Sodomy laws are just another way to discriminate against queer couples and they have no place in our country today.
Despite most states repealing these laws, 12 states, including Idaho, have chosen to keep them, continuing to make nonprocreative sex illegal.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, sodomy laws were mainly used as a secondary charge in cases of sexual assault, sex with children, public sex and sex with animals. Most of the time these cases regarded heterosexual sex. But these laws were part of a larger body of laws derived from the church to prevent nonprocreative sex, such as oral or anal sex, and sex outside of marriage.
But in the late 1960’s, as the gay rights movement began to make headway, social conservatives began to use sodomy laws as justification for discrimination. By the 70’s, nine states, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Tennessee and Texas, had rewritten their sodomy laws so that they explicitly only applied to gay people. Maryland and Oklahoma courts shortly after ruled that these laws couldn’t apply to heterosexual couples.
These laws acted as a justification for discrimination across the country. In Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Virginia, these laws allowed the courts to deny gay couples custody of their own biological children. In Florida and Mississippi, gay couples were denied the ability to adopt. And in Arkansas and Missouri, gay couples weren’t even allowed to be foster parents.
Sodomy laws also acted as a way to discriminate against gay people in the workplace. In a 1986 F.B.I. U.S. Supreme Court case, Bowers v. Hardwick, the court decided that the U.S. constitution allowed Georgia to make sodomy a crime. That meant, according to the U.S. Supreme Court and the F.B.I., that it couldn’t be illegal to discriminate against gay people because they were now a group defined by actions that could be a crime.
Finally, sodomy laws acted as a way to prevent equal rights or protection of queer people. In Utah, sodomy laws were used to justify excluding gay people from hate crime protection.
While most states have gotten rid of the majority of these laws, 12 have kept laws banning sodomy and same-sex sodomy. These states are Idaho, Alabama, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and Utah. While these laws are much harder to enforce and use for discrimination than they were 20 years ago, the fact that they still stand in the laws of so many states is symbolic of their despicable desire to hold on to an era where open hatred was not only rampant; it was legal.
Tracy Mullinax can be reached at [email protected]