Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/04/gays-who-were-charged-under-di.html
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Good. About time, though.
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“It’s about time you showed up, these have been collecting dust for years. Careful not to scratch the Village People LPs, those are first-run collector’s items now!”
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First, I find the phrase “members of the rainbow community” endearing.
Second, while I like the direction, I’ll hold my applause until I see the process. There have been similar efforts in other places that, in my opinion, have been done very badly. The issue was that these crimes may have been used to punish behaviour that was also otherwise criminal, like having sex in public (e.g. a men’s bathroom). So the onus has been placed on men charged with these crimes to prove that their only crime was being homosexual. That’s awful.
Rather than “1,000 individuals will have the option to scrub these bullshit charges from their records next year” I would like to read “1,000 individuals will have these charges scrubbed from their record over the coming week”. Skip the paperwork and the application process: go to your database, query all records with the charge, hit delete. It shouldn’t take a year, and there should be no burden placed on people who were victims of this bullshit to clear themselves.
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I agree totally. And then the same should be done for everyone ever charged with marijuana possession in states where it is now legal.
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I saw that California made their pot law retroactive, which is good. Unfortunately the US has that whole federal vs. state law thing going on.
At least under these New Zealand laws there is no one currently in prison. Canada is soon going to legalize pot, but we’re still going to have people in prison for possessing it. People see it as a change in policy rather than recognizing the original policy was an injustice.
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“sodomy, indecency between males and keeping a place of resort for homosexual acts.”
So, is this just intentionally incomplete reporting, or is it just male/male homosexuality that was problematic to NZ legislators? I mean, I get it because dicks are gross, and two women? Hot, right bro? (s)
In NZ sex between women was never illegal.
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Sex between women was not outlawed in the UK because the laws around sex were just written under the assumption that sex was putting a penis into something (the legend is that no one had the guts to explain lesbian sex to the queen / the queen refused to believe that was a thing, but I understand that’s apocryphal). I believe that NZ inherited it’s “anti-sodomy” laws from the UK.
Obviously ancient Greece is famous for being okay with homosexuality, but there was a very different attitude towards sex between men and sex between women (who, of course, were viewed as property). Sex between women wasn’t seen as a threat to men because they didn’t think women were really people or capable of love anyway.
I think the undercurrent is that when people pass laws against men having sex with men but not women having sex with women it is because of disregard women and erasure of female sexuality.
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Tell that to the writers on Xena. They tried so hard to keep the main character’s relationship merely “coded” lesbians.
Nowadays we have the CW superhero shows with open LGBT regular characters (The Flash being the exception).
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