 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
Sodomy lawA sodomy law is a law which makes certain sexual acts into sex crimes. The definition of sodomy ranges from anal sex to any sexual act that does not lead to procreation. This includes anal sex, oral sex, and bestiality. Even though many of these laws target both heterosexual and homosexual acts, they are more often selectively enforced only against homosexuals. Consequently, it is a common misunderstanding that sodomy laws are laws against homosexuality because the laws have been used so extensively in the prosecution of homosexual acts, when many of them prohibit some heterosexual acts as well. Following Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England [1], the crime of sodomy has often been defined in the past only as the abominable and detestable crime against nature, or some variation of the phrase. This language led to widely varying rulings about what specific acts were encompassed by its prohibition. While many other parts of the world have, or had, laws against sodomy or other sexual practices, the term sodomy law has mainly been used when discussing the sodomy laws of the United States which were struck down by the United States Supreme Court in 2003.
Sodomy laws and the impact on HomosexualsDue to religious edicts against homosexuality, homosexuality (and specifically male on male anal sex) was deemed a crime in many cultures, in spite of its status as a consensual act. In England, Henry VIII introduced the first legislation against homosexuals with the Buggery Act of 1533, making buggery punishable by hanging, a penalty not finally lifted until 1861. Heterosexuals have not historically been prosecuted for anal sex and some sodomy laws included all homosexuality or all non-coital sex, including oral sex, frottage, tribadism, and masturbation. The Wolfenden report in the UK was a turning point in the legal recognition of homosexuality in Western countries. Many Western cultures have repealed laws against homosexual acts, including the USA, whose Supreme Court ruled in June 2003 in the case of Lawrence v. Texas that US state laws criminalizing private, non-commercial sexual activity (including homosexual activity) between consenting adults are unconstitutional. A number of countries (for example, the Netherlands, the UK, New Zealand and Belgium), the provinces of Québec, Ontario, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and the Yukon Territory in Canada, and the state of Massachusetts in the United States currently recognize same-sex marriages or civil unions. Other jurisdictions (for example. Germany, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, France, and the US states of Vermont and California) recognize in law long-term gay relationships as "domestic partnerships" or the like. A number of jurisdictions now allow gay couples to adopt children. An increasing number of politicians have openly declared either that they are homosexual or bisexual, or that they have had past homosexual experiences. These include Michael Portillo a former British Defence Secretary in John Major's government. An openly gay politician and gay rights activist, David Norris, sits in the Irish Senate, while the current and previous Presidents of Ireland, Mary McAleese and Mary Robinson were founders for the Irish Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform, which led to decriminalisation of homosexuality in the Republic of Ireland. In France, the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, had already publicly come out as gay when he was elected. In the German capital Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, was elected mayor after outing himself as homosexual. Five Canadian MPs are openly gay (two New Democrats, a Bloquiste, and two Liberals including one cabinet member.) There have been various US politicians who have served as openly gay, including Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts. This trend among Western nations has not been followed in all other regions of the world, where sodomy often remains a serious crime. Homosexual acts remain punishable by death in Afghanistan, Mauritania, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, and by life in prison in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Guyana, India, Maldives, Nepal, Singapore, and Uganda. Along with alleged communists, homosexuals were investigated by the notorious senator Joseph McCarthy in the USA, who produced a report entitled "Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government". United KingdomThe United Kingdom has historically had similar laws, but the offence was usually called there buggery, not sodomy, and was usually intepreted as referring to anal intercourse between two males or a male and a female. Buggery was made a felony by statute in 1533, during the reign of Henry VIII. (See Buggery Act.) In 1885, Parliament enacted the so-called Labouchere Amendment [2], which prohibited "gross indecency" between males, a broad term that was understood to encompass most or all male homosexual acts. It was under this law that Oscar Wilde suffered his well-known conviction and imprisonment. Subsequent to the Wolfenden report, sexual acts between two adult males, with no other people present, were made legal in England and Wales in 1967, and in Scotland and Northern Ireland somewhat later. The passage of the Human Rights Act 1998 has resulted in further broadening of the legality of homosexual acts. CanadaCanadian law now permits anal sex by consenting parties above the age of 18, provided no more than two people are present. Its sodomy laws were repealed in the 1960s by Pierre Trudeau who famously stated that "the government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation." As well, in Ontario, the laws concerning anal sex when one or both of the partners are 14 to 18 years of age has been overturned as being in violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms; this doesn't seem to have been tried in court again however. (The legal age of consent in Canada for other sexual activities is 14). AustraliaAustralia inherited the United Kingdom's sodomy laws on colonisation in 1788. These were retained in the criminal codes passed by the various colonial parliaments during the 19th century, and by the state parliaments after Federation. Following the Wolfenden report, the Dunstan government introduced a consenting adults in private type defence in South Australia in 1972(actually initiated as a private member's bill by a "l" liberal, Murray Hill, father of Australian Liberal (right-of-centre) Defence Minister, Robert Hill), and repealed that state's sodomy law in 1975. The Campaign Against Moral Persecution during the 1970s raised the profile and acceptance of Australia's gay and lesbian communities, and other states and territories repealed their laws between 1976 and 1990. The exception was Tasmania, which retained its laws until the Federal Government and the United Nations Human Rights Committee forced their repeal in 1997. The details are given in Willett (2000). Since 1997, the states and territories that retained different ages of consent or other vestiges of sodomy laws have tended to repeal them. New South Wales and the Northern Territory did so in 2003. In 2004, Queensland is the only Australian jurisdiction that enforces a sodomy law, with the age of consent for anal sex being 18 as compared to 16. ChinaSodomy laws have been abolished since the early 1990s in the People's Republic of China. Yet there is no clear statute towards consenting parties above the age of 18. If someone under 18 is involved, the adult partner will be prosecuted. In a notable case in 2002, a man who had anal intercourse with a teenager was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. FranceSince the French Revolution, France has not had laws punishing homosexual conduct per se between over-age consenting adults in private. However, other qualifications such as "offense to good mores" were occasionally retained in the 19th century (see Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès). Furthermore, the age of consent for homosexual sex was kept to the age of the legal majority (18 then 21), above the age for heterosexual sex (15), until 1981. In 1960, a parliamentary amendment by Paul Mirguet added homosexuality to a list of "social scourges ", along with alcoholism or prostitution. This prompted the government to increase the penalties for public display of a sex act when the act was homosexual. Transvestites or homosexuals caught cruising were also the target of police repression. In 1982, under president François Mitterrand, the last measures against homosexuality were repealed: one, dating from 1942 (Vichy France), making the age of consent for homosexual sex higher than for heterosexual sex, the other, dating from the 1960s, making homosexuality an aggravating circumstance for public indecency. GermanyParagraph 175, which punished "fornication between men", was eased to an age of consent of 21 in East Germany in 1957 and in West Germany in 1969. This age was lowered to 18 in the East in 1968 and the West in 1973, and all legal distinctions between heterosexual and homosexual acts were abolished in the East in 1989, with this change being extended to all of Germany in 1994 as part of the process of German Reunification. (In modern German, the term "Sodomie" has a meaning quite different from the English word "sodomy": it does not refer to anal sex at all, but solely to acts of bestiality.) HungaryHomosexuality in Hungary was decriminalized in 1962, Paragraph 199 of the Hungarian Penal Code from then on threatened "only" adults over 18 who engaged themselves in a consensual same-sex relationship with an underaged person between 14 and 18. In 1995 a kind of domestic partnership was introduced for same sex couples, on September 3, 2002 the ruling of the Hungarian Consitutional Court abrogated Paragraph 199, since then the age of consent is for both sexes and both for heterosexuals and homosexuals 14 years. United StatesSodomy laws in the United States, laws primarily intended to outlaw gay sex, were largely a matter of state rather than federal jurisdiction. By the last quarter of the 20th century, 46 out of 50 states had repealed any specifically anti-homosexual-conduct laws, and 36 out of 50 had repealed all sodomy laws. The remainder have been invalidated by the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas. See alsoReferences
External links
The contents of this article are licensed from Wikipedia.org under the GNU Free Documentation License.
How to see transparent copy 01-04-2007 01:21:04 |
|
