Editorial, LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME, in 15 July 2009, Vol. 5, Part 2, No. 13 issue of LAW ANIMATED WORLD.

LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME

has at last been judicially recognized, albeit by only one High Court in India, and approved as part of a person’s right to live with personal liberty and privacy. Socratic love was said to have incensed God who poured down fires of hell and destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah according to the conservative version and, ever since, the same sex love came to be shunned and banned in the Western world. There is no instance of explicit prohibition of the same in the Hindu culture though certain punishments have been prescribed for same sex practices in Manu Smriti, which Code, incidentally, is reviled by many of the dalit and downtrodden sections in our country. Scholarly studies did not find any plausible grounds to substantiate the Biblic or Islamic versions of the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and even indicate the possibility of natural catastophes behind it, but right from the Justinian prohibition up to the incarceration of Oscar Wilde the Western world did not seem to recover from this trauma. Wilde was but one champion of the gay rights movement we may say, and ever since the Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) rights movement has gained currency first in the West and slowly all over the world, and liberal sections of the society are more and more coming to view these ‘deviations’ as but ‘natural variations’ of sexual urges and manifestations in human society. In India replete with superstitions and blind hatreds between communities, the third sex, as they are called, have always been subject to much social revulsion and ostracism, which course needs correction – especially, in the mindsets of a majority of the people. Already we see conservative religious, communal and political sections up in arms against this salutary decision promoting the fundamental right to life and gender equality and the ball now seems to be in the Supreme Court. We have all the confidence in the humane and liberal essence of our apex court and hope it would surely not reverse but affirm this much-needed liberal, humane correction to a superstitious legal cum socio-political blunder.   §§§