Sodomy Law - History

History

The Middle Assyrian Law Codes (1075 BC) state: If a man has intercourse with his brother-in-arms, they shall turn him into a eunuch. This is the earliest known law condemning the act of male-to-male intercourse in the military.

In the Roman Republic, the Lex Scantinia imposed penalties on those who committed a sex crime (stuprum) against a freeborn male minor. The law may also have been used to prosecute male citizens who willingly played the passive role in same-sex acts. The law was mentioned in literary sources but enforced infrequently; Domitian revived it during his program of judicial and moral reform. It is unclear whether the penalty was death or a fine. For adult male citizens to experience an act on homoerotic desire was considered natural and permissible, as long as their partner was a male of lower social standing. Pederasty in ancient Rome was acceptable only when the younger partner was a prostitute or slave.

Most sodomy laws in Western civilization originated from the growth of Christianity during Late Antiquity. The New Testament specifically condemns Sodomy (Romans 1:24, 26-28; 1 Corinthians 6:9-10; 1 Timothy 1:8-10).

In England, Henry VIII introduced the first legislation under English criminal law against sodomy with the Buggery Act of 1533, making buggery punishable by hanging, a penalty not lifted until 1861.

Following Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, the crime of sodomy has often been defined 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.
In 1786 Pietro Leopoldo of Tuscany, abolishing death penalty for all crimes, became not only the first Western ruler to do so, but also the first ruler to abolish death penalty for sodomy (which was replaced by prison and hard labour, though).
In was the French Revolutionary penale code issued in 1791 which for the first time struck down "sodomy" as a crime, decriminalizing it together with all "victimless-crimes" (sodomy, heresy, witchcraft, blasphemy), according with the concept that if there was no victim, there was no crime. The same principle was hold true in the Napoleon Penale Code in 1810, which was imposed to the large part of Europe then ruled by the French Empire and its cognate kings, thus decriminalising sodomy in most of Continental Europe.
Death penalty was not lifted in England and Wales until 1861, and in 1917, following the Bolshevik Revolution led by V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, even Russia legalized homosexuality. However, when Joseph Stalin came to power these gains were reversed bit by bit until homosexuality was effectively made illegal again by the government.

After the publishing of the Wolfenden report in the UK, which asserted that "homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence", many western governments, including the United States, have repealed laws specifically against homosexual acts. In June 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that state laws criminalizing private, non-commercial sexual activity between consenting adults at home on the grounds of morality are unconstitutional since there is insufficient justification for intruding into people's liberty and privacy.

As of 2011, sodomy laws have been repealed or judicially struck down in all of Europe, North America, and South America, except for Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago. Sodomy remains a serious crime in these countries and in many other parts of the world.

This trend among Western nations has not been followed in all other regions of the world (Africa, some parts of Asia, Oceania and even western countries in the Caribbean Islands), where sodomy often remains a serious crime. For example, male homosexual acts, at least in theory, can result in life imprisonment in Barbados and Guyana.

In Africa, male homosexual acts remain punishable by death in Mauritania, Sudan, and some parts of Nigeria and Somalia. Male and sometimes female homosexual acts are minor to major criminal offences in many other African countries; for example, life imprisonment is a prospective penalty in Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Uganda. A notable exception is South Africa, where same-sex marriage is legal.

In Asia, male homosexual acts remain punishable by death in Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen; but anti-sodomy laws have been repealed in Israel (which recognises but does not perform same-sex marriages), Japan, Kazakhstan, India, the Philippines, and Thailand. There have never been Western-style sodomy laws in the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, North Korea, South Korea, or Vietnam. Additionally, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were part of the French colony of 'Indochine'; so if there had been any laws against male homosexual acts in those countries, they would have been dismantled by French colonial authorities, since male homosexual acts have been legal in France and throughout the French Empire since 1791. Other discriminatory measures may exist against homosexual men (and women) in the countries discussed, however; and certainly do exist in the rest of Asia. For example, life imprisonment is the formal penalty for male homosexual acts in Bangladesh, the Maldives, Myanmar (formerly Burma), Pakistan, and Qatar.