BREAKING: Indian Supreme Court Decriminalizes Gay Sex, Ruling Affects Tens Of Millions Of LGBTs [VIDEO]

September 6, 2018 LGBT History, LGBT News

The Indian Supreme Court has just unanimously struck down Section 377, the 1861 penal law that criminalized homosexuality. With India’s population of over 1.3 billion, the ruling finally frees (at least) tens of millions of LGBT Indians from a cursed holdover from British colonial times.

The New York Times reports:



In a groundbreaking victory for gay rights, India’s Supreme Court on Thursday struck down one of the world’s oldest laws criminalizing consensual gay sex, putting to rest a legal battle that stretched for many years and burying one of the most glaring vestiges of India’s colonial past.

After weeks of deliberation in the Supreme Court and decades of struggles by gay Indians, Chief Justice Dipak Misra said the law, known as Section 377, was “irrational, indefensible and manifestly arbitrary.”

In court filings that stretched for hundreds of pages, more than two dozen petitioners related the emotional cost of living closeted lives, the bouts of depression, the abuse, the persecution, the blackmail and the coming-out journeys they had made while living under a shadow that made their most intimate behavior illegal.

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