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EVENTS AND ISSUES
New Delhi, 19 June 2006
US And India
NOTHING GAY ABOUT
IT!
By Saumyajit Ray
If President George W. Bush’s foreign policy initiatives
---- in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran ---- are the result of his neo-conservative
political convictions, his recent utterances against homosexuality and gay
marriages have placed beyond doubt his ideological leanings in matters of
domestic policy. He had called himself a “compassionate
conservative” while campaigning for President in 2000; six years later, he
continues to be a conservative, with compassion
for everything that Republicans hold dear to their hearts.
It is not the first time that President Bush has voiced his
opposition to homosexuality and gay marriages. During Campaign 2004, he came
out strongly against “civil unions”—the quasi-legal term for gay marriages—and
declared that marriage, as we knew it, was a time-tested institution,
sanctioned by faith, that solemnized the union between man and woman.
In other words, there can be no marriage between man and man
or between woman and woman. The term marriage should not be used to describe
same-sex relationships. In practical terms, neither can same-sex relationship
be accorded the status of marriage, nor can people in such relationships be
given the privileges and facilities associated
with marriage.
On the contrary, the Democratic Presidential candidate in
2004, John F. Kerry, the senior Senator from Massachusetts,
opposed any ban on gay marriages. Despite the fact that the Roman Catholic
Church — the single largest Christian denomination in the United States to
which Kerry belonged — is theologically opposed to same-sex relationships.
However, Kerry’s stand on gay marriages was in perfect tune with his party’s
politically correct Left-liberal ideological orientation.
His refusal to support a ban on gay marriages ruffled the
feathers of his native constituency of Irish Roman Catholics. Hispanics — also
devout Roman Catholics who, with African Americans, make up the Democratic
Party’s voter support base — also shifted loyalty to the Spanish-speaking
conservative President. In fact, President Bush had improved his Latino voter
support from 35% in 2000 to 45% in 2004.
The overwhelmingly Protestant Christian Coalition, a
Republican grassroots organization
dating back to the Reagan days ( it was known as Moral Majority then) not only
controls a big chunk of Republican votes but also decides the Grand Old Party’s
policies on social issues. No
Republican candidate — incumbent or challenger — can afford to rub it the wrong
way.
It would be imprudent to think that President Bush, a devout
born-again Christian himself, would disagree with the Christian Coalition on
such issues as homosexuality and gay
marriages. Accordingly, the President has re-affirmed his support to a
Christian Coalition-led group for their proposed amendment to the federal
Constitution defining marriage as exclusively between man and woman and seeking
to ban gay “marriages”. He has also declared that the Government would
“recognize and protect” marriage as it “promotes the welfare of children and
the stability of society”.
Christian churches all over America — Protestant and Roman
Catholic — are bitterly opposed to both same-sex relationships and any move to
legalize them. President Bush’s support to the proposed amendment not only
echoes the church’s voice in Government but reflects his own religious
convictions as well. It would be wrong then to say that he acted keeping in
mind only his Party’s prospects in the mid-term elections in November this
year.
True, the Republicans can ill-afford to lose the Congress (which they had recaptured from the Democratic
Party in 1994 and controlled since) but they cannot be expected to be so
politically naïve as to depend solely on the Christian coalition to shore up
their political fortunes, an unpopular Partyman in the White House
notwithstanding.
In India,
on the other hand, if latest newspaper and magazine columns are to be believed,
homosexuals and lesbians—people with “alternate sexuality”—are beginning to
come out of the closet. In fact, some of them are carrying their sexuality on
their sleeves, neither ashamed nor apologetic about it. There is no move as yet
to demand legalization of gay marriages, but certainly a long-standing demand,
supported by the politically correct English language media, for legalization
of homosexuality persists.
Gay activists and sympathizers point to the continued
existence of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which not only describes
homosexual activity as “unnatural” but makes it a cognizable and non-bailable
offense attracting punitive action, and call for its immediate abrogation.
According to them, this law is a legacy of British rule in the sub-continent
and even though no such law existed in Britain any longer, the Indian
Parliament has made no attempt to repeal it.
Indeed, India
was ruled by conservative British Protestants who were (and still are) known to
take the Holy Bible literally. In the matter of same-sex relationships too,
they have always faithfully stuck to the Biblical command: “Do not lie with a
man as one lies with a woman, that is detestable.” (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13)
Undoubtedly, then, that Protestants in the 19th
century Britain and those in present-day America would respond similarly to the
issue of same-sex relationships.
Roman Catholics, in India as
in America,
go a step further: they oppose abortion and divorce too, apart from condemning
same-sex relationships in the strongest terms.
Indian gay activists also point to the “existence” of
same-sex relationships in ancient India, saying that the literature
of those times is replete with references to homosexual activity in society.
But the fact remains that homosexuality is strictly forbidden by the Laws of
Manu, that ancient code of personal and collective conduct sacred to Hindus.
There is no denying that public morality in India, at least in sexual and
conjugal matters, is informed and governed by such scriptural stipulations. In
Islam, too, homosexuality is condemned as despicable and unnatural, anti-God
and anti-social.
In such a situation, the Protestant-written Section 377 of
the Indian Penal Code has perfectly served the purpose of Indians (both Hindus
and Muslims) who look at “alternate sexuality” as an example of embarrassing fringe behavior. If the politically correct
media in both India and the United States encourages behavior that is largely
perceived as deviant, then it is natural to expect both the Church and the state
(whose duty it is to control and eliminate social deviance) to intervene. ----
INFA
(Copyright India News and Features Alliance)
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