sodomy laws

(noun)

Sodomy laws in the United States, which outlawed a variety of sexual acts, were historically universal. While they often targeted sexual acts between persons of the same sex, many statutes employed definitions broad enough to outlaw certain sexual acts between persons of different sexes as well, sometimes even acts between married persons.

Related Terms

Examples of sodomy laws in the following topics:

  • The Movement for Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights

    • Prior to the 1970s, most states in the United States had laws against sodomy, generally defined as any sexual contact other than heterosexual intercourse.
    • First and foremost on the gay rights platform was the need to overturn laws that made homosexuality illegal.
    • Other states have passed laws allowing for same-sex civil unions.
    • Challenges to bans on same-sex marriage contend that laws prohibiting same-sex marriage are discriminatory.
    • This map depicts when anti-sodomy laws that criminalized non-heterosexual sex were overturned by state in the United States.

  • Socialization and Human Sexuality

    • ., from society), especially from religion, law, and the media.
    • The laws within a particular jurisdiction simultaneously reflect and create social norms regarding sexuality.
    • For example, based on American law, Americans are socialized to believe that prostitution and rape are improper forms of sexual behavior.
    • Sodomy laws, or laws prohibiting particular sexual acts between two consenting partners such as anal sex between two men, were on the books in most American states for decades.
    • Examine the various ways in which a person is sexually socialized, specifically through religion, law, and the media

  • Types of Crime

    • Criminal law, as opposed to civil law, is the body of law that relates to crime and that defines conduct that is not allowed.
    • Criminal law, as opposed to civil law, is the body of law that relates to crime.
    • Criminal law is distinctive for the uniquely serious potential consequences, or sanctions, for failure to abide by its rules.
    • In criminal law, an offense against the person usually refers to a crime which is committed by direct physical harm or force being applied to another person.
    • Others are violations of social taboos, such as incest, sodomy, indecent exposure or exhibitionism.

  • The Death Penality

    • In some countries sexual crimes, such as rape, adultery, incest, and sodomy, carry the death penalty, as do religious crimes, such as apostasy in Islamic nations.

  • Sociology and the Social Sciences

    • Sociologists occasionally posit the existence of unchanging, abstract social laws.
    • But even this law has proved to have exceptions.
    • In the late 19th century, attempts to discover laws regarding human behavior became increasingly common.
    • Kepler's law, which describes planet orbit, is an example of the sort of laws Newton believed science should seek.
    • But social life is rarely predictable enough to be described by such laws.

  • Racial Stratification

    • Not until 1967 were laws outlawing interracial marriage abolished in the United States.
    • These laws were referred to as miscegenation laws (miscegenation means "mixing races").
    • This was the experience of Mildred and Richard Loving, who married in 1958 in Washington D.C., a district in the US that no longer had a law against interracial marriage.
    • Virginia, which abolished miscegenation laws in the U.S.
    • Still as late as 2002, close to 10% of people in the U.S. favored a law prohibiting interracial marriage.

  • Crime

    • Crime is the breach of rules or laws for which some governing authority can ultimately prescribe a conviction.
    • Crime is the breach of rules or laws for which some governing authority can ultimately prescribe a conviction.
    • While every crime violates the law, not every violation of the law counts as a crime; for example, breaches of contract and of other civil law may rank as "offenses" or as "infractions. " Modern societies generally regard crimes as offenses against the public or the state, as distinguished from torts, which are wrongs against private parties that can give rise to a civil cause of action.
    • This approach considers the complex realities surrounding the concept of crime and seeks to understand how changing social, political, psychological, and economic conditions may affect changing definitions of crime and the form of the legal, law-enforcement, and penal responses made by society.
    • All such adjustments to crime statistics, together with the experience of people in their everyday lives, shape attitudes on the extent to which the state should use law or social engineering to enforce or encourage any particular social norm.

  • Formal Means of Control

    • Formal means of social control are generally state-determined, through the creation of laws and their enforcement.
    • Formal means of social control are the means of social control exercised by the government and other organizations who use law enforcement mechanisms and sanctions such as fines and imprisonment to enact social control.
    • The mechanisms utilized by the state as means of formal social control span the gamut from the death penalty to curfew laws.
    • From a legal perspective, sanctions are penalties or other means of enforcement used to provide incentives for obedience with the law, or rules and regulations.
    • Within the civil law context, sanctions are usually monetary fines.

  • Spencer and Social Darwinism

    • Like Comte, Spencer saw in sociology the potential to unify the sciences, or to develop what he called a "synthetic philosophy. " He believed that the natural laws discovered by natural scientists were not limited to natural phenomena; these laws revealed an underlying order to the universe that could explain natural and social phenomena alike.
    • Even in his writings on ethics, he held that it was possible to discover laws of morality that had the same authority as laws of nature.
    • He believed that all natural laws could be reduced to one fundamental law, the law of evolution.
    • It was a universal law, applying to the stars and the galaxies as much as to biological organisms, and to human social organization as much as to the human mind.
    • Thus, Spencer's synthetic philosophy aimed to show that natural laws led inexorably to progress.

  • Bureaucracies and Formal Groups

    • A bureaucracy is an organization of non-elected officials who implements the rules, laws, and functions of their institution.
    • The competition is "aimed at identifying innovative suggestions for reducing unnecessary bureaucracy stemming from European law".
    • A bureaucracy is an organization of non-elected officials of a government or organization who implements the rules, laws, and functions of their institution.
    • The competition is "aimed at identifying innovative suggestions for reducing unnecessary bureaucracy stemming from European law".
    • Street-level bureaucracy is accompanied by the idea that these individuals vary the extents to which they enforce the rules and laws assigned to them.