BAD NEWS! India High Court Restores Sodomy Law, Criminalizing Homosexuality For 1.1 Billion People

Horrendous news! The India Supreme Court has overruled a lower court decision that had struck down the nation's law criminalizing homosexual activity in the world's second most populous country. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code had been ruled unconstitutional by the New Delhi High Court in 2009 and the Indian government had agreed to accept the ruling, which meant that LGB people in the country no longer had to worry about being branded criminals by definition and subject to up to 10 years in prison. Religious groups took up the baton and appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.

However, the action by the Supreme Court overrules the lower court ruling and puts the issue at the feet of the India Parliament, which almost certainly will do nothing to change the law, which means that moving forward homosexuality has been effectively re-criminalized.

The top court said the 2009 Delhi High court order decriminalising homosexuality is constitutionally unsustainable as only the government can change a law. 

This means gay sex between consenting adults stays a criminal offence under Section 377, a British colonial era law banning "carnal intercourse against the order of nature", which had been struck down by the high court. The Supreme Court said there is "no constitutional infirmity" in that law. 

"It is surprising that the court which does judicial review on many issues has put the ball in the court of Parliament to decide on homosexuality," said additional Solicitor General Indira Jaising. "People expect the highest court of the land to protect their rights." 

The order is "a step backwards towards barbarism and medievalism," tweeted noted historian Ramachandra Guha. 

Gay rights NGO Naz foundation has said it will seek a review of the verdict.

Sad news from India. The first step to LGBT equality begins with decriminalizing sodomy. It was 10 years ago, in Lawrence vs Texas, that the United States Supreme Court ruled that all sodomy laws in the United States violated the constitution, saying that "The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime." Hopefully, the LGB community of India will not have to wait another 10 years before they can have their existence no longer demeaned by the laws of their country.

Godless Wednesday: Worldwide Analysis of Belief

The Pew Forum has released a report called The Global Religious Landscape which demonstrates that Christians are a plurality of the world's population (31.5%), followed by Muslims at 23.2% and people affiliated with no religion are at 16.3%. (Hindus are at 15.0% and Buddhists at 7.1%.)

Worldwide, more than eight-in-ten people identify with a religious group. A comprehensive demographic study of more than 230 countries and territories conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life estimates that there are 5.8 billion religiously affiliated adults and children around the globe, representing 84% of the 2010 world population of 6.9 billion. 

[...] 

The demographic study – based on analysis of more than 2,500 censuses, surveys and population registers – finds 2.2 billion Christians (32% of the world’s population), 1.6 billion Muslims (23%), 1 billion Hindus (15%), nearly 500 million Buddhists (7%) and 14 million Jews (0.2%) around the world as of 2010. 

[...] 

At the same time, the new study by the Pew Forum also finds that roughly one-in-six people around the globe (1.1 billion, or 16%) have no religious affiliation. This makes the unaffiliated the third-largest religious group worldwide, behind Christians and Muslims, and about equal in size to the world’s Catholic population. Surveys indicate that many of the unaffiliated hold some religious or spiritual beliefs (such as belief in God or a universal spirit) even though they do not identify with a particular faith.

The report also analyzed the geographic distribution of the religiously affiliated and noted that most people live in areas where their belief is held by the majority.

Nearly three-quarters (73%) of the world’s people live in countries in which their religious group makes up a majority of the population. Only about a quarter (27%) of all people live as religious minorities. 

[...] 

Overwhelmingly, Hindus and Christians tend to live in countries where they are in the majority. Fully 97% of all Hindus live in the world’s three Hindu-majority countries (India, Mauritius and Nepal), and nearly nine-in-ten Christians (87%) are found in the world’s 157 Christian-majority countries. 

[...] 

Though by smaller margins, most Muslims (73%) and religiously unaffiliated people (71%) also live in countries in which they are the predominant religious group. Muslims are a majority in 49 countries, including 19 of the 20 countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The religiously unaffiliated make up a majority of the population in six countries, of which China is by far the largest. (The others are the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hong Kong, Japan and North Korea.)

This may explain why religious people seem to believe that religious freedom should apply to their belief but no other. When your belief system is shared by the vast majority of people that you know and interact with, one could become somewhat inured to the desires and needs of religious minorities.

Hat/tip to Joe.My.God