ZMag.org – by Doug Ireland
Indonesia’s fledgling LGBT group, Arus Pelangi (Rainbow Flag), last Monday launched a national campaign against a welter of ultra-homophobic regional statutes based on Muslim Sharia law.
“Many LGBT people are arrested and detained, often without charges or clear reason, only to be released after a few days,” said Widodo “Dodo” Budi Darmo, the 35-year-old director of campaigning for Arus Pelangi, which was formed in January this year as Indonesia’s first explicitly activist LGBT group on the legal and political fronts.
“In 2004, the region of Palembang introduced a regional law that proscribes homosexuality as an act of prostitution that ‘violates the norms of common decency, religion, and legal norms as they apply to societal rule,'” Dodo — a co-founder of Arus Pelangi — told Gay City News from Jakarta. “That law says that included under the term ‘act of prostitution’ are ‘homosexual sex, lesbians, sodomy, sexual harassment, and other pornographic acts.'”
Dodo said that “this regional law was part of a chain of similar laws across Sumatra and Java that base themselves on Sharia law from the Koran,” and that “52 regions have adopted or put forward such laws.” In the special capital district of Jakarta itself, he said, “all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and transsexual people are legally considered cacat, or mentally handicapped, and as such are not protected by law. This contradiction of LGBT people falling outside the law while still being subjected to it is one of the injustices that Arus Pelangi hopes to combat.”