ISTANBUL, Turkey — A Turkish Court ruled Monday that gay sex is “natural,” contradicting a ruling by the country’s Supreme Court of Appeals in a similar case last year.
Ruling in a case of a vendor charged with unlawful sale of 125 DVDs depicting gay and group sex pornography, Judge Mahmut Erdemli stated that an individual’s sexual orientation should be respected, and cited examples of same-sex marriages in Europe and in the Americas.
The defendant, identified solely by his initials, DM, had faced up to four years imprisonment according to article 262/2 of the Turkish penal code that prohibits owning, trafficking, distributing and publishing “unnatural sex” videos.
Erdemli’s ruling on Monday counters last year’s decision by the appellate court that said video or photographic depictions of gay sex were “unnatural.”
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“Today, it is possible to have gay marriages in modern countries. International regulations prohibit discrimination regarding peoples’ sexual preference, and it is therefore an obligation to respect their sexual orientation,” Erdemli said. “In this respect, most of the European countries see gay relationships as equivalent to marriage.”
Erdemli added that contemporary societies allow same-sex couples “to achieve this legal status and therefore the contents of the DVDs can not be seen as unnatural.”
Erdemli did, however rule that the videos that depicted necrophilia and bestiality were correctly classified as “unnatural,” and found the defendant guilty of “unauthorized” sale of pornography. He imposed an 8 month sentence on the defendant.