Talking about sex is always a good way to mobilise public opinion.

For some people homosexuality is unquestionably immoral and unnatural. And if you don't believe them, they say, "What about Aids?" and you say, "What's that got to do with lesbians?". And then they say they meant male homosexuality, without considering that medical research has never claimed that HIV, which may or may not bring on Aids, is caused by homosexuality.

People don't naturally generate viruses. Viruses inhabit people. It would be like saying that religion causes fanaticism rather than religion is afflicted by fanaticism.

For homophobes, the warning that smoking also kills passive smokers, doesn't seem to invite the same kind of moral backlash that "HIV kills" does. In their minds, homosexuality is far worse than the pleasurable activity of smoking, which is indeed bad for everyone.

The idea that polygamy is very effective in spreading sexually transmitted diseases is, for some Muslims, not a strong enough reason to outlaw polygamy, the way he or she believes that homosexuality should be outlawed.

More people today accept homosexuality and are even open to the idea of gay marriage, but there are still many who do not. This was reflected in the United States elections on Nov 2. Along with voting for a president, Americans in several states also had to vote on issues, among them same-sex marriage.

The results showed that a large number of Americans, the so-called Evangelical Americans, voted to ban same-sex marriages.

The Anwar saga

On Oct 11, former Malaysian prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad said at a university lecture in Singapore on democracy and leadership in Asia, that the political career of his former deputy Anwar Ibrahim was "finished because he was a homosexual."

Homosexuality, equated in this case with sodomy, is a crime in Malaysia, a crime for which Anwar was acquitted on technicalities.

Meanwhile in Bruxelles, the Civil Liberties Committee voted against Rocco Buttiglione, the Italian nominee for Justice Commissioner of the Civil Liberties Committee, because Buttiglione had told a European Union hearing the week before that he considered homosexuality to be a sin.

Although Buttiglione had made it quite clear that there should be no discrimination against homosexuals, he had already lost credibility.

Buttiglione withdrew his candidacy for Justice Commissioner on Oct 30 in favour of another Italian nominee. He has also apologised to the gay community. But he feels that he has been discriminated by "anti-Catholic secular extremists" just because he had expressed what he, as a Catholic, thinks of homosexuality.

In Malaysia, the opposite scenario is more likely: a politician would probably be lambasted for saying, "I don't think homosexuality is a sin."

When Mahathir labelled Anwar a homosexual, he knew that this would smear Anwar and that he had the consensus of quite a lot of people. He knew that his words would appeal not only to Malaysian Muslims.

He said Malaysians, of all religions it is assumed, do not condone homosexuality. "We are a very conservative society," he stressed.

Public opinion on Anwar's alleged homosexuality has generally been divided into two camps: that Anwar is not a homosexual, but he was framed to prevent him from succeeding Mahathir; that Anwar is a homosexual and is therefore an immoral human being who is not fit to lead.

Less central to the debate is the view that holds: "So what if Anwar is a homosexual?"

Anwar himself is doing everything he can to discard any association of his being a homosexual. He expounds his image as a family man, a loving husband and father, a pious Muslim who performs the umrah (off-season pilgrimage to Mecca) and who visits friends in Saudi Arabia, some might assume to suggest how Saudi Arabia can improve its atrocious human rights record and change the way it treats women and criminals.

Anwar's own position on homosexuality and homosexuals is, at least in the media, unclear.

This might be because he, along with many other Malaysians, do not consider homosexuality, or the decriminalisation of homosexuality, to be a political, religious, social or cultural issue. Or even if they do, they feel they shouldn't, or can't, speak about it.

It is interesting to note that in Malaysia, where "kowtowing to the West" is considered to be bad and unilateral in the sense that we hardly ever hear about the West kowtowing to the East, keeping the old, colonial sodomy law is not expressed in terms of "kowtowing to the West", the way abolishing it probably would be.

So homosexuality is "un-Islamic" and "un-Malaysian." One wonders what Malaysians must think of Spain. Isn't Spain a Catholic country? A bill was recently passed in Spain, despite strong opposition from the Catholic Church and conservatives, which will legalise gay marriages.

Spain's new bill

Spanish gays may not be able to get married in church yet, but they will be able to get married in the civil courts.

Spain's current Prime Minister, Jos Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, is respected by the Spanish people because as soon as he was appointed following Madrid's train bombings on March11 this year, he withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq.

Of course, one also has to ask oneself what it means to say "Catholic Spain" or "Catholic Italy" today. Who today in Italy risks legal reprisal for breaking some of the cardinal rules of the Church such as having pre-marital sex, using contraception, having an abortion, being a divorcee or a homosexual? Nobody.

The Catholic Church today functions like a sort of moral consultancy: it can preach but not punish.

But flexibility is strength, many believe. An edifice that doesn't have shock-absorbers to make it flexible enough to shake with the quake just cracks and crumbles.

Homosexuality and transsexuality are themes which are central to the films of Spanish film maker Pedro Almodovar. Bad Education , his latest film which opened this year's Cannes festival and has been praised all over Europe, is partly about the fate of a young boy who was seduced by the head priest in his Spanish Catholic boarding school which he attended during the 1960s, heyday of the Franco dictatorship.

Bad Education shows explicit lovemaking scenes between males and hard drug use. While the film has caused furore among some Catholics and conservatives, it would be unthinkable in the Spain and Europe of today to have such a work of art censored or taken off the market.

We shouldn't forget, though, that it was not so long ago that the picture was very different for artists who dealt with homosexual themes.

In 1963, the great Italian poet and film maker Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922 -1975) who was a declared homosexual, was charged with "insulting the religion of the State." He was sentenced to four months in prison for his film La Ricotta (1962) which is about a film director, played by Orson Welles, trying to film the passion of Christ. Pasolini was absolved in 1964.

Pasolini, who considered himself to be "not a believer, at least not consciously", was a very controversial figure. Some saw deep religiosity in his work, others saw blasphemy.

What was radical about someone like Pasolini was that he opened the discussion about what it means to be Christian as opposed to Catholic. He made people think about non-institutionalised forms of religion.

Irshad Manji is a Canadian Muslim of Ugandan origin who is the author of the book 'The trouble with Islam: A wake-up call for honesty and change' (2004).

Part of the book is about her trying to reconcile her lesbian identity with her faith. Apparently she has received several death threats for her book and a torrent of less drastic condemnations like "why should God change his laws to accommodate your sexuality?"

God didn't have to change his laws but the state did. Irshad Manji lives in a country where being a lesbian is not a crime and she has the right to write what she wants.

Many Muslims find Irshad Manji irritating because they feel she undermines Islamic values, sexuality being their yardstick for measuring the worth of a person. They don't like Islam to be appropriated by a lesbian. They are not able to see compatibility with Irshad Manji's values and Islamic values.

But whether Muslims like it or not, Irshad Manji has made Muslims think about, and perhaps divided them on the issue of transforming their relationship to their religion. She has already changed the image of Islam, some say for better, and there are of course others who say for worse.

Victims of hate

Taking a jibe at judicial loopholes, Mahathir made the analogy that if homosexuals can be so easily acquitted, so can murderers. "So if you feel like murdering, come to Malaysia," he said.

In the real world however, homosexuals are often victims of hate and violence. Gay bashing is a terrible, anti-social behaviour that cannot be tolerated and has to be wiped out. For a start, some people believe it would help if homosexuality was decriminalised and politicians themselves did not speak about homosexuals in disparaging terms.

In Italy, we have Buttiglione who would like to see Italian political life united and grounded in "Christian values." Catholic politicians like him, he says, should not be intimidated into not voicing their principles.

In the United States, the recent elections have shown that Republican religious fanatics would like to bring politics and religion back together again. In Malaysia, they're not even divorced yet, although there is talk of separation.

Some political and cultural analysts see the revival of Christian chauvinism and fanaticism to be a consequence of Sept 11.

One the other hand, secular discourses, of which human rights are a part of, continue to play an extremely vital role in shaping the values of society.

There is a whole category of people, politicians included, who believe that there is life after religion and they speak a different language. They are not anti-religion per se, but they do not depend on a religious discourse to articulate political, social, moral and ethical issues.

When sometimes religion can become its own worst enemy, the legacy of keeping religion divorced from politics is more than ever worth defending.

Religion has always been slow, or reluctant, to respond to social change. If Italians voted in the historic referendum of 1974 to legalise divorce, it was because there were all these Italians who were living de facto divorced lives.

Despite the Catholic ban on divorce, they left their spouses anyway to set up house and start a family with their new partners. Sooner or later the state had to come to terms with this new reality and provided the legislation to permit divorce.

'What to do?'

Gay couples, who represent a significant proportion of the human population, consider themselves as stable families and see no reason why they should not enjoy the same rights as married couples.

The voice of someone who finds plural democracies strange and confusing might sound like: "how can you have anti-gay priests and politicians and, at the same time, colourful gay pride marches?

How can you have all these different voices competing for legitimacy and agency? You tell me "so what ... unless somebody actually starts physically harming someone. You need a system that allows people to push for peace when some want to go to war. I'm not convinced. But I have to put up with it, right? What to do?"

Tolerance, in Pasolini's words, is a "more refined form of condemnation." After all, to say "I don't like you but I tolerate you" is not the best of compliments. Some tolerant people might be wolves dressed in sheep's skin, but at least if everyone respects the rules of tolerance, this would create the necessary conditions for dialogue and conflict resolution.

Perhaps the greatest mystery of all is why some societies value liberating sexuality, while others don't; why it seems easier to get people to vote against gay marriage than it is to get them to vote against the death penalty or war.

For fears of strife in the nation or fears of the imagination?

MASTURAH ALATAS, a former print journalist in Malaysia, now lives in Italy. She has previously written on the nature and impact of the image in contemporary culture.