heterosexual dress but now delight in explicit descriptions of male intercourse and orgiastic nightmares. It is evident in the theater, with many a play dedicated to the degradation of women and the derision of normal sex. The most sophisticated theatrical joke is now built around a homosexual situation; shock comes not from sex but from perversion. Attacks on women or society in general are neither new in U.S. writing nor necessarily homosexual, but they do offer a special opportunity for a consciously or unconsciously homosexual outlook. They represent a kind of inverted romance, since homosexual situations as such can never be made romantic for normal audiences. -raghu. -- Q: What did the apple say to the orange? A: Nothing, apples don't talk.
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