Posted on 12/10/2002 11:21:41 AM PST by Liz
Like whist, whilst, and self-abuse, the word sodomy has an old-fashioned ring to it. You don't even see it alluded to much anymore, except in punning tabloid headlines about the situation in Iraq. But it—or its kissin' cousin, the nearly as archaic-sounding "deviate sexual intercourse"—can be found in the criminal codes of thirteen states of the Union, where it is punishable by penalties ranging from a parking-ticket-size fine to (theoretically) ten years in prison.
Even at this late date, many people are vague about just exactly what sodomy is. Montesquieu defined it as "the crime against nature," which is not especially helpful. Blackstone called it "the infamous crime against nature, committed either with man or beast," which gets us a little further, but not much. Back in the U.S.A., the statute books tend to be franker. Some states bring animals into the picture, some don't. The Texas Legislature's definition is nonzoological.
SKIP THIS IF EXPLICIT LANGUAGE OFFENDS. According to Section 21.01 of the Texas Penal Code (readers of delicate sensibilities may at this point wish to skip down a few lines), " 'Deviate sexual intercourse' means: (A) any contact between any part of the genitals of one person and the mouth or anus of another person; or (B) the penetration of the genitals or the anus of another person with an object."
RESUME READING HERE What the Lone Star State does and does not view as some kinda deviated preversion became of national interest last week, when the United States Supreme Court agreed to consider Lawrence v. Texas. The Lawrence of the case is John G. Lawrence, fifty-nine years old, of Houston, who, on the evening of September 17, 1998, was in his apartment with a guest, Tyron Garner, who is thirty-five. Texas got involved when police, having been tipped off by a neighbor that a "weapons disturbance" was in progress, busted down the door. (The tip was a deliberate lie on the part of the neighbor, who was later convicted of filing a false report.)
What the officers found Lawrence and Garner doing is really none of our business, any more than it was any of Texas's; suffice it to say that it was consensual, nonviolent, and noise-free. The two men were arrested, jailed overnight, and eventually fined two hundred dollars each. They appealed, a three-judge panel of a district appeals court reversed their conviction, the full nine-judge appeals court reversed the reversal, and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals declined to do any more reversing. And so to Washington.
The statute under which Lawrence and Garner were convicted, Section 21.06 of the Texas Penal Code, is officially known as the Homosexual Conduct Law. Ironically, this statute was a product of the progressive mood of the early nineteen-seventies. In most of the states that still criminalize sodomy, it doesn't matter, legally, whether a couple engaging in behavior (A), above, consists of two men, two women, or one of each.
That's how it was in Texas, too, until 1974. In that bell-bottomed year, the Texas Legislature made heterosexual sodomy legal, but it couldn't quite bring itself to do the same for gays. The result is that Texas is now one of only four states (the others being Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma) where it is a crime for gays to please each other in ways that are perfectly legal for straights. The panel that overturned the conviction saw this as discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
The full state court disagreed. Rather, confirming what Anatole France called "the majestic egalitarianism of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges," the court pointed out that in Texas homosexuality is illegal for heterosexuals and homosexuals alike. No discrimination there.
According to the Times's Linda Greenhouse, the Supreme Court probably wouldn't have taken the case unless a majority had already decided to "revisit" Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), which upheld the constitutionality of Georgia's sodomy law.
The decision in that case—by a vote of five to four, as with so many of the Court's clunkers—was an embarrassment. Both its language and its reasoning were shockingly coarse. Writing for the majority, Justice Byron White defined "the issue"—leeringly, sarcastically, obtusely, and repeatedly—as "whether the Federal Constitution confers a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy," or protects "a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy," or extends "a fundamental right to homosexuals to engage in acts of consensual sodomy." Any such claim, he added, "is, at best, facetious."
Caricaturing the well-established constitutional right to privacy in this nyah-nyah way is like dismissing the First Amendment as being all about the right to make doo-doo jokes. It was left to the author of the dissenting opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun, to point out, quoting Justice Brandeis, that the case was really "about 'the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men,' namely 'the right to be let alone.' "
Justice Lewis Powell, who tipped the balance in Bowers v. Hardwick, expressed regret years later that he had voted the way he did. He's gone now. John Paul Stevens, who dissented, William Rehnquist, now Chief Justice, and Sandra Day O'Connor are the only holdovers from the Court that upheld Georgia's sodomy law (which, by the way, was thrown out, a few months after Lawrence and Garner were arrested in Houston, by Georgia's supreme court, for violating Georgia's constitution).
Half the states that had sodomy laws when Bowers was decided have got rid of them, and those that still have them seldom enforce them. But when they are enforced the consequences can be more onerous than it may appear. Lawrence and Garner aren't just out four hundred bucks; they may also be banned from certain professions, from nursing to school-bus driving, and are deprived of other privileges denied to persons who have been convicted of "crimes of moral turpitude."
Anyway, sodomy laws are a standing insult to, among others, millions of respectable citizens who happen to be gay. They are an absurd anachronism and an obvious violation of the right to privacy. Whatever they may have represented in Montesquieu's day, or even Byron White's, in 2002 they are nothing but an expression of bigotry. If the Supreme Court takes a truly honest look at Section 21.06 of the Texas Penal Code, it will surely agree with the view of Dickens's Mr. Bumble: this is one case where, at bottom, "the law is a ass."
--SNIP -- Clink on source link for rest of story (go to next)
So you're for mandatory church attendance? Outlawing taking the Lord's name in vain? Banning the worship of "flase gods?"
Then why do they outlaw it?
Homosexuals were considered insane and a threat to society.
Now, millions are dead from all the diseases they carry because they changed that.
I can see the law being changed for heterosexual couples, because all through nature male and female unite (except for male goats- they'll jump anything).
I think encouraging the public health hazard of homosexual lifestyles is a really bad idea. Why make death any easier? Enough are killed by dismemberment before birth, so why add rotting away while still alive to that list?
There's enough suffering in this world already. The next generation will have to suffer for what our generation has done.
Do you support anti-smoking laws? And what about people who support laws that protect the air and water, are they "enviro-wackos" or just people interested in public health?
And when an AIDS vaccine is created will you change your position? Will you advocate asexuality if some disease comes alongs that ravages heterosexuals?
Ro 14:10
But why dost thou judge thy brother? or why dost thou set at nought thy brother? for we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ.
Ro 14:13
Let us not therefore judge one another any more: but judge this rather, that no man put a stumblingblock or an occasion to fall in his brother's way.
It is not your nor my place to judge sinner, for we are but sinners ourselves.
Its purpose isn't to legislate or to decide what laws are warranted.
When a statute and the Constitution conflict
In this case, they dont.
You're free to leave.
And any California state laws that apply could become null and void depending on the society or culture I move to. Getting my point?
You're free to leave.
Everyone dies. 100% of the time.
In the winter, you're not allowed to have gay sex on any of the nights the Boston Bruins play. In the spring and summer, you're not allowed to have gay sex on any of the nights the Red Sox play. I'm sorry about this, but this is the way it's got to be.
And people wonder how it was possible that Germany went haywire in the 1930s and 1940s . . .
The Birdcage, a terrific movie.
Interior design. Without homosexuals, the insides of our buildings would look like 1950s-era VA hospitals.
It was probably a gay guy who developed thong underwear for women.
William S. Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg were damn good writers, as was Truman Capote, Walt Whitman, and Tennessee Williams.
The Indigo Girls are terrific.
Gertrude Stein was responsible for mentoring just about every big-name Lost Generation author.
Just a few off the top of my head. Gays aren't all bad.
Maybe you should take your own advice.
Marx and Engels did not explicitly address the subject of homosexuality in their work. Some contend that Engels’ passing comment about the “distasteful” practices of the ancient Greeks in The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State is an explicit condemnation of homosexual relations while others argue, with I think good reason, that Engels is primarily concerned with the ways in which Greek society divided relations between men and men and men and women such that the latter were subordinated to the former, and the ways in which sexual relations between men and men tended to parallel sexual — and social — relations between men and women with a strict line of division between older and dominant adult males and younger and subordinant youthful males. Engels is, after all, primarily concerned with investigating sexual difference as a basis for class stratification through sexual division of social labor. The fact that homosexuality is not explicitly addressed elsewhere in Engels’ work also belies the contention that Engels was in any way manifestly opposed to — or “disgusted with” — homosexuality. In any event, what is at least clear is that Marx and Engels did not themselves even begin to develop a marxist theory of homosexuality.
My dear genius LEO from North Carolina:I am amazed at the utter lack of sense that you idiot libertarians have.Do you even read your own posts? You don't enforce common law. You enforce statutory law, which comes from common law that was codified into statutes by your legislature. You should've realized this when you wrote "North Carolina General Statute: § 4-1. Common law declared to be in force" . . . or did you simply not see the word "statute" there?
Definition of Common Law: COMMON LAW. As distinguished from law created by the enactment of legislatures, the common law comprises the body of these principles and rules of action, relating to the government and security of persons and property, which derive their authority solely from usage's and customs of immemorial antiquity, or from the judgments and decrees of the courts recognizing, affirming, and enforcing such usage's and customs; and, in this sense, particularly the ancient unwritten law of England. The "common law" is all the statutory and case law background of England and the American colonies before the American revolution. People v. Rehman, 253 C.A. 2d 119, 61 Cal. Rptr. 65, 85. "Common law" consists of those principles, usage and rules of action applicable to government and security of persons and property which do not rest for their authority upon any express and positive declaration of the will of the legislature. Bishop v. U.S., D.C. Tex., 334, F. Supp. 415, 418. (from Black's).
Another: common law n. the traditional unwritten law of England, based on custom and usage, which began to develop over a thousand years before the founding of the United States. The best of the pre-Saxon compendiums of the common law was reportedly written by a woman, Queen Martia, wife of a king of a small English kingdom. Together with a book on the "law of the monarchy" by a Duke of Cornwall, Queen Martia's work was translated into the emerging English language by King Alfred (849-899 A.D.). When William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066, he combined the best of this Anglo-Saxon law with Norman law, which resulted in the English common law, much of which was by custom and precedent rather than by written code. By the 14th century legal decisions and commentaries on the common law began providing precedents for the courts and lawyers to follow. It did not include the so-called law of equity (chancery), which came from the royal power to order or prohibit specific acts. The common law became the basic law of most states due to the Commentaries on the Laws of England, completed by Sir William Blackstone in 1769, which became every American lawyer's bible. Today almost all common law has been enacted into statutes with modern variations by all the states except Louisiana, which is still influenced by the Napoleonic Code. In some states the principles of Common Law are so basic they are applied without reference to statute.
If you think the Common Law is not in effect here in North Carolina, I invite you to come and break the Common Law, Let's see where you end up.
I hope the other LEOs in NC aren't as pig-ignorant as you are.
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