In response to the threat to a broad range of privacy protections posed by the US Supreme Court with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Massachusetts Senate unanimously voted last Thursday to advance a bill to repeal archaic anti-sodomy laws in the state still on the books.
“There is quite a bit of stuff on the books that is either really offensive to current views or is just outdated and no longer in use and we should get rid of it,” the bill’s author state Sen. William N. Brownsberger told the Boston Globe.
“[T]he original intent of this some of this language was very specifically to segregate out and condemn LGBTQ people by calling our forms of intimacy unnatural or lewd or lascivious,” Arline Isaacson of the Massachusetts LGBTQ Political Caucus told the Globe.
Reports the Globe:
The unanimous vote follows last week’s Supreme Court ruling that allows states to prohibit abortion for the first time in 49 years and also comes as Massachusetts celebrates the last day of LGBTQ Pride month.
In a separate concurring opinion to last week’s decision, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas called into question several other rulings made by the high court, including Obergefell v. Hodges, which established the right of same-sex couples to marry, and Lawrence v. Texas, in which the court ruled against a Texas law criminalizing the act of sodomy.
With the Supreme Court stripping away precedent and subsequently, the right to privacy, archaic laws on the books in Massachusetts are more relevant than ever, bill sponsors said.
“In my America, there is a personal space the government has no business in. These laws intrude into people’s personal space and they shouldn’t be on the books. The Supreme Court, for a while, has agreed with that. But lately, we are not sure where they are going,” said state Senator William N. Brownsberger, the bill’s author. “There are LGTBQ people who say this is important, who say that the shadows of [the old laws] are threatening.”
The Boston Democrat’s bill would repeal laws that ban sodomy, “unnatural or lascivious” sex acts, and being “a common nightwalker,” a status crime critics say police use to target law-abiding transgender people. The bill also creates a review commission to actively engage in updating Massachusetts’ laws, which include a litany of other outdated measures.
Read the complete Globe article here.
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