The Indian Muslim party Jamaat-e-Islami Hind has condemned the Indian Supreme Court’s decision to decriminalise homosexuality.
JIH Secretary General, Muhammad Salim Engineer, said the decision will lead to moral degradation and destroy the family system.
Earlier today India’s Supreme Court ruled that gay sex would no longer be a criminal offence, overturning a 2013 judgement that upheld a colonial-era law, known as section 377, under which gay sex is categorised as an “unnatural offence.”
The decision was delivered by a five-judge bench headed by India’s outgoing chief justice Dipak Misra and was unanimous. Reading out the judgement, he said: “Criminalising carnal intercourse is irrational, arbitrary and manifestly unconstitutional.”
Another judge, Indu Malhotra, said she believed “history owes an apology” to LGBT people for ostracising them.
But Muhammad Salim Engineer called homosexuality a “perversion.”
He said: “Jamaat-e-Islami Hind is dismayed and disappointed over the Supreme Court verdict to legalise homosexual behaviour between two consenting adults… It may be recalled that JIH along with leaders of different religious organisations had welcomed the decision of the Supreme Court wherein the SC had refused to do away with section 377 and persisted with the view that homosexuality is a criminal offence.
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“With that historic decision, the apex court had kept the country from going on to the path of moral degradation. But today the SC has ruled that ‘human sexuality cannot be confined to a binary and that homosexuality is not a mental disorder’.”
He added that “decriminalising homosexuality and permitting male-male and female-female marriage will destroy the family system and prevent the natural evolution and progress of the human race. Jamaat firmly believes in the fundamental rights of all citizens and is a strong advocate of freedom and minority rights. However we wish to remind fellow citizens that with freedom comes moral responsibility and no society can accept crimes, vices and anarchy in the name of freedom and personal liberty.
“We will persevere to educate the people and exercise all democratic options to resist this shameful perversion and decadence in values which ignores religious teachings, our culture and the opinion of the overwhelming majority of the people. Such filthy experiments have destroyed human society and violated the rights of women on large scale in certain countries and we should learn a lesson from it.”
Appealing to the citizens of the country, the government and all political parties, the Secretary General of Jamaat urged them to “save this country from falling into sexual anarchy, protect our children from vile sexual predators, safeguard the rights of our daughters and sisters and prevent the infringement of the fundamental rights of its citizens as the abrogation of section 377 of IPC will have a cascading effect on the Personal Laws of many religions.”
He concluded by saying “we sincerely hope and pray that the country will be rescued from the dark precipice it is rushing headlong into.”
