India’s supreme could has struck down a provision in India’s constitution in a major decision that has legalized homosexuality according to a report:
India’s Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a ban on gay sex after a decades-old campaign against a colonial-era law used to hold back LGBT rights.
Members of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender groups held tearful celebrations in cities across the South Asian nation of 1.25 billion people as the historic verdict was read out.
“The law had become a weapon for harassment for the LGBT community,” said chief justice Dipak Misra as he quashed the cornerstone of Section 377, a law introduced by British rulers in 1861.
“Any discrimination on the basis of sexuality amounts to a violation of fundamental rights,” he added in the ruling, which added India to a list of more than 120 countries where homosexuality is decriminalised.
While India’s law only legalises sexual acts between adults, gay activists have hailed the verdict as a major boost in the deeply conservative country where religious groups have fiercely opposed any liberalisation of sexual morality.
Activists had been fighting the ban since the 1990s, suffering several court reverses before Thursday’s verdict.
The Delhi High Court decriminalised gay sex in 2009, but the Supreme Court reinstated the ban in 2014 after an appeal by religious leaders.
According to official data, 2,187 cases under Section 377 were registered in 2016 under the category of “unnatural offences”. Seven people were convicted and 16 acquitted.
“It was a law that propagated homophobia,” said Keshav Suri, one of the petitioners against Section 377, who organised a dance show at his family’s luxury Delhi hotel to celebrate the court victory.
“In rural areas it is a harassment tool, used by cops, used by authorities for extortion for glorifying rape and molestation,” Suri told AFP in an interview ahead of the verdict.
Many Indian gay professionals have moved to Canada and Europe where they are more accepted, added the businessman who married his partner in Paris this year.
India’s conservative government had opposed ending Section 377 but said ahead of the hearing that it would leave the decision to the “wisdom” of the Supreme Court.
It had warned, however, that judges should not change other aspects of Indian law, such as the right to marriage.
– ‘Long battle’ –
Members of the LGBT community hugged each other and cried outside the Supreme Court in New Delhi as news of the verdict spread.
“I am speechless! It’s taken a long time to come but finally I can say I am free and I have equal rights as others,” said Rama Vij, a college student in Kolkata who gathered with others watching on television.
Despite the pressure on the LGBT community, India has quietly made some strides in sexual rights in recent years.
A transgender judge, Joyita Mondal Mahi, presides over courts in West Bengal state, Indian passports now state whether a holder is “male”, “female” or “other”, and the city of Raigarh, with 139,000 people, has a transgender mayor.
Suri’s hotels are known for their gay-friendly discos and more professionals are coming out to challenge the Indian establishment.
Many say that gay marriage and equal rights in inheritance and other areas must be the ultimate prize, but they acknowledge that change will not be swift.
“This is the first step of the history of a lot of other countries that first decriminalised gay sex, allowed civil unions and then marriage,” said Suri.
“It is a long battle to equal rights but I am sure we will get there eventually.”
New Delhi choreographer Mandeep Raikhy, who has used the performances of his dance troupe to highlight the experience of gays, was even more cautious.
“I don’t want to sound pessimistic but I don’t think we will see gay marriage in my lifetime,” he said. (source)
This is a major victory not for the LGBT, but for Hindu nationalism.
We have been warning for a long time about the rise of Hindu nationalism and the threat it poses to Christians as well as Muslims in India. Hindu terrorists have made clear they want to create a Hindu “ethnostate” and intend to do so by hunting down and either forcibly converting or murdering all Christians in India.
The issue with the laws against the LGBT is not that they were established by the British, who did it out of Christian influence, but because of the connection between homosexuality and the Hindu religion. Hinduism is an ancient form of Vedic paganism going back to the days of the Aryan invasions, who introduced it as a way to enslave the Dravidians and integrated aspect of pre-Aryan Dravidian religion into it. The creation of this intercultural union was Hinduism.
In Hinduism, homosexuality is considered very normal and accepted because it represents acceptance of androgyny, sometimes called “tritya-prakriti”, or a “third gender” between male and female and is legally recognized throughout parts of India, such as the state of Tamil Nadu in the south. There are also many cases of the “gods” of Hinduism assuming male and female forms, such as Ardhanarishvara, which is an androgynous form of Shiva (male) and Parvati (female). Gender is not seen as something which is intrinsic to the creation of a person, but is something which is “assigned” and essentially corresponds with a state of one’s “spiritual evolution”. For just as an individual can, per Hindu beliefs, reincarnate into different animals or persons regardless of gender, one must argue that a shift in gender could not happen either in the current life or in a future one.
However, this also poses another question as to the meaning of gender, specifically, what is its purpose?
The purpose of gender would seem to be reproduction, and it is because God has made it so. As the Book of Genesis writes “…male and female He (God) created them” and He gave them the order to “be fruitful and multiply.”
But to the pagan world, the purpose of sexuality was far from generation. Indeed, one might say that generation was regarded as but an extra “fruit” of the action that one had a “divine responsibility” to control, for if one believes that the position of the stars, the days of the year, the times of the seasons, and other outside factors influence the creation of a child because the child is the sum of these outside forces, then it presupposes a eugenic mindset that one must attempt to harness as best as possible the sum of these forces to pass on the best possible creation as one’s progeny. This has many implications, including the justification for abortion and murder of the “unfit” and cannibalism.
If the primary meaning of sexuality is not about generation, then because of the ability for natural sexual relations to generate life and the physical sensations that one experiences, it is traditionally viewed in pagan cultures an expression for the channeling and harnessing of cosmic energies that unites one to the divine in a massive channeling of power. This is why “sacred sex” is so commonly associated with paganism, called “tantra” for the Hindus, because like the “sacred prostitution” of the ancient world, it is a way of uniting man with the “divine” just as many worship celestial bodies such as the sun or moon in an attempt to “unite” heaven with earth.
Sexuality does not have to be limited to male-female relations. Indeed, if one believes that sexual actions are a transmission of power, then even the domination over a person or “power sharing” between persons involved in sexual activity can be a way of uniting with the “divine” that does not need to be limited to gender. One could argue that to limit sexual relations to simply men with women could be argued to be a form of imposing “spiritual limitations” on a persons’ “attempts” to “unite” with the divine and thus be spiritually “retarding” himself and others around him. To that one could also argue that because “transgenders” believe to partake of both genders in a variety of ways, that they are more spiritually advanced because they use both male and female “channels” in their “union” with the spirit world through their sexual activity.
All of these activities are simply forms of debauchery and a perversion of the sexual act. To argue that sex exists as a form of divine union before a means of generation is as ridiculous as saying that a pencil exists first as a ear-scratching device and a means of writing last. However, this is the demonic inversion that has pervaded the world on account of original sin, for as its effects permeated all of creation, it darkened the minds of men so that even the simple and obvious truths as evidenced by natural law could and did become confused and darkened under the yoke of sophistry and deceit. It was Christ who had to come and, directly revealing the word of God to the human race, teach that which he not only had forgotten, but would not have known were it not told to him.
Christ came, and He promised that He would return and make all things right. His teachings have been revealed, and man has the choice to accept or reject Him. Because of this, the same paganism of the ancient world still exists, albeit having been greatly controlled and limited far from what it was before in terms of its spread and intensity. However, as Christianity around the world has become under increasing attack and many have either left the Faith through various forms of rejection, from heresy to simply leaving the faith, paganism has returned with a vengeance, for in the ancient world Christ was not known and so the truth had not yet been revealed. Now, the truth has been revealed, and knowing the truth there are individuals who are choosing to reject it and re-embrace paganism in its different forms.
Indian paganism is particularly interesting because it has always been very strong, tied to a deeply rooted ethnic nationalism and a sense of history. To confront Hinduism is to confront the founding myth upon which India has been rooted for over three thousand years, and it is to say that the native Dravidians were either deceived or forced to be subject to this religion by their Aryan rulers, which has held them in a state of perpetual bondage. It is, in the literal sense. to challenge the very meaning of what many believe it is to be an Indian in the past, present, and future senses. It is also why Christianity, while making progress, has struggled so much in India, for it has had to confront these issues among many others.
The fact that India embraced the LGBT means much more than just “freedom” and “gay rights.” It is a sign that India is attempting to re-assert her Hindu spiritual identity, bound to an ancient and perverse form of paganism that Christ came to the Earth to combat and destroy. The hatred of the “saffron terrorists” for the cross is not a new hatred as some would present it, being one of “colonization” or “British rule,” but one going back to the struggle between good and evil manifested at Babel, where man attempted to become like his creator. What is different is that the Gospel message has been given to India, and while there are many that have accepted it, especially from the poorer castes, those of power have generally not accepted it, preferring the racism of Hindu spirituality that has kept them in a position of power and have been stirring up those in the poorer castes to support them in the name of nationalism and the Hindu religion.
The rise of the LGBT in India is a signal to the rise of nationalism, and it is a warning for all Christians. If a Christian has the means, he may want to consider leaving India, because