Attitudes to Homosexuality

One area of undeniable progress which humanity is making is in terms of attitudes to homosexuality. Where once societies repressed their gay populations, imprisoned them, tortured or killed them or simply bullied them into going underground, there are signs that humanity is at last lightening up and righting some injustices.

Let's be clear, no matter what your personal opinions on homosexuality are, no repressive society has really ever eradicated homosexuality. They might have terrified their gay population into living a lie for a while, or hiding their true selves from the authorities, but no dictatorship or extremist regime has really succeeded in its aim in squashing their gay population. And that's for one simple reason; homosexuality has always existed and it always will, which is why enlightened nations have started acknowledging this fact and legally enshrining gay rights.

One nice graph that summarises this neatly comes from the Future Timeline website which plots the number of countries since 1790 that made homosexuality illegal versus the number in which gay marriage is now legal. Whilst the latter is still the minority, it's projected that by the mid 2040's countries that permit gay marriage will become the majority:

Source: futuretimeline.net

The really encouraging thing about all this is that this shift in legislation wasn't a top-down thing imposed upon us by our governments, it reflects changes in societal attitudes. The populations of many countries are living with gay friends, colleagues and neighbours on a daily basis and have discovered that they're not the Antichrist as some mediaeval doctrines would have you believe. 

That's reflected in societal attitudes which are measurable quantitatively, as per the following graph. It shows that the proportion of population which regard homosexuality as "never justifiable" has dropped steadily from, in the UK case, 47% in 1981 to 21% in 2006:

Source: thesocietypages.net

That has resulted in a world which is increasingly heading towards acceptance of homosexuality (as shown by the blue countries), albeit with a long way to go:

Source: Loopy Lettuce Blog

This means that should an Alan Turing like genius be born today in one of those blue countries he would be permitted to go about his lawful business, rather than being convicted of gross indecency, chemically castrated with appalling physical side effects and ultimately caused to take his own life through the unbearable shame of it all. And that's how we used to treat a genius who helped break the Nazi's enigma code and shorten WWII by potentially years!

That's on injustice that the UK has recently atoned for, by formally issuing a royal pardon for Alan Turing. And the world is a more enlightened place than it once was for that fact alone.