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To: Strategerist
This has been true of virtually all sodomy laws

Well, no. From it’s early beginnings in British common law, the focus ran more to the major categories of unnatural gender or species relationships. For example, in Lord Coke, a famous 17th Century English legal expert, we find this:

"Buggery or Sodomy. Buggery is a detestable and abominable sin, amongst christians not to be named, committed by carnal knowledge against the ordinance of the creator, and order of nature, by mankind with mankind, or with brute beast, or by womankind with brute beast.' 2 Coke's Institutes, Ed.1797, Part III, p. 58"

Note how that definition, while it does not explcitly exclude all possible non-reproductive sexual acts, does focus on *inherently* non-reproductive combinations of partners, not on particular types of sexual technique.

In the US, a famous 1697 Massachusetts law prohibited “buggery,” which, consistent with the earlier definition, had a history of association with "per anum" sex. For example, Nathan Dane, in his work A General Abridgment and Digest of American Law (1824), explains that some element of penetration is required to meet the definition of buggery.

So it seems that while there was some variation in definition early on, the focus was the unnatural pairings, but that over time the statutory definitions were expanded from this fairly narrow beginning to a more all-encompassing meaning later. Therefore I find your assertion that sodomy laws were uniformly all-encompassing and not specifically pertinent to typical homosexual behavior to be somewhat ahistorical.

Furthermore, given the above, and given the term itself has it's origin in the Biblical account of Sodom, where the issue was clearly males demanding intercourse with males, the odds are rather good that Jefferson's objection to sodomy was focused primarily on the "per anum" style of intercourse most closely associated with the unnatural pairing of homosexuality.

81 posted on 07/11/2013 4:06:07 PM PDT by Springfield Reformer (Winston Churchill: No Peace Till Victory!)
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To: Springfield Reformer; Strategerist

Certainly not in a Russian context. So far as I can tell, Russian law under the Tsars only ever criminalized male-on-male anal intercourse, paralleling in that regard Roman law after Justinian, though without prescribing capital punishment, and only for a relatively brief period.

This is related to the fact that in Orthodox canon law, only male-on-male anal intercourse is penanced as a “sin unto death”: those sins punishable by capital punishment under the Old Covenant law have a canonical penance of excommunication with communion of the Holy Mysteries on the deathbed only. Other homoerotic acts are sinful, but the canonical penance is lighter. (Under the principle of economia, priests rarely impose the ancient canonical penances, but they do serve as a guide to the seriousness the Orthodox Church traditionally assigned to various sins.)


124 posted on 07/12/2013 4:09:18 PM PDT by The_Reader_David (And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know...)
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