Queering religion

Some years back, one of my good activist friends – very prominent, secular and politically articulate quoted her daughter to indicate that she had “no problems” with homosexuality as long as it did not involve her children or siblings!!

In 1996, during the initial presentation on “Discrimination based on Sexual Orientation” for a seminar course on Comparative Constitutional Law, the person who seemed most anguished and compared homosexuality to incest to elicit audience support so he could demonstrate the frivolity of my proposed paper was Dr. Madhava Menon!! Dr. Menon is well known as the pioneer of the new wave of legal education in India which purportedly stands for liberal and secular values.

One fallout of the Delhi High Court judgement reading down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code – decriminalising homosexual behaviour – is a shift of focus of the discourse and therefore the visible actors. Of course there is a paradoxical alignment of representatives of conservative segments cutting across religions to oppose the ramifications of this judgement and appeal to the Supreme Court. These self-styled representatives of religion would have us believe that they are the custodians of public morality. The media discourse also would lead us to believe this. And it amuses the more dangerous adversary (to queer rights) than those seeped in religious bigotry who are getting media space nowadays -  the homophobic “rational” secular liberal that activists scamper to find “historical” evidences to acceptance of queer lives in the glorious yore.

This adversary, for the moment is yet to come out of the closet with his/her homophobia and is very happy to see the fight in someone else’s domain, where s/he does not have to rack her/his brains for logical, moral and “scientific” – the prototype would be our Honourable Union Home Minister, who in an interview to NDTV on the 11th of July kept stalling questions on his personal opinion on decriminalisation of homosexuality on the grounds that it was irrelevant – as if as a Home Minister he does not proffer his opinion on anything!!! This adversary is perhaps secretly satiated that two of her/his adversaries are busy engaging each other.

This adversary is suave, affable, politically correct and can tolerate queer behaviour as long as it is “exhibited” by people in whose lives s/he does not have a stake directly or indirectly. And in that sense s/he seemingly does not have a problem with the reading down of S.377 – but as long as someone else is fighting her discomfort, s/he is fine – though s/he will not admit it. S/he is as uncomfortable with the self-appointed custodians of morality as s/he is with the queer community. For her/him the need to criminalise the queer community arises when it breaches his/her periphery of every day life. The best way to keep the queer community from committing that breach is by keeping a distance – painting the queer community as an insular homogeneous and if necessary exotic entity that lives far away from the complex realities of “normal” society!!!!

The danger of this adversary is that s/he can subtly lull the queer rights discourse into complacency by masquerading as a supporter, by a dehumanizing glossing over the fact that all problems of society from economic recession to other hegemonies involving caste, colour, race, gender etc. affect the queer community as much as it does her/his heterosexual comforts.

In so far as I know, across hegemonic barriers, many members of the queer community are practitioners of various religions to varying degrees. Some of them observe fairly orthodox religious practices and few others are scholars in theology. What I do not understand is why even remotely there should be a conflict between the constitutional right to practice and preach religion and the right to sexuality, why they should be mutually exclusive? I suppose one of the answers might be in evolving multiple critical queer theologies across different religions. These are times when I wish I believed in a religion – so I could begin to contribute – practice what I preach!!!