ON THE JESUIT-MARONITE PROVENANCE OF LEBANON'S CRIMINALIZATION OF HOMOSEXUALITY

Ivan Strenski

doi:10.1017/jlr.2019.42

Abstract

AbstractArticle 534 of the Lebanese Penal Code, effectively, criminalizes homosexual practices. Most commentators have claimed that its existence in modern Lebanon is a “colonial relic,” specifically of the French Mandate, 1920–1946. But since 1791, French penal codes have not criminalized same-sex relations. I argue, instead, that Article 534 was the product of native religious, legal, and moral thinking among the Maronites, reinforced by the Thomistic and post-Tridentine moral theology taught in Lebanon by the Jesuit missions. Thomistic and post-Tridentine moral theology classified same-sex relations as worthy of condemnation as “unnatural acts”—the same language used in Article 534. Therefore, as a product of Lebanese political and religious sectarianism, Article 534 is a specific case of a congenial collaboration of Jesuit moral theology and a conservative Maronite ethical and legal koine.

Highlights

A Presbyterian missionary was once asked, if he was going to build a school in a certain town of the Lebanon
“Yes? How is that?” “Oh, I’ll put up one for myself, and, within a week or two, the Jesuits will be at work with another.”[1] the ups and downs of article 534
This is not the rst recorded application of this kind of legal thinking in Lebanon, nor the rst time Lebanese judges have challenged the classi cation of same-sex relations as “unnatural.” Judgments have tended to swing back and forth on the whether the illegality of same-sex relations can be conceived in terms of their being “unnatural.”[4] In 2009, Judge Mounir Suleiman ruled that consensual sexual intimacy could not be considered “against nature”: “Man is part of nature and one of its elements, so it cannot be said that any one of his practices or any one of his behaviours goes against nature, even if it is criminal behavior, because it is nature’s ruling.”[5]