Few raw materials for answers regarding rights of LGBT sexual rights : rights issues : GS 2 : IAS
12:05 PM
- Indian philosophy, unlike the Western construct of a rigid male-female binary, has always recognised that gender is socially grafted on to what is essentially a sexually dimorphic body.
- In its inspired 2009 judgment, the Delhi High Court seemed to finally acknowledge this history when it read down Section 377, thus allowing consensual sex between same-sex individuals.
- the ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2013. On Tuesday, a five-judge bench of the apex court will hear a curative petition to decide once again on the constitutionality of Section 377.
- in 2014 the Supreme Court's historic NALSA judgment affirmed the fundamental rights and freedoms of the third gender.
- The 2013 judgment sought to defend Section 377 by claiming that it does not criminalise a community or a sexual orientation but merely identifies certain acts as offences.
- But how does one separate the act from the person?And there lies its biggest catch.
- The second aspect of the 2013 judgment was that the Supreme Court left it to the legislature to amend the law if it is indeed discriminatory.
- This is unusual reticence from a judiciary that has been both hailed and reproached for its extraordinarily activist stance in most other issues
- when the court dismissed the LGBT community as "a minuscule fraction of the country's population", it failed to recognise that a democracy has to protect the liberties even of somebody who is in the minority of one.
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