An Indonesian Crowd Cheers While Two Men Are Publicly Caned for Having Gay Sex
Last year, after Islamic authorities in the Aceh province of Indonesia publicly caned two adult men for the crime of having consensual same-sex intercourse behind closed doors, Aceh’s vice governor Nova Iriansyah said the Indonesian caning displays would start to occur privately to avoid unflattering viral videos that might turn off potential investors. Well, it looks like Iriansyah threw out his original idea because Aceh just caned two more gay men outside of a mosque in front of a cheering crowd of about 1,000 people.
Agence France-Presse reports that each man was publicly caned more than 80 times while the crowd implored the punisher to strike them harder. Unlike last time, there has been no viral video of this Indonesian caning.
The men were just two of 15 people receiving an Indonesian caning for hard-line Islamic laws against drinking and public displays of affection.
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Aceh is the only province in Indonesia that has such strict Islamic laws. Homosexuality isn’t even explicitly against the law in Indonesia, but even so, the country’s crackdown against LGBTQ people has now gone on for years.
A brief rundown of Indonesia’s recent anti-LGBTQ policies
After publicly humiliating 141 men arrested in a gay sauna, the capitol city founded an anti-LGBTQ police force, the government proposed a law to ban all LGBTQ TV content, the Air Force called LGBTQ identity “a mental disorder,” the country tried to shut down an international gay sporting event and one region in particular recently arrested 12 transgender women and shaved their heads to “make them men.”
Earlier this year, the Indonesian government started to ban gay social apps and banned Tumblr, the popular microblogging social network, because of its porn content. The country also reportedly destroyed hundreds of LGBT comics at a major Jakarta post office after being shipped in from China and is currently considering a law criminalizing all “indecent sex” that would worsen attacks against queer and non-married straight people having consensual sex.
Economists estimate that Indonesia’s anti-LGBTQ policies have cost the country anywhere from $900 million to $12 billion in lost revenue per year. HIV experts also think that the anti-LGBTQ crackdown has dramatically raised the country’s HIV rates over the last ten years.
