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repealed such laws in 1967.
• In the United States, 20 states repealed their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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