Gay Ruling a Step Backwards for India

On Wednesday India's Supreme Court turned the clock of history backwards when, in defiance of all expectations, it set aside a landmark 2009 High Court judgementthat had ruled homosexuality could not be construed as a criminal offense "against the order of nature," as held for more than a 150 years by Article 377 of the colonial-era Indian Penal Code.

In doing so, the Supreme Court effectively re-criminalized gay sex, making second-class and stigmatized citizens of those it revealingly called "a minuscule fraction of the country's population," and returning them to what the novelist Vikram Seth, one of the gay-rights movement's most lucid voices, called "lives of quiet desperation." To look at it another way, the Supreme Court decided that the High Court had overreached in exercising its powers of judicial review, and placed the onus for a change in the law on Parliament instead.