India top court reinstates gay sex ban | Hacker News Reader

India top court reinstates gay sex ban

bbc.co.uk

24 pointscaublestone11 comments

Important tl;dr for those not from India:

1. Section 377 is a 148-year-old colonial law (read: British rule) under which a same-sex relationship is an "unnatural offence" and punishable by a 10-year jail term.

2. The Delhi High Court (akin to one of the US state supreme courts) had in 2009 struck down this law.

3. The Supreme Court hasn't defended the law, but asked Parliament to repeal it. I quote:

> "It is up to parliament to legislate on this issue," Justice GS Singhvi, the head of the two-judge Supreme Court bench, said in Wednesday's ruling.

> "The legislature must consider deleting this provision (Section 377) from law as per the recommendations of the attorney general," he added."

It's important to note that the Supreme Court has thrown the ball in the Government's court. They have said that they need to uphold the Constitutional section until it's there. If the section is repealed it can be done away with.

On the other hand, the Supreme court has the authority to stay such sections which affect fundamental human rights.

This is all objective stuff.

My opinion is that the Supreme Court effectively avoided the issue and put the onus on the government. In simpler terms, I feel the Supreme Court didn't have the balls to strike down the Section 377.

They could have refused to take the case, non? That's how the US Supremes effectively avoid taking the decision.

Here they effectively nullified an existing decision saying that the legislature has to act to support the decision.

Assuming a hostile or deadlocked legislature, this is nothing short of striking down the lower court's decision.

It's not a surprise. Other BRICS are on the same road.

Russia and Brazil more explicitly.

I'm homossexual and live in Brazil. We have the highest rate of homophobia related crimes of the "civilized" world.

Moral aggressions are very common.

Just like in the USA, fundamentalist christians are pushing the government against all the progress we have made in the past decade.

I fear for my rights and my safety.

Could hardly believe this when I read it. What an embarrassment. The damage done by the Brits lives on around the world.

In fairness to them, there aren't any Western cultures that openly or "legally" tolerated homosexuality in the mid 19th century...

As posted on another thread:

And people wonder why we need LGBT+ activism still....

It is worth baring in mind that this incidentally will affect a lot of people in Europe and North America. India is a primary area for companies to outsource not just their technology to, but also entire business processes. This includes HR document processing, which will result in personal information clearly relating to LGBT issues being processed by staff working in a culture hostile to LGBT people

Implementing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_Award would have prevented these type of issues in India

India is a lost cause. Human rights, Climate change and on many other issues have only been driving the quality of life for a billion Indians into the gutter.

Let's keep the outrage factory away from HN if we can.

I'm so glad I live in Palo Alto

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