JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP)—Indonesia’s Parliament unanimously passed a long-expected revision of the country’s penal code on Tuesday that criminalizes sex outside of marriage for citizens as well as foreigners, prohibits promotion of contraception, forbids progressive political thought, and bans defamation of the president and state institutions.
The amended code also expands an existing blasphemy law and maintains a five-year prison term for deviations from the central tenets of Indonesia’s six recognized religions: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism.
Citizens can face a 10-year prison term for associating with organizations that follow Marxist-Leninist ideology and a four-year sentence for spreading communism. Anti-communism has long been a tenet of the Indonesian state. […]
– December 6, 2022; By Niniek Karmini
The more I read about this, the more insane it gets. I’m not familiar with the Indonesian president, but if he feels the need to put people in jail just for insulting him, then he seems incredibly thin-skinned. Then there’s the state trying to police when and how people have sex. That by itself is insane enough.
What floored me, though, is the mention of outlawing freaking black magic in the penal code (Source). How do you even define black magic? More to the point, why put something that cannot be clearly explained or defined in a legal document? Are we regressing back to medieval times or something? Because clearly, I missed the memo.