Marriage Equality in the USA & A Lesson for India

Probably the biggest news to come out of the USA in the past few days was the landmark judgement by the USA Superme Court which effectively legalises homosexual marriages throughout the country... The reaction on social media was overwhelmingly positive...

The marriage equality in the USA is rather insightful for other countries, especially India, which quite honestly has not addressed the concerns of the LGBT community... The reaction by Indians on social media has been mixed... While there is a big proportion of naysayers, there has also been an overwhelming trend to change one's display picture to rainbow colors and show one's support towards the LGBT community... Among them, a lot of these people are indeed well-meaning but some wannabe "cool" people among this "rainbow crowd" is making it rather hard to separate the grain from the chaff... If one seriously wants to achieve the same level of inclusion for LGBT people in India, one needs to first improve the quality of public debate...

The US is most certainly not the first to achieve marriage equality... A few weeks earlier Ireland legalised gay marriage... But the economic and political importance of the US makes it by far the biggest country to do so... And has placed LGBT issues on a global platform for the first time... Additionally the similarities between the US and India makes it a better of comparison than countries in Europe...

It might come as a surprise to many of the crowd that the decision to legalise gay marriage in the US has not happened overnight... If one wishes to achieve the same goal of same sex marriage in India, one has to first create a culture and society that is accepting of gays and lesbians... And give them the same respect and dignity as heterosexuals... Legal considerations aside, frankly speaking, Indian society as a whole is no where close to such levels of tolerance... 

There are two steps that India has to go through to ensure that this issue reaches a logical conclusion:

1) Remove section 377, effectively decriminalising homosexuality...

2) Create a society that is accepting of openly gay people...

Point 1 is an absolute no-brainer... But its Point 2 that is the difficult one.. And is a decade long process, probably even a generation long one... Trolling Karan Johar unnecessarily and making a stereotypical comedy like Dostana a box office success is the indication that Indian society is quite a long way away from accepting homosexuals...

Jai Hind...