Law Regarding Same-sex Sexual Activity
Common law prohibitions include sodomy, defined as the "unlawful and intentional sexual relations per anum between two human males" as well as unnatural offences, defined as the unlawful and intentional commission of an unnatural sexual act by one person with another person. Section 11 of The Censorship and Entertainments Control Act, which provides that no person shall import, print, publish, distribute, or keep for sale any publication which is undesirable (defined as "indecent or obscene or is offensive or harmful to public morals or is likely to be contrary to public health." has been used to harass LGBT people and activists.
Laws passed in 2006 criminalize any actions perceived as homosexual. The Zimbabwean government has made it a criminal offense for two people of the same sex to hold hands, hug, or kiss. The "sexual deviancy" law is one of 15 additions to Zimbabwe's Criminal Code quietly passed in Parliament. The sections involving gays and lesbians are part of an overhaul of the country's sodomy laws. Before then, laws against sodomy were limited to sexual activity, and the revised law now states that sodomy is any "act involving contact between two males that would be regarded by a reasonable person as an indecent act."
Read more about this topic: LGBT Rights In Zimbabwe
Famous quotes containing the words law and/or activity:
“These, having not the law, are a law unto themselves.”
—Bible: New Testament St. Paul, in Romans, 2:14.
“Criticism is infested with the cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit to imitate the sayers.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)