Similarly, the defendant in Bowers v. Hardwick (the decision overruled by Lawrence) was caught when an officer entered his home while serving an arrest warrant on an unrelated offense.
Wow, I’ve never seen such a paragraph filled with unsupported and biased opinions (in GQ) and outright errors.
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No, the colonies were not founded by people who “wanted the freedom to persecute anyone who didn’t think like them.” Some of them indeed wanted that, but you’ve provided no evidence (and there is no) that was the onus for them leaving the mother country. They by and large left because they were persecuted for not following accepted CoE teachings at the time. That’s also mostly only relevant to the Plymouth/Massachusetts Bay Colonies and ignores all the colonies south of that with far different histories. But hey, why bother getting anything correct when you start off so wrong and biased to begin with.
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They were not “ex-Brits” for two reasons, first with one exception none of the founders of the various American colonies were British to begin with. They were English (primarily in terms of the leaders/founders who got the charters) with some Scottish, Welsh and Scotch-Irish among the early settlers along with the English. The one exception is the founders of Georgia, which wasn’t founded until the 1720s. The other colonies were all founded (many a good 60-70+ years) prior to the 1707 Act of Union. Prior to that the concept of anyone being “British” was laughable as Scotland and England were simply in personal union. There was no Kingdom of Great Britain or etc.
Second, had they been British in the first place, they certainly didn’t become “ex-Brits” when they founded the colonies. They remained British subjects until 1776/1783 (informally/formally), and by that point the colonial founders/initial settlers were long since dead.
- It makes no sense to try and morally distinguish the persons who founded the colonies and the ones who stayed behind. The UK also had anti-sodomy laws on its books. Also much like the United States at one point in time it prosecuted people regularly for it, then it dropped off substantially while still remaining on the books. Everyone should be aware of the famous case of Alan Turing, a famous cryptographer in the war who helped defeat the Germans and a pioneer of early computing. He was gay, was prosecuted for it and forced to undergo humiliating (as an alternative to imprisonment) and ineffective hormone treatments to try and neutralize his “improper” sex drive. The injections of synthetic estrogen, given to him over a year made him impotent and caused him to develop breasts. He eventually killed himself.
No, not quite.
That’s not sodomy, that’s rape.
Yes, if it was without her consent. The point was that until a couple of decades ago, the law presumed a wife unable to consent to anal sex, so you needed only establish that the act had taken place - and this antedates laws criminalising marital rape, by a long way.
Maybe not quite, but not quite the opposite either. We are, after all, talking about a country who at the time it was formed thought it incredibly broadminded of them to tolerate Quakers.
My point remains. The dominant Protestant morality in the United States was not merely reflected but interleaved in the law. The United States is not a theocracy, nor does it have an official state religion, but standards have always been set with at least one eye on what religious sensibilities allowed or didn’t allow. Those are not monolithic and they do vary over time. The abolitionist movement was a fervent religious cause and so was Prohibition. Prohibition is interesting because that pitted dry Protestants against wet Catholics, part of a larger antagonism between the older and newer immigrant movements. Catholics lost that, but later won other moral battles. The Hollywood censorship drive we call the Hays code was written by high-level Catholics and adopted because the Church was going to use its strength to have adherents boycott movies. Catholics once had the kind of majority power in the Rust Belt cities that fundamentalists have in parts of today’s South.
Religion has permeated every aspect of American social life and that includes what is sexually permissible, both in informal sanctions and in the law. But when I say religion I mean Christianity. There is no getting around this. Sexual behaviors and adjuncts to sex like birth control and abortion have historically been governed by what Christians approve and disapprove. The U.S. was only nominally secular, and if you don’t believe that ask any atheist. That is true in exactly the same way as saying that the U.S. was only nominally color-blind and if you don’t believe that ask any person of color. I’d say those sentences remain true if you substitute “is” for “was” though we have seen a good deal of wonderful change in recent years.
BTW, this is exactly what people mean when they call the U.S. a “Christian nation.” They mean exactly that their beliefs used to be dominant and enforced by laws. They blame secularists and atheists for this change but there simply aren’t enough of them to sweep this attitude throughout society. What really happened is that their co-religionists changed. That’s not a very good battle cry, though.
My larger point also remains. We are free in the U.S. and I’d put that freedom up against any other country in the world in almost every way. But no society is free in a different and important sense: we are all constrained by the beliefs and attitudes of the majority. Attitudes about many things have changed in my lifetime, and those on homosexuality are a major example. But it is flat out ludicrous to think that the attitudes prevalent when I was born were not those of the Christian majority or that the changes would have happened if the Christian majority did not allow them.
What? What? In the butt?
Applied with rectitude, I would think.
Heh. The men’s room at my church only has two urinals, and I’ll use the stall if one of the urinals is occupied. Not out of any fear of homosexuals; it’s simply because several of the older-than-me men at my church haven’t gotten the memo about conversing at the urinals, and I simply can’t go when there’s somebody next to me trying to strike up a conversation.
Male Restroom Etiquette (YouTube, educational video)
But that’s the whole purpose of the slow toe tap. If—and only if—it’s reciprocated within a few seconds, you know that the person in the next stall is interested in playing. If he doesn’t silently respond, no one is the wiser. No one is ever “harassed” in such situations.
Excellent analysis.
Astute addition, even.
The term “British” was in common use as a demonym since long before the Act of Union. The OED has citations for its use in the sense of “anyone from the island of Great Britain” going back to 1387. The usage notes indicate that by the time of Henry VIII it was “frequently used to include English and Scotch”. In short, your etymological argument is completely specious. Most of the founders of the American colonies were British and wouldn’t have had any qualms describing themselves as such.
You never heard of conjugal right? There were conjugal rights butt sodomy was a conjugal wrong.
IIRC from the news reports of the time, Craig was remarkably persistent up to and including putting his foot on the policeman’s. He said it was just a “wide stance”. To be charged we seriously hope you have to do more than toe-tap in time to your Walkman…?
Not until recently. The idea that a woman could say no to the husband is relatively recent, and IIRC the establishing precedent for that was a case where they were separated and the husband broke into his wife’s apartment and also physically assaulted her.
After the first uniformed officer interrupts them, the switch to oral from anal? Then the second one walks in and then they stop that?
It’s a testament to the “justice for all” attitude of the Texas courts that this made it to the supreme court, not on the merits of the charges, but on the constitutionality of what they were allegedly doing? Or else the police are not too up on their perversion identification, need to watch more training videos.
Actually just showing a word existed at a certain date doesn’t mean it was in common use. But if you’d like to go down that path, please provide some evidence that British was in “common usage.” I know that many of the writings of the Founding Fathers, who wrote long after the Act of Union, still referred to English liberties, rights as Englishmen etc. Which is in direct contradiction to your claim, which is unsupported by fact.
In England and Wales, yes. In the US, the marital rape exception was revoked by various legislation in the states. Not sure about Canada.
Do I remember incorrectly, or was at least one of the cases that tested the anti-sodomy laws a set up? I thought I remembered reading that a gay couple and a friend decided to get arrested so they could appeal the Constitutionality of the laws as far as they could. So they started doing their thing, and then a friend called in something unrelated but serious, like an assault in progress or something, to get the police to show up so they would get arrested for sodomy.
Can somebody correct me if I am wrong?
Regards,
Shodan
Buggered if I know.
Sort of, butt not quite.
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The gay rights advocates from Lambda Legal litigating the case convinced Lawrence and Garner not to contest the charges despite their innocence and to plead no contest instead.[20] On November 20, Lawrence and Garner pleaded no contest to the charges and waived their right to a trial. Justice of the Peace Mike Parrott found them guilty and imposed a $100 fine and court costs of $41.25 on each defendant. When the defense attorneys realized that the fine was below the minimum required to permit them to appeal the convictions, they asked the judge to impose a higher penalty. Parrott, well aware that the attorneys intended to use the case to raise a constitutional challenge, increased it to $125 with the agreement of the prosecutor.[21]
To appeal, Lawrence and Garner needed to have their cases tried in Texas Criminal Court. Their attorneys asked the court to dismiss the charges against them on Fourteenth Amendment equal protection grounds, claiming that the law was unconstitutional since it prohibited sodomy between same-sex couples, but not between heterosexual couples. They also asserted a right to privacy and that the Supreme Court’s decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that found no privacy protection for consensual sex between homosexuals was “wrongly decided”.[22] On December 22, Judge Sherman Ross denied the defense motions to dismiss. The defendants again pled “no contest”. Ross fined them $200 each, the amount agreed upon in advance by both sides.[23]*
from Wiki on Lawrence v Texas.
The friend who called in the “crazy black man” report was jealous because Garner and Lawrence were flirting with each other in his presence. He was an ex- of one of the two.
I suspect a lot of people would be surprised to discover that anti-sodomy laws are still being enforced in many states.
IIRC, that was an attempted challenge to the Wisconsin statute making it a crime to get married in another state (to a person of the same sex) and the district attorney refused to pursue the matter.