Homophobia - A Residue of British Colonial Rule

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At times I want to pull my hair out over the ignorance of those in Africa, India and now Singapore who claim that the acceptance of homosexuality is a western trait that threatens indigenous social mores.Why don't this homophobes have "I'm an ignorant cretin" tabooed on their foreheads?  The truth is that homophobia is a western import that traces back to British colonial rule.  As noted in treatise, The Origins and Roles of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies, opposition to same sex relations was low across the globe until the arrival of Christian missionaries.  Now, American Christofascists are working diligently (with corrupt politicians and parasitic churchmen) to follow in the footsteps of their equally bigoted ancestors and dupe local populations into embracing homophobia.  A piece in the Washington Post traces all of this back to British colonial rule.  Here are highlights:

During the past half-century, many countries have eliminated criminal laws against what are variously called “homosexual offences”, “sodomy,” “unnatural acts” or  other terms used to describe consensual sexual relations between people (often specifically men) of the same sex.

Yet, the decriminalization of homosexual conduct is an uneven process and several countries are moving in the opposite direction. 

Among such criminalization cases, a common narrative is that acceptance and tolerance of homosexuality is a foreign, or alien, Western imposition on indigenous cultures.  For example, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has called homosexuality an invention of the West that will “disturb the African moral fabric.”

Here stands one of the biggest ironies.  The idea that the so-called tolerance towards homosexuality somehow sprang from a western source doesn’t hold.  As our research shows, this narrative is not only wrong-headed but the opposite of the historical facts.  Instead, for many countries, including some of those mentioned above, criminalization laws were based on British imperial legal instruments, like the Indian Penal Code Section 377A, introduced and imposed on these countries by Britain when they were colonized.

We investigated whether and why there is variation in laws regulating and punishing homosexual conduct around the world.  Looking at a variety of data on 185 countries, we found that former British colonies are much more likely to have laws that criminalize homosexual conduct than former colonies of other European powers, or than other states in general. 

It seems that when the British Empire was introducing legal systems around the world, one of the laws they included was the law against sodomy, which was not decriminalized in England and Wales until 1967. By this time, most of the “Winds of Change” wave of decolonization had left former colonies independent of changes in British legislation.  By contrast, after the French Revolution, the French Empire decriminalized sodomy between consenting adults, and spread this Enlightenment legacy among its colonies.

Highlighting the colonial origin of anti-gay legislation is an important way to counter the narrative that tolerance of homosexuality is a neo-colonial imposition. . . . Another strategy is to publicize the numerous examples of accepted homosexual practices and relations in various pre-colonial African cultures.

 What is sad is that the original British colonials played upon the ignorance of native populations in introducing anti-gay laws.  Now, American Christofascists are engaging in the same toxic conduct.   As for leaders who claim to be rejecting foreign influence by enacting anti-gay laws, all they ultimately prove are they they are ignorant asses.  Are you listen, Mr. Putin?