India court legalises gay sex in landmark ruling

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.