Panama repeals its sodomy law

In the recess between regular sessions of the National Assembly, most public attention was fixed on a controversial set of decrees by which the president rearranged the nation's law enforcement agencies, gave them a military command structure and created the SENIS secret police. However, those were not his only decrees.

At the end of July President Torrijos and Minister of Health Rosario Turner issued Decree Number 332, which modified the 1949 Health Code, which had been passed by decree and thus could be amended by decree. Article 12 of that code criminalized sexual relations between men. It was Panama's analogue to the sodomy statutes that still exist in a number of US states.

Panama's gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered rights organization, the Association of New Men and Women of Panama (AHMNP), celebrated the move and asked for the repeal of Article 133 of the National Police's Internal Regulations, which excludes homosexuals from the police force. There are conflicting voices within the administration about that issue, but it seems likely that this regulation will also be scrapped, seeing as its justification in the first place was that homosexual sex was a crime and cops who break the law can't be tolerated.

So how tolerant, or intolerant, is Panama about homosexuality? That's a complicated question that doesn't get well answered by way of a comparison to the situation in the United States.

Panama is an overwhelmingly Catholic country --- more than 80 percent --- and the Holy See is vociferously anti-gay at the moment. (It has been worse. The church used to burn homosexuals on the faggot piles lit to burn alleged witches.) But Catholics tend on the whole not to be so militantly intolerant as some other denominations, as they tend to believe that we are all sinners yet must somehow get along with one another.

In Panama, we don't have any openly gay or lesbian politicians getting elected to public office. But neither do we have any religious zealots getting elected on the basis of campaigns against homosexuals having rights.

Panama had Latin America's first openly gay diplomat, dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega's older brother Luis Carlos Noriega, whose public career preceded that of his notorious military sibling. (By many accounts, Luis Carlos was the mentor to Manuel Antonio and the only person who could advise that a course of action taken by the latter was mistaken and should be abandoned. After Luis Carlos died in 1985, it is said, Manuel Antonio Noriega was surrounded by yes men who were afraid to give tell him what they didn't think he wanted to hear, and the resulting disaster is a lesson to go down through the ages.)

When the Spaniards conquered the isthmus, they brought the fanaticism of the Spanish Inquisition with them but encountered indigenous people who didn't share their prejudices against homosexuals. They've had more than 500 years to implant such attitudes, but the Kunas kept to themselves and had and have a culture that not only tolerates gay men and lesbians, but considers them to have special sensitivities that are good for a society to have.

Kuna Yala is thus one of the noteworthy destinations for gay and lesbian tourism, a prosperous little niche in the overall tourist industry. But the people involved in that business prefer not to talk to the press about it because they don't want religious pickets or belligerent young men coming around to their tour agency offices or more people who don't understand Kuna culture coming to indigenous communities to "save" the people there.

But in contrast with those social islands of tolerance, when a player for an opposing soccer team is writhing on the pitch after having been injured, the crowd is likely to start chanting "Cueco, cueco!" ("Queer, queer!") Panamanian popular music includes some flagrantly anti-gay lyrics. Homophobia is alive and well here.

What seems to keep things somewhat under control is the Panamanian penchant for privacy, an attitude that, even if one disapproves of homosexuality, what people do in their private lives is their business alone.

So, as a practical matter, what does the new law mean?

Panama had not been prosecuting people for homosexuality. The decree didn't get anyone out of prison.

It did, however, eliminate one more legal basis to which prejudiced people could point to justify their attitudes. Moreover, even as the AHMNP celebrated, Panama did not hear a storm of denunciations from leaders of religious denominations that disapprove of homosexuality. It would have been seen as a case of bad manners had there been such an outcry.

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