On this day · archive
The law steps out of private life
On September 6, 2018, India’s Supreme Court struck down the reach of Section 377 over consensual sex between adults in private. The ruling changed the law at once; the work of equality remained larger than a single judgment.
8
events in todayish file
2018
India’s Supreme Court decriminalizes consensual sex between adults in private.
A unanimous ruling placed dignity, privacy, and equality above a colonial-era prohibition that had reached into the most personal part of life.
The Supreme Court of India’s ruling in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India was unanimous. On September 6, 2018, the five-judge bench held that Section 377 could no longer criminalize consensual sexual conduct between adults in private.
The judgment mattered both in law and in language. It treated sexual orientation as part of individual dignity and placed constitutional rights against a colonial-era statute long used to mark LGBTQ people as criminals.
A court can remove a prohibition; it cannot erase every prejudice that grew around it. The decision nevertheless changed the ground beneath millions of lives, making the date a legal milestone and a public declaration that privacy does not diminish citizenship.
The full record
8 entries from the day’s archive, filed year by year with a note on what each one leaves behind.
Boris Johnson resigns as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and is replaced by Liz Truss. Their meetings with Queen Elizabeth II at Balmoral Castle were the Queen's final official duties before her death two days later.
A transfer of power coincided with Queen Elizabeth II’s final official duties.
Politics
Russo-Ukrainian war: Ukraine begins its Kharkiv counteroffensive, surprising Russian forces and retaking over 3,000 square kilometers of land, recapturing the entire Kharkiv Oblast west of the Oskil River, within the next week.
The counteroffensive rapidly changed control across much of Kharkiv Oblast.
Conflict
Supreme Court of India decriminalises all consensual sex among adults in private, making homosexuality legal on the Indian lands.
The ruling decriminalized consensual private sex between adults in India.
Rights
The first Minotaur V rocket is launched from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, carrying NASA's LADEE spacecraft.
The Minotaur V launch sent NASA’s lunar-atmosphere mission into space.
Space
Sixty-one people die after a fishing boat capsizes off the İzmir Province coast of Turkey, near the Greek Aegean islands.
The capsizing killed 61 people near Turkey’s Aegean coast.
Disaster
Archaeologist Peter Marsden discovers the first of the Blackfriars Ships dating back to the second century AD in the Blackfriars area of the banks of the River Thames in London.
The Thames discovery revealed the first of a group of ancient river vessels.
Archaeology
The Monterrey Institute of Technology is founded in Monterrey, Mexico as one of the largest and most influential private universities in Latin America.
The university grew into a major private institution in Latin America.
Education
Louisa Ann Swain of Laramie, Wyoming becomes the first woman in the United States to cast a vote legally after 1807.
Swain’s ballot became a landmark in the return of legal voting rights to American women.
Voting rights