Legal Status
Sodomy was decriminalized in Thailand in 1956. The age of consent is sixteen. Many of the legal reforms that benefit LGBT Thais have come out within the early part of the twenty-first century.
In 2002, the Thai Ministry of Health publicly declared that homosexuality was no longer to be regarded as a mental illness or disorder.
In 2005, the Thai armed forces lifted its ban on LGBT serving in the military. Prior to this reform, LGBT people were exempted as suffering from a "mental disorder" law of 1954.
In 2007, the Thai government broadened the definition of a sexual assault or rape victim to include women and men The government also prohibited marital rape, with the law stipulating that women or men can be victims.
In May 2009, the Thai Red Cross reaffirmed its ban of men who have sex with men (MSM) from being blood donors, despite prior campaigns.
Read more about this topic: LGBT Rights In Thailand
Famous quotes containing the words legal status, legal and/or status:
“In the course of the actual attainment of selfish ends—an attainment conditioned in this way by universality—there is formed a system of complete interdependence, wherein the livelihood, happiness, and legal status of one man is interwoven with the livelihood, happiness, and rights of all. On this system, individual happiness, etc. depend, and only in this connected system are they actualized and secured.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“screenwriter
Policemen so cherish their status as keepers of the peace and protectors of the public that they have occasionally been known to beat to death those citizens or groups who question that status.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)