"The State has No Business In the Bedrooms of the Nation"

[bcholmes]

Reading sinboy's straight-forward analysis of the Texas Sodomy Law case, I'm reminded again about just how lucky we were to have Pierre Trudeau as the leader of our country.

A few years ago, I was doing some research about Canada repealing the sodomy laws in 1969 and ran across this article by Senator Anne C. Cools, which I enjoyed reading. In all recent bills involving same-sex rights, Anne Cools has consistently argued that "sexual orientation" is a term that could be used too broadly -- I don't think that her concern is real, and I suspect that her position could be interpretted too much like "homosexuality is related to pedophilia" for me to be comfortable.

Anne Cools talks about the Klippert case -- a gay man convicted 18 times on "acts of gross indecency". In 1967, the Canadian Supreme Court upheld a request to have Klippert declared a dangerous sex offender. It wasn't a unanimous result. One of the dissenting judges wrote:

It would be with reluctance and regret that I would have found myself compelled by the words used to impute to Parliament the intention of enacting that the words 'dangerous sexual offender' shall include in their meaning 'a sexual offender who is not dangerous.'

And I am pleased with the Canadian parliament who, affected by this case, elected to repeal the laws against sodomy (I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, a law student, who told me that actually certain forms of sodomy are still on the books -- daisy-chaining, for example, could be prosecuted).

Comments

[futabachan.livejournal.com]

So hooking up a bunch of external SCSI or Commoodore 64 peripherals is illegal in Canada? Go figure?

:-)