Tolerating Sexuality

A homosexual lesbian girl, kills herself because she was caught out, doing pornography. This is a true story, and happened recently in India.

There is an important lesson to be learnt here.

Whether prostitution should be criminal, or whether lesbianism or pornography should be against nature, is not for society to choose, but for the individual to decide.

It is unfortunate that our society and government still considers it its right to force upon people, values that dont belong to them. To force a set of Victorian laws upon them - in this land of the Kama Sutra and erotic temple sculptors. And to follow blindly, archaic laws, made by a set of people who dont practice these laws in their own countries any more.

Prostitutes must enjoy the benefits of sexual diseases counselling, condoms, etc. by becoming registered. Why should internet pornography be illegal, when foreigners and NRIs compete among themselves for a larger piece of the internet pie - worth millions in foreign exchange?

The police regularly hauls off people to prison for prostitution, sodomy, pornography and what not, when they know perfectly well themselves, that these people are pretty much comfortable with themselves with what they do. And do not harm anybody else (unlike smoking, drinking or drugs). They also know, that for every one person they ’catch’, there are probably a hundred more who believe in these very same values.

Why should these youths not be allowed to compete with their foreign colleagues, if they are unemployed, and their family does not object to pornography?

New Zealand has recently legalised prostitution. America has removed anti sodomy laws from the last of its states that had it still in place.

Why should a young girl die in India, or even be jailed, for an act no different from what several of her contemporaries do - on Indian films, MTV, FTV, blue films and the internet?

India has to make a first move now. At the very least what India can do, is to make these acts, a civil crime, or a crime of the conscience - and act only when criminal complaints are recieved. It must not continue to criminalise sex. Or humiliate those involved. And it should punish law officers who try to make money out of their misfortune.

If at all sex should remain illegal, we should consider punishing these ’consented’ crimes, such as prostitution, pornography and homosexuality, with a ’rap on the knuckle’, and not by throwing them out of their family and their social life.

Every Indian citizen, should have a right to believe. Whatever that belief. And a freedom guaranteed to profess that belief.