I doubt that I knew anything about homosexuality when I was a kid. I was drawn to girls from a very early age, though the feelings were forcefully repressed and buried deep down thanks to the screwed up social mores of those days.
As I got older, I have always wondered whether the love for the other sex does not preclude satisfying physical relations with the same gender. Not having tested this out myself, I can only rely on what scientists and commentators have written about, and it seems like
sexual fluidity is for real.
Whether or not straight people have sex--or fall in love--with others of the same sex, the more I have walked away from the old traditions of the old country, the more I have wondered what place law has in who people love, or who they have sex with. I can even understand the religious orthodoxy issuing decrees on what makes something a sin. If people do not like those religious decrees, then they can always shed that religious cloak. But, the law? One cannot simply walk away from one country to another, right?
In the old country, homosexuality as a crime was leftover from the years of the bastard empire's rules. A free India
merely replaced the white masters with home-grown brown masters.
The criminalisation of homosexuality or what is popularly referred to as
Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) dates back to 1860 when the
British introduced it as sexual activities against the “order of
nature.” ... The roots of the legality, however, can be found in
European culture which for a long time had influenced Indian ways and
thoughts.
We then have to ask ourselves where the white colonizers got the idea that homosexuality is not the “order of nature.”
Britain was Christian, though Catholics and Protestants killed each other in the name of Christ! In the narratives that developed a couple of centuries after the death of Jesus,
Saint Augustine invented the story of sex:
He needed to understand the peculiar intensity of arousal, compulsive
urgency, pleasure, and pain that characterizes the human fulfillment of
desire. He was not looking back on these feelings from the safe perch of
a diminished libido, or deluding himself that they were abnormal. As a
young man who had already fathered a child, he knew that, for the entire
human species, reproduction entailed precisely the sexual intercourse
that he was bent on renouncing. How could the highest Christian
religious vocation reject something so obviously natural? In the course
of answering this question, Augustine came to articulate a profoundly
influential and still controversial vision of sexuality, one that he
reached not only by plumbing his deepest experiences but also by
projecting himself back into the remotest human past.
Or, to put it in simple words, Augustine had a penis problem!
How weird it is, Augustine thought, that we cannot simply command this
crucial part of the body. We become aroused, and the arousal is within
us—it is in this sense fully ours—and yet it is not within the executive
power of our will. Obviously, the model here is the male body, but he
was certain that women must have some equivalent experience, not visible
but essentially identical.
So, what did Augustine do?
Augustine’s tortured recognition that involuntary
arousal was an inescapable presence—not only in conjugal lovemaking but
also in what he calls the “very movements which it causes, to our
sorrow, even in sleep, and even in the bodies of chaste men”—shaped his
most influential idea, one that transformed the story of Adam and Eve
and weighed down the centuries that followed: originale peccatum, original sin.
This idea became one of the cornerstones of Christian orthodoxy
Augustine blamed his own penis problem on Adam and Eve's sexual relations!
That whopper of an explanation from 1,700 years ago bled into Catholic, and later Protestant, doctrines, which
the white settlers brought to the United States too.
In his deeply researched new book, Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty-First Century,
Geoffrey R. Stone gives his answer to these and other questions about
our country’s regulation of sex, with a special emphasis on same-sex
activity. According to Stone, a scholar of constitutional law at the
University of Chicago, Christianity has exerted the biggest influence on
how we have addressed the issue from colonial times to today. The
“central theme” of Sex and the Constitution “is that American
attitudes about sex have been shaped over the centuries by religious
beliefs—more particularly, by early Christian beliefs—about sex, sin,
and shame.”
Stone reminds us that life was different in the pre-Christian, pre-Augustine Europe:
In a brief survey of sexual attitudes in the ancient world, he blames
the early Christians for having taken all the fun out of sex. In
pre-Christian times sex was considered “a natural and positive part of
human experience” and not “predominantly bound up with questions of sin,
shame, or religion.” He echoes previous scholars in finding that
“classical Greek morality and law focused not on sexual sin, but on
whether an individual’s conduct was harmful to others.”
The missing link between Augustine and the British sodomy laws?
If Stone holds Augustine responsible for promoting the idea of sex as an
evil force, he presents Saint Thomas Aquinas as “the man most
responsible for the hardening of the Church’s attitude toward same-sex
sex.” Aquinas “systematized and expanded upon Augustine’s thinking.” His
Summa Theologica (1265–1275) “rewrote the whole of Christian
moral theology” and pronounced same-sex activity, which could not be for
procreation, “especially contemptible in the sight of God.”
Aquinas distinguished sinful acts carried out by opposite-sex couples
from the sexual activity of same-sex couples. The latter activity was
per se the “more grievous sin.” The church conferred formal authority on
Aquinas’s views on these and other matters at the Council of Trent in
1563.
At some point in time, the sooner the better, we better develop for ourselves an understanding of what it means to be human, which will then provide clear answers to questions such as who the fuck cares what Adam and Eve did!
