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Sexual Rights Are Human Rights

Do we make the laws that govern us or do the laws that govern us make us?
This is a question that decides the nature of the democracy we believe we
have.

The recent debate on the decriminalization of homosexuality by amending


the Indian Penal Code, hardly modified since the British Raj put it in place
long before it became obsolete, is a crucial human rights issue defining the
very nature of the democracy we claim to be the fundamental basis of our
self-governance.

The first responsibility of our legislators is to ensure that the laws they
create are in the interest of every citizen and are not detrimental to the
interests of the smallest minority in our republic---the individual citizen. A
second caution our lawmakers must regard is that, whatever its flaws an
inadequacies, our constitution is designed not for a majority monoculture but
for a plurality of cultures and individual orientations across a vast cultural
spectrum. We have built-in constitutional mechanisms to prevent the
trampling of human rights by governments in power. Sadly, however, the
British-made Indian Penal Code is not in alignment with our constitution
launched in 1950; and both lawmakers and the police are constitutionally
illiterate as we witness in our daily lives.

As for gays and lesbians, the debate over their sexual rights centres on
whether they are ‘natural’. This is curious. Either all human behaviour has
roots in ‘nature’ as opposed to ‘culture’ or every human being requires to
undergo an appropriate therapy to be made ‘natural’ or ‘healthy’ again.

We do need law to prevent violence and anarchy in society. Violence and


anarchy have to be sternly dealt with in order to maintain a civil society.
Homosexuality is not a social crime, it is a private choice to pursue
happiness and to enjoy freedom. On the other hand, extremists and
fundamentalists, and terrorists ranging from Naxalites to the Bajrang Dal
and the various militant senas that have spread across India are a social,
cultural, and political threat to the rule of equality and freedom in India.

The tendency of law and its makers is to choose soft targets instead of
addressing hard ones. The result is that terrorism is here to say either in the
form of organized violence or in the shape of cultural suppression.
If there were scientific evidence that HIV AIDS is caused by or spreads
through homosexuality, other civilized democracies in the world would have
taken note of it. We are hypocritical in this respect, too. We proclaim that
HIV patients will not be discriminated. They may even marry by mutual
consent and medical treatment can ensure that they produce HIV-free
children.

Why then do some of want to continue to treat homosexuals as criminals?


Why are we afraid of them? Is it because all of us are naturally bi-sexual but
are conditioned by social mores to become heterosexuals? Gender
discrimination and sexual segregation are the means society uses to ensure
that a majority of people have a heterosexual orientation, produce children to
propagate the species---and so forth.

We have not moved beyond that traditional dogma even as more females
join the work force, become economically independent and sometimes
choose to live together as some men do. Sex is a part of companionship and
the right to choose a companion is a human right, too. Marriages are made in
courts, not in heaven; and in modern society, priests and scriptures have
been effectively replaced by sensible laws made by constitutionally literate
lawmakers.

----Dilip Chitre

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