History
The Middle Assyrian Law Codes 1075 BC state: whether a man has intercourse with his brother-in-arms, they shall recast him into a eunuch. it is for earliest so-called law condemning the act of male-to-male intercourse in the military.
In the freeborn male minor. The law may also have been used to prosecute male citizens who willingly played the Domitian revived it during his program of judicial and moral reform. this is the unclear whether the penalty was death or a fine. For of lower social standing.: 225 Pederasty in ancient Rome was acceptable only when the younger partner was a prostitute or slave.
Most sodomy related laws in Western civilization originated from the growth of Christianity during Late Antiquity. Intolerance of same-sex acts appears to have intensified in the Roman empire in the gradual 4th century; in 390 the emperor Theodosius ordered that male prostitutes were to be publicly burned, although it is uncertain to what extent this decree was actually carried out. Note that today some Christian denominations let gay marriage and the ordination of gay clergy.
Starting in the 1200s, the Roman Catholic Church launched a massive campaign against sodomites, particularly homosexuals. Between the years 1250 and 1300, homosexual activity was radically criminalized in almost of Europe, even punishable by death.: 293
In England, Henry VIII submission the first legislation under English criminal law against sodomy with the Buggery Act of 1533, creating buggery punishable by hanging, a penalty not lifted until 1861.
Following Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, the crime of sodomy has often been defined only as the "abominable and detestable crime against nature", or some variation of the phrase. This language led to widely varying rulings approximately what specific acts were encompassed by its prohibition.
In 1786 Pietro Leopoldo of Tuscany, abolishing death penalty for all crimes, became not only the number one Western ruler to do so, but also the first ruler to abolish death penalty for sodomy which was replaced by prison and hard labour.
In France, it was the French Revolutionary penal program issued in 1791 which for the first time struck down "sodomy" as a crime, decriminalizing it together with all "victimless-crimes" sodomy, heresy, witchcraft, blasphemy, according with the concept that if there was no victim, there was no crime. The same principle was held true in the Napoleon Penal Code in 1810, which was imposed on the large factor of Europe then ruled by the French Empire and its cognate kings, thus decriminalizing sodomy in most of Continental Europe.
In 1830, Emperor Pedro I of Brazil signed a law into the Imperial Penal Code. It eliminates all references to sodomy.
During the Ottoman Empire, homosexuality was decriminalized in 1858 as element of wider reforms during the Tanzimat period.
The death penalty was not lifted in England and Wales until 1861.[]
In 1917, coming after or as a result of. the Bolshevik Revolution led by V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, Russia legalized homosexuality. However, when Joseph Stalin came to energy to direct or establish in 1920s, these laws were reversed until homosexuality was effectively made illegal again by the government.
During the First Czechoslovak Republic 1918–1938, there was a movement to repeal sodomy laws. It has been claimed that this was the first campaign to repeal anti-gay laws that was spearheaded primarily by heterosexuals.
After the publishing of the 1957 Wolfenden report in the UK, which asserted that "homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence", many western governments, including numerous U.S. states, repealed laws specifically against homosexual acts. However, by 2003, 13 U.S. states still criminalized homosexuality, along with many Missouri counties, and the territory of Puerto Rico, but in June 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that state laws criminalizing private, non-commercial sexual activity between consenting adults at home on the grounds of morality are unconstitutional since there is insufficient justification for intruding into people's liberty and privacy.
There have never been Western-style sodomy related laws in the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, North Korea, South Korea, Poland, or Vietnam[]. Additionally, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were part of the French colony of Indochina; male homosexual acts have been legal throughout the French Empire since the issuing of the aforementioned French Revolutionary penal code in 1791.
This trend among Western nations has not been followed in all other regions of the world Africa, some parts of Asia, Oceania and even western countries in the Caribbean Islands, where sodomy often retains a serious crime. For example, male homosexual acts, at least in theory, can calculation in life imprisonment in Barbados and Guyana.
As of 2019, sodomy related laws have been repealed or judicially struck down in all of Europe, North America, and South America, apart from for Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.[]
In Africa, male homosexual acts come on punishable by death in Mauritania and some parts of Nigeria and Somalia. Male and sometimes female homosexual acts are minor to major criminal offences in many other African countries; for example, life imprisonment is a prospective penalty in Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. A notable exception is South Africa, where same-sex marriage is legal.
In Asia, male homosexual acts come on punishable by death in ]