On 8 April, 2026, eleven
leaders of a Turkish gay-rights group faced a judicial trial on charges of “obscenity”
and “violating the protection of the family.”[1]
These charges are of course heavily subjective and even controversial,
especially well into the twenty-first century by which time gay and lesbian
couples were raising children in family units so the issue in Turkey could be
said to be which type of family warrants protection. The obscenity charge
had to do with the fact that two men or two women kissing romantically in
public still made a significant proportion of people uncomfortable in Turkey.
Turkish authorities had deemed photos showing gay couples kissing and put on
social media to be obscene. That homosexuality was not illegal there at the
time rendered the trial perplexing to many in the gay community in Turkey and
elsewhere in the world. Perhaps even more perplexing is the fact that the constitution
of Turkey contained an article on protecting family values and that gay couples
raising children were exempted from even being deemed families.
The gay association claimed
that the trial was “an attack on freedom of expression and freedom of
association.”[2] In
particularly harsh terms, the group also called the trial “a form of
dehumanization.”[3]
Whereas expression and association are jurisprudential terms, dehumanization
evokes human rights being severely violated. I contend that none of these
claims gets at the underlying issue, which is that, just as in climate change wherein
some regions (e.g., the poles) have been warming faster than others (e.g., the
equator), in any society some parts change more than others, such that the
latter can be expected as a matter of human nature to resist surges in the
former. Whereas people in a gay bar in San Francisco were used to seeing men
kiss each other, the same cannot be said in many cities in Turkey. Both being accustomed
and being uncomfortable are valid human reactions to the fact that change does
not happen at the same rate across a given society. In a healthy society, the gays
who are on the forefront in displaying their homosexual affection in gay neighborhoods
naturally tone down the visuals in other
neighborhoods, and heterosexuals not used to such displays try to tolerate them
under the correct supposition that culture changes. In an unhealthy society, gays
intentionally push their homosexuality where they know it is not as accepted,
and people unaccustomed to the visible gay affection seek to punish the gays
for what is only natural affection for gays.
A man can fall in love with
another man, and a woman can fall in love with a woman. Any sexual acts pale in
significance to the deep emotions that are stirred asexually out of sheer
affection for another person’s personality. Selfless, or other-focused love is
possible in human nature itself, and thus whether the person being put first is
of the same or the other gender does not alter the qualities of the love
because it is oriented to personality, not sexual organs. Furthermore, a
gay couple can truly love a child being raised because the parent-child love is
the same, regardless of what the parents are doing sexually. That is to say,
gay couples can form real families, and the love therein is what the Turkish
constitution could ideally promote and protect.
That which should arguably be excoriated is not homosexuality per se, but the sordid elements culturally that can render the gay “community” as anything but. I am referring to the privileging of anonymous sex and even cheating sexually over emotional intimacy and trust that could otherwise embrace gay couples. Also problematic is the ruthlessness with which gay men reject other gay men not only sexually, but also emotionally. Gays have reported to me that the sex-centric, utterly selfish aspect of the gay “community” has hardly been unknown to them. In short, it may be that for too many gay men, the act of gay sex is more important to them than emotional intimacy and establishing trust and connection. If so, I would not be surprised if loneliness is rife among many gay men, though I have no empirical data to back up my conclusion. My point is that rather than thrown “obscene” and anti-family charges at homosexuality itself, genuine romantic love that a same-sex couple can have can be distinguished from the more primitive gay lifestyle. Societies that make this distinction would be able to relegate Turkey’s approach to punishing gay people as utterly crude and primitive, which are labels I would also apply to the gay men who use sex to obviate commitment as if the sexual urges of gay men are such that those urges are different or stronger and thus cannot be resisted. The belief that such urges should not be resisted, even for the integrity of an intimate romantic relationship, is more troubling. Perhaps one day Christopher Robin of Winnie the Pooh lore will finally grow up. Turkey’s approach of lashing out against gay visuals is itself jejune, and thus can not facilitate the maturation of humanity’s homosexual population.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
