Dilbert lampoons India's anti-gay ruling in new comic strip

The creator of Dilbert, cartoonist Scott Adams, used his comic strip to throw his weight behind the Indian LGBT community - but some American newspapers were reportedly shy of running the strip in question. In the new strip, Dogbert observes that the Supreme Court of India “recently voted to uphold a law making it a crime to be born gay.”* Adams uses an asterisk to drop a footnote within the panel, which reads “essentially.” [caption id=“attachment_1384099” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Dilbert comic[/caption] In the second panel of Adams’s comic strip, Dogbert blasts the court’s decision as “hopelessly ignorant,” before announcing that “Asok the intern is now officially gay.”  In the final panel, Asok jokes that he has “a lot of gay stuff to do.” The full strip can be seen here, on Dilbert’s official website. According to several media reports, several US newspapers, including the San Jose Mercury News, refused to run the Dilbert strip, opting instead to  rerun an older comic. Section 377 of the IPC criminalises sexual activities “against the order of nature”, including homosexual acts. The section was declared unconstitutional with respect to sex between consenting adults by Delhi High Court in 2009. But that judgement was overturned by Supreme Court in December last year. A bench of justices HL Dattu and SJ Mukhopadhyay, in in-chamber proceedings, dismissed a clutch of petitions filed by the Centre and gay rights activists, including noted filmmaker Shyam Benegal, against its verdict declaring gay sex an offence punishable with up to life in prison. “SC really had a great chance to correct its mistake… It is the duty of the apex court to protect the fundamental rights of every citizen of,” s aid Mohnish Malhotra, an LGBT community member and gay rights activist.