Riding a tsunami of moral conservatism and anti-gay prejudice, Indonesia's Islamic political parties appear on the cusp of a major victory: outlawing all sex outside marriage.
Revisions to Indonesia's criminal code being considered by Parliament would allow prison sentences of up to five years for sex between unmarried people. Those changes would also criminalize gay sex, the bugbear of Indonesia's Islamic and secular political parties.
Rights groups and legal experts fear a profound setback to human rights and privacy in Indonesia, one of the world's largest democracies, and the spread of vigilantism, already common in parts of the sprawling Muslim-majority nation of more than 250 million people. […]
While the possible criminalization of sex between unmarried consenting adults has grabbed attention, the revised criminal code, which has nearly 800 articles, also contains changes that could weaken checks and balances in Indonesia's young democracy. One article potentially makes criticism of the president defamation and other articles could be used to weaken the Corruption Eradication Commission, one of Indonesia's most effective public institutions.
Put the pious regressives in power and it’s only a matter of time before they start imposing their narrow moral code on a populace they think has had a little too much liberty until now. It comes to show there’s no point in establishing a democracy unless you also install strict secular safeguards to protect the rights of the people from religious-fascists.
This isn’t the only move Indonesia’s taken against perceived “immorality”. As Joe Jervis at Joe.My.God. summarizes:
Earlier this week Google bowed to Indonesia’s demand to remove a gay dating app from the local version of its online store. Also this week the ultra-conservative province of Aceh ordered all flight attendants to wear headscarves when they fly into the region or face prosecution by religious police.
[…] Last year Jakarta police arrested 141 men in a raid on a gay sauna as part of an ongoing attack against LGBT citizens. In December, however, Indonesia’s high court narrowly rejected a petition to criminalize homosexuality outright. Indonesia’s Aceh province instituted sharia law in 2015 and two gay men there were publicly caned last year as a jeering crowd recorded the abuse with their phones.
There’s a dark irony in the fact that whilst the United States is replete with Christian-conservatives who rail obsessively against “creeping Islam”, their approach to handling sexual minorities and anything else that goes against their Biblical worldview is taken directly out of the Muslim-conservative country’s playbook.
