A sodomy law is a law that defines certain sexual acts as crimes. The precise sexual acts meant by the term sodomy are rarely spelled out in the law, but are typically understood by courts to include any sexual act deemed to be "unnatural" or immoral. It also has a range of similar euphemisms. These acts typically include oral sex, anal sex and bestiality; in practice such laws have rarely been enforced against heterosexual couples.
Today, consensual homosexual acts between adults are illegal in about 70 out of the 195 countries of the world (approximately 36%); in 40 of these, only male-male sex is outlawed. In 2011, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a LGBT rights resolution, which was followed up by a report published by the UN Human Rights Commissioner which included scrutinisation of the mentioned codes.
Famous quotes containing the words sodomy and/or law:
“I see not much difference between ourselves & the Turks, save that we have foreskins and they none, that they have long dresses and we short, and that we talk much and they little. In England the vices in fashion are whoring & drinking, in Turkey, sodomy and smoking.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)