A court in Turkey has ruled that the gay rights group there was in violation of the country’s laws against immorality and that it must shut down. If the ruling stands, it will be "immoral" in that country even to campaign for gay rights.

For the record, Turkey is has 71 million people, 98.9% of whom are Muslim (mostly Sunni), its government is a Republican Parliamentary Democracy, and over the last eight years only 48 Turkish men have signed on to Apollo Network. For information about where gay life is in abundance in Turkey, Click Here.

How can a democratic society have moral laws that impede the rights of its citizens? Oh, I forgot that the US democracy has a sullied history of flirting with so call moral laws. There was Prohibition, laws against racial marriages, Sunday blue laws, not to mention "Don’t ask; don’t tell." (It was not really against US laws to have sex between white males and African American women. The founding fathers [Tom Jefferson] and modern segregationists [Strom Thurman] did it at will.)

The point is that when you start running a country by "moral laws," you have to choose a source for perceived morality, which is not a big deal in Turkey where the non Muslim population is about one percent. Unfortunately, in the US morality is often determined not by who has the biggest heart but rather who has the biggest mouth or microphone.

Until recently, Turkey had laws that made homosexuality a criminal offense. Well, actually so did the USA, but Turkey’s homophobic laws were just a little more recent than in the US. Turkey has decriminalized homosexuality, but this act came not from a moral or an enlightened stance but rather a political one. Turkey wants to join the European Union where no such laws are allowed.

There are a number of lessons to learn from Turkey, the major one being that gay people’s best hope for "the pursuit to happiness" is in democratic governments that treat all people as equals and make no laws based on "perceived moral issues."