Richard Gere, traveling in India to promote AIDS awareness, kissed the beautiful and glamorous Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty. Shetty built her fame on the reality show "Big Brother". Following the kissing event, a Jaipur court summoned Shetty and issued an arrest warrant for Gere. The crime that they are accused of is "committing obscene acts in a public place to the annoyance of others."
Appearing on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Gere said that he had kissed Shetty on the cheek and that a small right wing political party was out to score points as the moral police.Gere on The Daily Show
Here is the kiss on the cheek.
Richard Gere Kiss
Now his explanation has moved from "kiss on the cheek" to a scene from "Shall We Dance". There are a couple of issues here.
First, in the United States, an "unwelcome touching" is a criminal act. If he did "the kiss on the cheek" here instead of India, prosecutors might still have a look at it. I doubt very much if he would be prosecuted here because of the context of the kiss. I don’t think he crossed a criminal line based on American law, but he crossed some kind of line.
Second, he was not in the United States. He was in another country that has different laws. We can criticize those laws if we want, but they are a sovereign nation and can have the laws that they want. It is up to us to adhere to those laws if we travel there.
It is a brand of arrogance to suggest that our laws are the good ones and other countries are all screwed up. India, and many other countries, have cultures that are far more modest than ours. We might not like their culture, but when we are there, I think we are required to respect it.
Third, I think it is unfortunate and unhelpful for Gere to sell this as a right wing conservative party attacking a kiss on the cheek. And Jon Stewart should have called him on it.