Legal Issues

•    In the state of California, almost all consensual sexual acts between adult members of the same sex within the privacy of their homes are completely legal.

•    Most Western countries have no laws restricting sexual behavior between consenting adults. Great Britain repealed such laws in 1967.

•    In the United States, 20 states repealed their sodomy statutes between 1961 and 1978. The U.S. Supreme Court at one time upheld the Virginia state sodomy statute, and recently upheld the Georgia state sodomy statute. The dictionary definition of sodomy is anal or oral sex between two people or sex with an animal. The Missouri sodomy law even includes hands!

•    In California, the age of consent (when one is an adult in sexual matters according to the law) is 18. However, engaging in some sexual acts, especially with other young people, is not necessarily illegal. Simply being lesbian, gay, or bisexual is definitely legal in every state in the United States.

•    According to the studies performed by the Institute for Sex Research and the Children’s Division of the American Humane Association, more than 90% of arrests for child molestation involve male adults and female children. That means that even if every male adult arrested for child molestation of a male child were homosexual (which is not the case), the percentage of gay male child molesters is no greater than the percentage of heterosexual child molesters, taking into account their percentages in the population as a whole. According to the same sources, incidents involving adult women with children of either sex are statistically insignificant.

•    In California, AB2601 protects homosexuals from discrimination in employment.

•    Of the 16 NATO nations, only the United States and Turkey exclude homosexual soldiers from their armed forces.

•    It is illegal for two people of the same sex to marry, except in Denmark. This denies committed homosexual couples the many legal advantages of marriage. Domestic partner benefits in some communities and corporations attempt to remedy some of the inequality in this situation..

•    The opposition to gay rights is organized and active. In 1992, Colorado passed a constitutionally questionable amendment denying homosexuals equal protection under the law. Read your newspapers and stay up to date on new developments in this critical area. (Please see UPI article appended.)

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