Two AI voices discuss my articles Laws that Punish Love: A History, 1600 Years of Christian Persecution of Queers and How Homophobia Infected the World
Pip: Rainbow messenger, where the history is long, the laws are older, and the injustice has been hiding in plain sight for about sixteen centuries.
Mara: Today we’re following shokti through two stretches of that history — how colonial-era laws exported homophobia around the world, and how the Christian persecution of queer people built the legal and moral scaffolding those laws stood on.
Pip: So: empire, church, and a very long paper trail of harm. Let’s start with the colonial roots of anti-queer laws.
How Empire Exported Homophobia
Mara: The central claim here is stark — laws criminalizing homosexuality and transgender expression weren’t organic developments in the countries that still enforce them. They were imported, by force, during European colonial expansion, and many have outlasted the empires that imposed them.
Pip: The post puts a number on it that’s hard to shake off: of the sixty-nine countries that still criminalize homosexuality today, thirty-eight were once under British rule.
Mara: And the mechanism is specific. The Indian Penal Code’s Article 377, criminalizing “sexual acts against the order of nature,” became the template. It was copied into legal systems across Asia and Africa — Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Malaysia all carry versions of it today.
Pip: The Queensland Penal Code did similar work in the Pacific and then traveled to Nigeria in 1916, then Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania. One document, drafted in one colony, still shaping lives on two continents.
Mara: The post is direct about why this matters beyond the statute books: “Wherever anti-gay laws exist, even when these laws are used on rare occasions, their very existence creates a criminal class of queer people, who are consequently targeted for violence, harassment and discrimination because of their criminal status.”
Pip: Criminal status as a tool — not primarily for prosecution, but for stigma. The 1885 Labouchere Amendment was called the Blackmailers Charter almost immediately after it passed.
Mara: Laws that punish love — a history the second post traces in detail — shows this pattern goes back further than empire. The colonial exporters were themselves working from centuries of accumulated European law, much of it theologically motivated.
Pip: Which brings us to where that theology came from, and what it did when it had state power behind it.
Sixteen Centuries of Church-Backed Persecution
Mara: The through-line across both posts in this segment is that Christian persecution of queer people wasn’t incidental — it was structural, beginning the moment the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its official religion.
Pip: And the first targets weren’t gay men in the modern sense — they were the gender-fluid priests of pagan goddess temples, whose existence the new Christian order found theologically intolerable.
Mara: The post on sixteen hundred years of Christian persecution quotes historian John Malalas on what Emperor Justinian’s crackdown looked like in practice: “Alexander, on the other hand, had his male organ cut off, and was placed in a litter and exposed as a spectacle to the people. Shortly after, the emperor passed a law that the crime of sex with males should be punished by castration. And at that time many androkoitai were seized and their genitals were cut off. And a great fear ensued among those who suffered from the evil desire for males.”
Pip: That fear was the point. Procopius, Justinian’s own court historian, noted the prosecutions were used against political opponents and the wealthy — paiderastias as a charge of convenience.
Mara: The post traces how that legal climate traveled — through medieval Europe, through the Spanish Inquisition, through burnings in Venice, Florence, France, and the Netherlands. Louis Crompton estimates around a hundred executions in Spain’s Inquisition alone between 1570 and 1630, with a similar count from secular courts.
Pip: And Scotland, for the record, was the last country in Europe to abolish the death penalty for gay sex — 1889, which is not a medieval date.
Mara: The closing argument in both posts is the same: this wasn’t theology protecting morality. Plato identified it in the fourth century BCE — suppression of same-sex love has always served power, not virtue.
Pip: Sixteen centuries of church law, then exported by empire — the history is long, but the thread is straight.
Mara: And it’s still live. Several Caribbean nations decriminalized same-sex intimacy only between 2022 and 2025. The next episode will find us somewhere further along that thread.
