Déjà vu all over again. AP Photo/Altaf Qadri
When India’s supreme court effectively re-banned gay sex earlier today,
it set aside the ruling of one of its own high courts in favor of a law
imposed on India by its British occupiers in 1861. That means it
has now re-joined 75 other countries that explicitly punish gay sex with
imprisonment. Here’s a look:
(India should now be dark orange.)
What do many of these countries have in common? More than half were former British colonies:
Wikipedia
In
fact, the law that India’s supreme court just upheld is one of the most
resilient relics of the British Empire. Known as Section 377 of the
Indian Penal Code, it imposed Victorian values on what colonial rulers
viewed as unpardonable tolerance toward homosexuality throughout their
empire. The British instituted versions of Section 377 in colonies all over the world (pdf, p.5). India’s ruling today brings the tally to 42 out of 52 British Commonwealth countries (pdf, p.3) in which the law is still on the books.
But
was it just the British? You might notice that a lot of the other
countries from the map above where homosexuality is illegal were French colonies:
Wikipedia
And
many Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and Belgian ex-colonies have high
penalties for gay sex too. However, in these cases colonialism isn’t the
culprit. Nearly all of the non-British former European colonies with
stiff penalties for homosexual relations instituted them after
independence.
That’s
probably because the French Revolution banned religious courts, which
had previously handled sodomy. This policy spread to the Netherlands in
1811 when France invaded the country. Throughout the 1800s, Spain,
Portugal, Belgium and Italy all decriminalized sodomy (pdf, p.22), as Douglas E. Sanders, a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, explains.
A
more obvious factor keeping homosexuality illegal in many of these
countries is Islam. Take for instance the countries that punish gay sex
with death: Mauritania, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, and parts of
Nigeria and Somalia. Some—Nigeria, Sudan and Somalia—inherited British
colonial anti-gay laws. But they too instituted the death penalty long
after independence—most in the last 40 years—in line with Islamic sharia
law. Many of the other 76 countries with severe anti-gay laws are also
Islamic states.
India,
however, isn’t. And before the British invasion, it was much more
tolerant of homosexuality. So why would India and so many other
ex-colonial countries cling so tightly to the moral whims of Victorian
Englishmen that were never their own?
One
reason might be that morality codes give governments a way to build a
national identity around shared values, often as a foil to permissive
Western countries. But a more prosaic one is that anti-gay laws are also
a handy way to fortify state control (as is now happening in Russia).