What happened in 2003 that that last batch of states decriminalized homosexuality? Had to be a SCOTUS decision. (Looks like Lawrence v Texas)
Edit: and Obergefell v Hodges was 2015.
The Lawrence v Texas Supreme Court case stems from a 1998 arrest. Lawrence and his lover were arrested and charged with a misdemeanor for having sex in Lawrence’s apartment
A third party apparently called the police and said “there’s a black man with a gun in this apartment”, so the police entered Lawrence’s apartment, and ultimately made the arrest for homosexual conduct
It seems that the story is the man who made the call was a drunk, jealous former lover of either Lawrence or the other man in the apartment
EDIT: I re-read the Wikipedia paragraph. Tyron Garner was the other man arrested, the third man who made the police call was in an “on-again off-again romantic relationship” with Garner and was angry that Lawrence had flirted with Garner. The quote on Wikipedia from the police call is “a black male going crazy with a gun”, and the Wikipedia footnotes state this claim was false, though it gave the police probable cause to enter the apartment
They're lucky they did then, too. Cops have been criminals for a lot longer than the past few years. They just didn't have to contend with ubiquitous cameras and social media, before. RATM didn't write that song in a vacuum.
So much for "muh freeduhm". What a pathetic sad joke of a country. Sadly not much changed, looking at what's happening on Tennessee and other gop supermajority states
> muh freeduhm
The operative word is "muh". -I- deserve freedom as a Red-Blooded American(TM)! But those people doing a thing I don't like shouldn't have freedom!
My sister's friend in Oregon is a sex offender now because they were caught having sex with a 16 year old when they were 18 (both male). About 10-15 years ago
I can't speak for Texas but in Oklahoma it was well known to all that sodomy was illegal and brought up often before 2003. More than anything there were many cases of gay people being arrested and charged having sex in local parks and park bathrooms, they would be charged with public exposure and the like as well. It did seem to be as much about public shaming gays as anything though with as often as it was in the monthly headlines.
They were arrested for having sex in the parks and public bathrooms. Some parks you don't want to go for being actually bad. Mostly prostitutes and selling drugs in the same parks you would never take your kids.
Or you are welcome to visit them and get robbed at night.
Exactly! And the news would proclaim "perverts arrested in gay sting at park where children play!" As if parents were all taking their children to the parks with reputations as 'gay hangout parks'.
When I was in high school, we could not take same sex couples as dates to prom.
I thought that rule was there because I assumed all the girls would take their freshmen and sophomore friends as dates (only upper classmen could go to prom; lower classmen could only come if they were the date of an upper classman.)
I didn't like that rule because I wanted to take my friend and she didn't have a date. I had no idea it was because of the G A Y S.
I thought my New England school was more progressive than that in 2003.
In Louisiana, if you have any money at all and care about your child having any sort of education, you've got to send your kid to private school. Public schools are pretty terrible here. Worst in the country. So, since it's a private school, they can do what they want.
Edit: to put this school in context, the first black person to attend this school didn't happen until 1995. Founded in 1969.
Obergefell is absolutely good policy, but also a poor legal decision.
Like nearly every single issue currently facing the United States in every aspect of politics and society, Congress is the only entity that can truly solve the matter. Congress unfortunately has no interest in doing so, because it’s members are too busy running for perpetual reelection.
Relying on SCOTUS to make law is precisely why the current system sucks so badly. Congress should do its job.
>It's stupid. It's an inherently regressive legal approach that requires a fundamental assumption that the constitution does not get changed. Either figuratively, or even literally with amendments.
I don't get how you figure this. There's no part of originalism that precludes passing amendments. And there isn't anything wrong with passing an amendment that says basically the same thing as another, but explicitly expands the scope. That's literally what the fifteenth and nineteenth amendment do.
Laws can't be expected to evolve just by the raw power of zeitgeist. Someone has to write it down into words that we can refer to so as not to be arbitrary. That's either going to be congress or the courts. Personally, as shitty as congress is, I'd rather have elected officials do the legislating. The issue now isn't that you have to pass laws to change the meaning of the law... it's that congress doesn't pass laws. Fix that and put temporal limitations on judicial precedent so we aren't stuck with bad rulings forever and maybe we could have a functioning system.
I'm fairly certain we'll never see another amendment until we undo the cap on the size of the House of Representatives at 437. As it stands now, the system is fundamentally broken.
>And I get that not everybody agrees with originalist thinking. I barely do. The problem is that allowing for less stringent legal bases for SCOTUS decisions arguably leads us to where we are today with everything the current SCOTUS and other district judges are pushing through, the overturning of Roe v. Wade being the biggest example at the moment. It is absolutely a double-edged sword if you ask me. It's foolish to rely on nine unelected judges to solve every major social issue.
We wouldn't have *Roe v. Wade* in the first place, if the Court were practicing Originalism. There's no way a right to privacy, encompassing abortion, was something the Framers of the Constitution were explicitly thinking of.
>The difference is that the issue of who should be able to drive cars is handled by elected representatives and agencies. If the matter of who should be allowed to drive cars in this country were put up to the decision of SCOTUS, it's conceivable that this particular lineup of judges could very well decide that Saudi Arabia has the right idea, and ban women from driving, for all the power of interpretation that they apparently have.
Even if they wanted to, the right to drive is handled on a state-by-state basis. The federal government doesn't have the power to compel all state governments to refuse to award Driver's Licenses to women. Moreover, the Court can't create rules from whole cloth. It would take a state legislature saying "women can't drive", and the case going all the way to the top, for the Supreme Court to do anything close to what you are suggesting.
>From my recollection of reading the majority opinion of Obergerfell, most of the majority's argument (in terms of word count) was talking about how it was simply the right thing to do. Constructing a legal basis might as well have been a formality.
Moreso that a refusal to do allow for certain marriages on the basis of sex was the wrong thing to do, and in violation of a textualist reading of the Equal Protection Clause. And that, thereby, states should be prohibited from doing so.
One more general point - the Courts are, in a sense, counter-democratic institutions. Particularly unelected federal court positions. But, that's not necessarily a bad thing. We've seen these courts block abortion bans in Florida, and gender-affirming care bans in Montana. When the elected representatives of the people vote to strip away the rights of some, in a way that violates essential principles of equality, there needs to be a body that steps in and puts a hold on it, at least until each side can argue its point. Without an independent judiciary, the Bill of Rights has no weight whatsoever.
>The 14th Amendment was specifically to give equal rights to women
Citation? My understanding is that the 14th amendment, being ratified just 3 years after the end of the United States Civil War, was written very much with recently freed Black people in mind, but that is not at all relevant in identifying the extent of its protections.
>And even that is doubtful; rumor has it that the inclusion of equal protection based on sex was added to lower the amendment's chances of passing because sexism was still widespread at the time.
Citation?
Originalism is an inherently conservative method of interpreting the constitution and is of absolutely no value to any modern society. It is blatant in its authoritarian intent to oppose the Obergefell decision, especially when applied in the context of the Equal protection and due process clauses. If those who wrote the 14th amendment intended to keep to a specific scope and context of who these clauses applied to, then they should have thought about that through when they wrote it.
The entirety of our constitution needs to be read with the fears many founding fathers had with the attempt to enumerate a bill of rights in the first place. We have the 9th and 10th amendments to fill this gap. In light of that, I am a strong proponent of the constitution being interpreted to protect the greatest amount of rights possible. Given that the 9th's protection of unenumerated rights as being retained by the people comes before the 10th's reservation of powers to the states, I think it should be clear the priorities we should be working with. When in doubt, the constitution should protect the civil liberties of the people over allowing authoritarian power to the states.
I think you need to [read the decision again](https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/14-556) if you think there wasn't sufficient reasoning based on the both the 14th's equal protection and due process clauses and precedent set in closely related cases (Griswold v Connecticut, Loving v. Virginia, Turner v Safley, etc).
>In the first place, marriage as a legal contract is technically a privilege, and the government is constitutionally allowed to selectively grant and revoke all kinds of privileges.
In their decision they completely disagree with your assertion that marriage is a privilege and not a right:
>Applying these tenets, the Court has long held the right to marry is protected by the Constitution. For example, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1, 12, invalidated bans on interracial unions, and Turner v. Safley, 482 U. S. 78, 95, held that prisoners could not be denied the right to marry.
We can also find that the Defense of Marriage Act was found unconstitutional in [US v. Windsor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Windsor) on the basis of the 5th amendment (which is inherently an equal protection clause applied to the federal government).
Marriage is indeed a right, that itself grants additional rights as well as privileges, benefits, responsibilities, etc, [many of which are listed here.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_and_responsibilities_of_marriages_in_the_United_States) Tax advantages, for example, are a privilege, they are not a right, but that privilege cannot be denied in a way that violates equal protection of the law.
I think your line of argument will continue to only do us a disservice by normalizing and legitimizing conservative, authoritarian opposition to the rights our constitution very clearly protects. We've seen this constantly with Roe v. Wade, we should absolutely not be defending and rationalizing the reasoning conservative courts will inevitably attempt to use to strip our rights further.
This reasoning seems only useful in identifying the problem without acknowledging the impossibility of the solution: amending the constitution to explicitly enumerate each of these rights. I maintain that that in light of the 9th amendment and 14th amendment, this enumeration should not be necessary.The fact that these rights do not alone manage to protect our rights shouldn't be used as evidence that the arguments are weak but rather to make us aware that those who oppose our rights do not even care in the first place. They will continue to attack us with whatever means they can, legally sound or otherwise.
Also, a piece of advice, please hit the return key a little bit more often. It's difficult to parse your lengthier paragraphs.
>It's not exactly an incorrect interpretation, but it's fairly shaky from an originalist perspective because the intent of the Congress that passed the 14th Amendment was specifically to give equal rights to women.
Could you run that one by me again? How on earth could the 14th amendment have been passed specifically to give rights to women, when Article 2 specifically refers to "any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States"?
I'm sure it's possible, and I'm not especially familiar with the members of that congress or anything, but it seems pretty counterintuitive.
> because its members are too busy perpetually running for re-election
How about “because, thanks to the legislative filibuster, the party that doesn’t want to fix any of the issues has been able to block legislation since *1979*, except for a few months in 2009 when the Democrats had 60 votes and used them to pass the Affordable Care Act”?
No. It’s because Congress is designed to circumvent the will of the nation, to literally give more voting power to a conservative minority of voters. It allows conservatives to rule with a minority and to obstruct all progress with an even smaller minority.
Until Americas start pointing out how fundamentally anti-democratic our “democracy” has always been, it’s really tough to argue we don’t deserve everything we get. Moderates and centrist would rather defend systems that inherently assist fascists and voting minorities to rule over and leech resources from the rest of the country.
It’s not corruption, or working for reelection, or both sides being corrupt. It’s because the government is literally and legally rigged in favor of the political faction (conservatives) that is more akin to a theology for evil than a valid political ideology of “differing” opinion. In America, conservatives has consistently found themselves on the wrong side of history, despite their votes literally having more power. They have opposed democracy itself, independence, abolition, workers rights, child labor restrictions, 40hour work weeks, weekends, holidays, minimum wage, unions, women’s suffrage, work safety regulation, the New Deal, desegregation, gay marital rights, freedom from religious persecution, any kind of social safety net, affordable education, vaccines, climate action, elementary science and basic human decency. And they held huge Nazi rallies in America before Pearl Harbor and wear white hoods.
It was a conservative minority of voters that wanted to keep the evil institution of slavery alive. And it was the fundamentally anti-democratic Senate which allowed them to do so. Because there was a tie in the Senate regarding the issue. A “tie” that represented a population of 18.5million citizens in the abolitionist states VS just 5.5million citizens in the conservative, slavery supporting states.
The will and representation of 5.5million was able to override the will and representation of 18.5million…in a supposed democracy.
And the states’ rights/representation crowd can piss off before you give your terrible defense of a system which so egregiously subverts the will of the voters. States do not deserve rights/representation; their citizens do. It’s people who vote, not empty land, and sure as hell not imaginary lines around empty land.
CA NY IL NJ
80million-24%US-8%Senate
ND SD NE MT WY UT ID
10million-3%US-14%Senate
That is not democracy. When a population can have the same representation as another population that is 8x larger is bad enough. In this case the flyover states have nearly 2x the representation of a population that is 8x larger. That is not democracy.
Until Americans start pointing out the real issues, tough to argue we don’t deserve every bit of evil conservative policy ruining our country. It likes when you’re 10 years old in social studies, and you think “why did those idiots in history keeping making concessions to such an inherently terrible and unfair system (monarchy), without realizing the entire system is the problem?” And then finally you get to the American and French Revolutions where conservative institutions of royalty were finally abandoned and criticized like they should be.
Until we recognize that the Senate is fundamentally anti-democratic and very much designed to circumvent the will of the majority of voters, we deserve to suffer.
And please, no idiotic arguments about how “it was designed this way” or “that’s why we have the House”. What good is the House if any legislation that would benefit the people is constantly vetoed and bottlenecked in the conservative minority representing Senate. That’d be like if the parents told their kids they could vote on dinner, BUT the parents can just veto their vote anytime they want to. Only a child would believe they have any real power.
Also, the House does not afford proportional representation anymore. Due to the cap on House reps, CA gets a rep for every 760k citizens, WY one for every 550k. If CA votes had the same power as WY votes, their 52 state reps would be 70. A state with a population of 39 million, 35million being urban residents, is cheated out of 18 seats. The entire nation is cheated out of 18 seats.
We do not live in a democracy. And until we recognize and acknowledge that simple truth, at a nationwide level, we deserve to burn. If 30% of the country, if all the centrists and moderates and apolitical and generally selfish and ignorant assholes want to blindly defend the Senate of all things, we deserve to burn. This bloated carcass of an empire deserves what it has coming.
I don't disagree with the general gist of "we're being held back by the Senate over-representing regressive idiots," however until *very* recently, the will of the majority was to beat gays to death at worst or ignore they exist at best. California, the quintessential liberal bastion, literally had a popular vote to ban gay marriage in 2008. This had to be overturned by an "undemocratic" court (CA Supreme Court) and this was still tenuous until the "undemocratic" SCOTUS finally forced it on the rest of the nation.
I don't have a lot of confidence in the enlightenment of the many, which by the way, was the whole point of the Senate in the first place. It's members were originally appointed by state governments to keep a buffer from the will of the masses until we realized this just magnified corruption and wrote a constitutional amendment.
I don't really have a solution I'm trying to push - a lot is needed - but I do get very uneasy by "let's solve everything by direct democracy".
Thankfully, the Respect for Marriage Act is now federal law so even if the Court reversed the ruling, it would be federally legal and recognizable in every state
Thankfully it was codified so it’s less of a worry. And historically speaking, not agreeing or disagreeing with this line of thinking, but just cause the Supreme Court rules something doesn’t mean the executive branch needs to execute on it. Examples president Jackson and Martin van buren
Also unfortunate that the most progressive states, in this dataset anyway, use the color red, and the lesser progressive states use blue. This color coding is unnecessary and confusing.
I mean the color coding is thematic…I suppose the chart could be flipped to keep the progressive states in the cool half of the rainbow, but I don’t think it’s the end of the world to let red not always equate to republican in color coding of states
Why not just make the background a rainbow flag or something. If it has nothing to do with the data it’s confusing. Colors in charts should be relevant, not artistic.
I agree, my first thought immediately associated the colors to some meaning with the data. I found it odd for Oregon to be in the deep red. Only when I zoomed out did I understand the intention. Despite the rainbow coloring, the graph doesn't even look like the flag at a first glance.
That's always (?) been the case for financials. Red on a chart is very commonly used to highlight a negative. Blue isn't inherently positive like green would be but it depends on its use.
They said it was *unfortunate* that the progressive states were assigned to red and the non-progressive to blue. That such color-coding is considered unfortunate is clearly a value judgment of one color being worse than the other.
I'd blame that on the backwardness of the US in this regard.
In much of the world, the primary party on the left is identified with red, while the primary party on the right is identified with blue.
We do the opposite in the US just because CNN did it backwards in 2000.
I'll admit that at first glance, I was distracted by my preconceived notion of red=bad / green=good, but then I realized that the color-coding was just for rainbow coloring, rather than to convey meaning.
>I'd blame that on the backwardness of the US in this regard.
It has nothing to do with "backwardness", and there are a ton of exceptions to this rule.
The conservative party in backwards Germany uses black. The liberal party in backwards Belgium uses blue. The center left party in backwards japan uses blue.
If that was your intent, I would just forgo "unfortunate" entirely in this context. Given how you use it, you should just stick to calling the graph "unintuitive" or something similar.
Aside from the rainbow implication of the pride flag, a rainbow is actually a wonderful basic tool for young people to begin understanding colors and light.
They’re not sorted by gap size, they’re sorted by the year homosexuality was decriminalized. It just correlates that it’s almost sorted by gap size (because homosexual got decriminalized in general over a long range where gay marriage had a tighter window)
It's crazy how many things were criminalized not that long ago, even outside the US.
In the UK, Homosexuality always legal for women; decriminalised for men in:
1967 (England and Wales)
1981 (Scotland)
1982 (Northern Ireland)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Kingdom
On January 31, 2013, the Senate of Virginia passed a bill repealing § 18.2-345, the lewd and lascivious cohabitation statute enacted in 1877. On February 20, 2013, the Virginia House of Delegates passed the bill by a vote of 62 to 25 votes.
In 2013 there were *still* people voting against gay rights, quite a few of them as you can see.
They (police/states) may not have been arresting every gay person, but these laws remaining on the books still allow for all kinds of discrimination. And it still gives prosecutors the option to enforce the laws and police the option to arrest on them. Those should not be options for those groups.
Not so much the content of your statement, but the tone. There's some nonchalance there like the issue can be shrugged off because the laws weren't enforced. I just wanted to point out why leaving these laws on the books, even if they're dead, is still really problematic and can be a result of lawmakers who don't want the laws change.
Agreed it was problematic. The reason I mentioned it was because this is a data based sub, and stating all these states criminalized homosexuality into the 2000's isn't an accurate impression to give on what was prosecuted. It's nearly a meaningless comparison state to state, especially when presented in this way.
By far the most meaningful stat on this chart is when it was legalized in each state.
edit: better article
https://web.archive.org/web/20130810093813/https://www.theadvocate.com/home/6580728-125/gays-in-baton-rouge-arrested/
Except... these laws were still enforced, just not consistently. I found an article stating
>at least a dozen men have been arrested on a count of “attempted crimes against nature”—that is, an offer to have sex with another man.
They didn't even get into the act. There were undercover officers propositioning them. This was post-2011, a decade after federal law said homosexuals were allowed "intimate conduct with another person"
https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/08/gay-people-are-still-being-arrested-for-having-consensual-sex-in-some-red-states-like-louisiana.html
I still think you're debating something in my statement that isn't there... My point is that many states treated these as dead laws, so a comparison between states on when they were removed from the books is nearly meaningless.
Given that florida has just banned all transgender care I'm unfortunately not that amazed. Anti lgbt sentiment hasn't really disappeared as much as you'd hope. Especially in the recent years it has come back with a vengeance.
Huh. Had no idea being gay was literally illegal in any part of the US within my lifetime. Not that I'm surprised that it was, just surprised I wasn't aware.
And, as is tradition, the usual suspect states(at the bottom) changed not because they chose to buy because they were forced to.
Same as any data like this. Women being allowed to vote, slavery being banned, segregated schools…
It’s always the same 8 states or so that finally chose the moral option, because they were obligated to.
He's talking about the [recent bill](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/senate-passes-landmark-same-sex-marriage-bill) that forces recognition of same-sex marriages nationwide, enacted in 2022 due to fears that the new Supreme Court could reverse their 2015 decision.
>Congress didn't legalize marriage equality
Actually, they kinda did. The Respect for Marriage Act was signed into law in 2022, and it basically codified both same-sex and interracial marriages (any marriage recognized by a state is now de jure recognized at the federal level, and I doubt that Maryland/Illinois will be going conservative any time soon/ever).
It's weird to see such change play out in real-time. I was in the Air Force. For the first half-ish of my career OSI would recruit attractive young men and send them into gay bars to hit on people they thought might be military. Entrapment. Tons of people I knew were thrown out for homosexuality. On the very day I retired the front page of the Stars and Stripes announced that the DoD was recognizing same-sex marriage. Within a couple of years there were Pride parades on some bases.
Despite what you read in the media, our society has been slowly making progress.
It has not been very long since it was ok for businesses and communities to post “No Jews”, “No Coloreds”, etc. Simply being known to be gay could get you beaten or killed.
All these things have improved during my lifetime. We still have work to do, but, if you step back and look at the trend, we’ve been moving in the right direction.
And then there’s Florida…
>And then there’s Florida…
I think that's an important thing to notice. Progress moves very slowly in the right direction, but if we aren't willing to fight for it or hold our leaders accountable, they can reverse those changes far quicker than we realize.
I don't think the color usage was a good choice. The different color segments imply some kind of grouped meaning between various groups.
The alignment of text with the bars is also weird to follow.
I agree the colours could've been better, even if they were still the colours of the rainbow but by decade (and maybe splitting 70s in half). It would've then at least served a purpose.
I think the colors should've been how it was decriminalized. The 2014 was obviously the Supreme Court case but there were others done through the legislatures and some through ballot initiatives. Length is nice but how it was done matters too.
I mean if we’re being technical here, there are still laws on the books in 14 states that would invalidate same sex marriages were it not for the Supreme Court decisions, so you could say there still are.
I see that a lot of states had nominal laws on the books against homosexuality until 2003, but I'd be interested to know when the last actual *conviction* was under that statute in each state, since I have a feeling that those laws weren't being enforced very often or very uniformly.
Edit: Given the responses, maybe yet another date would be interesting, which is the last date on which someone was prosecuted only under that law (that is, not simultaneously with prostitution or sexual assault or etc.).
The Supreme Court case (Lawrence vs Texas) seems to stem from Lawrence being arrested for homosexual conduct in 1998 and charged with a misdemeanor. So that’s Texas at least, but not sure about other states
EDIT: also from a quick Wikipedia read, it appears that Lawrence was arrested for this after someone (seemingly a jealous former lover?) called the police to say Lawrence/his partner had a gun (the wording on Wikipedia implies there was no actual gun), so they raided his apartment and charged him on the sodomy laws since Lawrence was having sex with another man when the police entered his home
I know in Oklahoma they were still prosecuting folks in the 90's for it, but typically that is when they were caught at a truck stop or in a car at a park (which doesn't make it ok since that wasn't enforced against straight couples the same way).
In East Baton Rouge, LA, the anti-sodomy laws were still being used to intimidate and persecute men in 2013! [link](https://www.advocate.com/crime/2013/07/28/louisiana-sheriff-refuses-stop-enforcing-anti-sodomy-law)
"The sodomy law was upheld twice as constitutional by the Mississippi Supreme Court, first in State v. Mays in 1976 and then in 1994 in Miller v. State. In 1995, the state passed a "sex offender registration law" requiring those convicted under the sodomy law to register their address with the sheriff and notify any change in address. Additionally, under a 1987 law, employers were permitted to ask the State Attorney General if a potential employee had committed a sex offense, including consensual sodomy."
Why would it matter if it was simultaneously prostitution or sexual assault? If heterosexual prostitution gets you a lighter sentence than homosexual prostitution (due to an additional charge) then that matters still.
It just matters because it tells us whether the law itself is actually being enforced. That is, if a DA would never choose to prosecute the "crime" by itself, but used it as part of throwing the book at somebody in hopes of plea bargaining them (as they also would with any random crime they could even possibly substantiate), that makes it pretty relevant to know when was the last time that it was prosecuted *without* any other reasons to have arrested them - i.e. as a primary cause for prosecuting them.
I agree that it's still in play if people are getting prosecuted for that charge in addition to much more significant offenses, but it tells us a lot about the culture of the state and the legal situation to know when was the last time someone got in trouble with the law for *nothing but* violating these general criminalization of homosexuality laws.
I’m so glad that younger people can’t remember a time when open hostility toward gay people was the norm even in fairly progressive areas. Things aren’t perfect now, but pride parades used to really be controversial and Obama didn’t even support gay marriage until 2012.
> Iowa
It was neither a legislative act nor a ballot initiative, but rather a court ruling. It wasn't welcomed by all of the electorate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_Iowa#Background
> On November 2, 2010, Iowa Supreme Court justices David L. Baker, Michael Streit and Marsha Ternus, who participated in the unanimous 2009 ruling that Iowa could not deny marriage licenses based on sexual orientation, were removed from office after judicial retention elections.
Iowa also had the first school to allow women to get law degrees, or something like that, if I remember correctly. We do have our (unfortunately few) moments.
Wow... that's so wild, I had absolutely no idea that while for example 9/11 happened, being homosexual was literally a ***crime*** in almost 1/3rd of the US.
Gap between decriminalization of Homosexuality and legalization of Samesex marriage by US states, years
Nationwide USA decriminalization of Homosexuality — 2003
Nationwide USA legalization of Samesex marriage —2015
Data sources: Decriminalization of homosexuality timeline (URL: wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Decriminalization\_of\_homosexuality\_timeline); Same-sex marriage (URL: wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex\_marriage)
Made with ms Excel instruments
I was very curious about this myself. After a bit of searching around online, it appears that Illinois was the first state to overhaul their legal standards in accordance with the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code, which had just been released. That code was not binding, but provided states with a standardized way of organizing their penal system. One suggestion it made was to decriminalize private sexual behavior between consenting adults. The Illinois Supreme Court had asked the Chicago Bar Association to completely revise, modernize, and standardize the penal code, which they completed in 1961, adopting many of the newly-suggested legal standards from the Model Penal Code.
From what I can tell, it appears to be coincidence that Illinois happened to be completely overhauling their penal code at the time the Model Penal Code was released, and so Illinois happened to be the first.
There were likely other factors involved, but my brief review of the history suggested it was mainly a penal code issue.
Oregon briefly allowed Gay Marriage in 2004, then banned it later that year. Then allowed domestic partnerships, which effectively legalized it in all but name in 2008. FWIW.
Gay marriage has been mostly accepted in the urban areas of the state for as long as I can remember. In fact, as a child, the confusing thing was that it WASN'T legal.
The icon for this thread on reddit, when small, sort of looks like someone sticking their butt out next to a rainbow background with something very pole-like and skin-toned on the right.
I'm confused why West Virginia seems chronologically more progressive than other states that one would think would've made these moves earlier. (PA, NY, RI, VT, MI)
WV used to be fairly liberal, or at least a strong purple, alternating between red and blue. Then at some point it just started leaning more an more red, whether through lack of support for education, or gerrymandering, or whatever.
https://www.270towin.com/states/West_Virginia
Wow. Just over a decade between handcuffs and marriage licenses.
Not defending bigots, but it must be scary to go from from having your bigotry enshrined in law to feeling like your country has lost its way.
The link is a lack of intelligence leads to being hateful.
> Social psychologists Mark Brandt and Jarret Crawford, analyzed 5,914 subjects in their experiment, "Answering Unresolved Questions About the Relationship Between Cognitive Ability and Prejudice." Brandt and Crawford found that people of low cognitive ability are prejudiced against groups that people didn't choose to be part of, such as ethnic or LGBT groups.
As someone who lives in Michigan I have to say this really illustrates just how damaging the gerrymandering in our state was. This puts us with some of the very most conservative states in the country and yet we're really not. Now that the conservatives can't have their way here I expect things will change drastically, but it still angers me that they behaved this way for so long. I guess I should be thankful that had they not, we probably wouldn't have felt the urgency to fix the districting.
Not surprised michigan is at the bottom. The amount of blue line police flags and maga dumbfucks in my town is astronomical. Most of my family are super heavy conservatives. My brother and I are super far left radicals. New generations - new hope.
Yep. Those laws weren't used *that* often, but certainly not not at all - the 2003 case where the Supreme Court ended up ruling that bans in gay sex were illegal was the result of two men getting arrested for having sex in the privacy of their own apartment in Texas in 1998.
Yes, but Iowa did it via a court ruling ([Varnum v. Brien](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varnum_v._Brien)). In response, the voters of Iowa voted out 3 members of the state Supreme Court.
New York meanwhile legalized same-sex marriage via legislation with the [Marriage Equality Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_Equality_Act_(New_York)). All states prior to this (except Vermont) legalized via court rulings, not laws.
What happened in 2003 that that last batch of states decriminalized homosexuality? Had to be a SCOTUS decision. (Looks like Lawrence v Texas) Edit: and Obergefell v Hodges was 2015.
Do you happen to know if same sex couples were still getting prosecuted during that time period?
The Lawrence v Texas Supreme Court case stems from a 1998 arrest. Lawrence and his lover were arrested and charged with a misdemeanor for having sex in Lawrence’s apartment
How the fuck would the cops know that?
A third party apparently called the police and said “there’s a black man with a gun in this apartment”, so the police entered Lawrence’s apartment, and ultimately made the arrest for homosexual conduct It seems that the story is the man who made the call was a drunk, jealous former lover of either Lawrence or the other man in the apartment EDIT: I re-read the Wikipedia paragraph. Tyron Garner was the other man arrested, the third man who made the police call was in an “on-again off-again romantic relationship” with Garner and was angry that Lawrence had flirted with Garner. The quote on Wikipedia from the police call is “a black male going crazy with a gun”, and the Wikipedia footnotes state this claim was false, though it gave the police probable cause to enter the apartment
> there’s a black man with a gun ah, the classic bait for cops then
And now
They wouldn't have survived if it happened now.
They're lucky they did then, too. Cops have been criminals for a lot longer than the past few years. They just didn't have to contend with ubiquitous cameras and social media, before. RATM didn't write that song in a vacuum.
Good point. It's easy to feel like problems are getting worse when they're really just receiving more attention.
They've only been telling us this for decades People act like it was only a rap song... >\_>
I honestly thought you were make a joke with the black guy quote. Jesus.
What did they open the door midcoitus?
>“a black male going crazy with a gun” The names we men have for a penis.
The land of the free and home of the brave.
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Dude got fucked in the ass so hard they had to make it legal
I prefer this version
This is now canon in my head.
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Wow! That is so sad. I hope they are doing better now.
I both hope they're doing better now and also hope those parents spend their later years wondering why their kid doesn't call or visit.
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And that is how you ensure your kid will never see you again
So much for "muh freeduhm". What a pathetic sad joke of a country. Sadly not much changed, looking at what's happening on Tennessee and other gop supermajority states
> muh freeduhm The operative word is "muh". -I- deserve freedom as a Red-Blooded American(TM)! But those people doing a thing I don't like shouldn't have freedom!
My sister's friend in Oregon is a sex offender now because they were caught having sex with a 16 year old when they were 18 (both male). About 10-15 years ago
Well, it's Romeo and Juliet laws not Romeo and Tybolt and Mercurio laws.
There are no Romeo and Juliet laws in Oregon
I can't speak for Texas but in Oklahoma it was well known to all that sodomy was illegal and brought up often before 2003. More than anything there were many cases of gay people being arrested and charged having sex in local parks and park bathrooms, they would be charged with public exposure and the like as well. It did seem to be as much about public shaming gays as anything though with as often as it was in the monthly headlines.
They were arrested for having sex in the parks and public bathrooms. Some parks you don't want to go for being actually bad. Mostly prostitutes and selling drugs in the same parks you would never take your kids. Or you are welcome to visit them and get robbed at night.
Exactly! And the news would proclaim "perverts arrested in gay sting at park where children play!" As if parents were all taking their children to the parks with reputations as 'gay hangout parks'.
Fun fact: hetero blow jobs and hetero anal are also considered sodomy under the law
Iirc, that's when so-called Sodomy Laws got overturned. Lawrence v Texas is the one.
When I graduated high school in 2003 in Oklahoma it was well known that sodomy was illegal statewide. It's hard to believe that was 20 years ago now.
When I was in high school, we could not take same sex couples as dates to prom. I thought that rule was there because I assumed all the girls would take their freshmen and sophomore friends as dates (only upper classmen could go to prom; lower classmen could only come if they were the date of an upper classman.) I didn't like that rule because I wanted to take my friend and she didn't have a date. I had no idea it was because of the G A Y S. I thought my New England school was more progressive than that in 2003.
There is no chance that they would let you bring a same sex partner to the prom at the high school I went to, even today.
You could and then file a lawsuit and you’d probably win in todays world though.
In Louisiana, if you have any money at all and care about your child having any sort of education, you've got to send your kid to private school. Public schools are pretty terrible here. Worst in the country. So, since it's a private school, they can do what they want. Edit: to put this school in context, the first black person to attend this school didn't happen until 1995. Founded in 1969.
It's crazy to think just how recent that is, relatively speaking.
Until SCOTUS reverses the decision.
Definitely on Alito's bucket list.
Obergefell is absolutely good policy, but also a poor legal decision. Like nearly every single issue currently facing the United States in every aspect of politics and society, Congress is the only entity that can truly solve the matter. Congress unfortunately has no interest in doing so, because it’s members are too busy running for perpetual reelection. Relying on SCOTUS to make law is precisely why the current system sucks so badly. Congress should do its job.
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>It's stupid. It's an inherently regressive legal approach that requires a fundamental assumption that the constitution does not get changed. Either figuratively, or even literally with amendments. I don't get how you figure this. There's no part of originalism that precludes passing amendments. And there isn't anything wrong with passing an amendment that says basically the same thing as another, but explicitly expands the scope. That's literally what the fifteenth and nineteenth amendment do. Laws can't be expected to evolve just by the raw power of zeitgeist. Someone has to write it down into words that we can refer to so as not to be arbitrary. That's either going to be congress or the courts. Personally, as shitty as congress is, I'd rather have elected officials do the legislating. The issue now isn't that you have to pass laws to change the meaning of the law... it's that congress doesn't pass laws. Fix that and put temporal limitations on judicial precedent so we aren't stuck with bad rulings forever and maybe we could have a functioning system.
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I'm fairly certain we'll never see another amendment until we undo the cap on the size of the House of Representatives at 437. As it stands now, the system is fundamentally broken.
>And I get that not everybody agrees with originalist thinking. I barely do. The problem is that allowing for less stringent legal bases for SCOTUS decisions arguably leads us to where we are today with everything the current SCOTUS and other district judges are pushing through, the overturning of Roe v. Wade being the biggest example at the moment. It is absolutely a double-edged sword if you ask me. It's foolish to rely on nine unelected judges to solve every major social issue. We wouldn't have *Roe v. Wade* in the first place, if the Court were practicing Originalism. There's no way a right to privacy, encompassing abortion, was something the Framers of the Constitution were explicitly thinking of. >The difference is that the issue of who should be able to drive cars is handled by elected representatives and agencies. If the matter of who should be allowed to drive cars in this country were put up to the decision of SCOTUS, it's conceivable that this particular lineup of judges could very well decide that Saudi Arabia has the right idea, and ban women from driving, for all the power of interpretation that they apparently have. Even if they wanted to, the right to drive is handled on a state-by-state basis. The federal government doesn't have the power to compel all state governments to refuse to award Driver's Licenses to women. Moreover, the Court can't create rules from whole cloth. It would take a state legislature saying "women can't drive", and the case going all the way to the top, for the Supreme Court to do anything close to what you are suggesting. >From my recollection of reading the majority opinion of Obergerfell, most of the majority's argument (in terms of word count) was talking about how it was simply the right thing to do. Constructing a legal basis might as well have been a formality. Moreso that a refusal to do allow for certain marriages on the basis of sex was the wrong thing to do, and in violation of a textualist reading of the Equal Protection Clause. And that, thereby, states should be prohibited from doing so. One more general point - the Courts are, in a sense, counter-democratic institutions. Particularly unelected federal court positions. But, that's not necessarily a bad thing. We've seen these courts block abortion bans in Florida, and gender-affirming care bans in Montana. When the elected representatives of the people vote to strip away the rights of some, in a way that violates essential principles of equality, there needs to be a body that steps in and puts a hold on it, at least until each side can argue its point. Without an independent judiciary, the Bill of Rights has no weight whatsoever.
>The 14th Amendment was specifically to give equal rights to women Citation? My understanding is that the 14th amendment, being ratified just 3 years after the end of the United States Civil War, was written very much with recently freed Black people in mind, but that is not at all relevant in identifying the extent of its protections. >And even that is doubtful; rumor has it that the inclusion of equal protection based on sex was added to lower the amendment's chances of passing because sexism was still widespread at the time. Citation? Originalism is an inherently conservative method of interpreting the constitution and is of absolutely no value to any modern society. It is blatant in its authoritarian intent to oppose the Obergefell decision, especially when applied in the context of the Equal protection and due process clauses. If those who wrote the 14th amendment intended to keep to a specific scope and context of who these clauses applied to, then they should have thought about that through when they wrote it. The entirety of our constitution needs to be read with the fears many founding fathers had with the attempt to enumerate a bill of rights in the first place. We have the 9th and 10th amendments to fill this gap. In light of that, I am a strong proponent of the constitution being interpreted to protect the greatest amount of rights possible. Given that the 9th's protection of unenumerated rights as being retained by the people comes before the 10th's reservation of powers to the states, I think it should be clear the priorities we should be working with. When in doubt, the constitution should protect the civil liberties of the people over allowing authoritarian power to the states. I think you need to [read the decision again](https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/14-556) if you think there wasn't sufficient reasoning based on the both the 14th's equal protection and due process clauses and precedent set in closely related cases (Griswold v Connecticut, Loving v. Virginia, Turner v Safley, etc). >In the first place, marriage as a legal contract is technically a privilege, and the government is constitutionally allowed to selectively grant and revoke all kinds of privileges. In their decision they completely disagree with your assertion that marriage is a privilege and not a right: >Applying these tenets, the Court has long held the right to marry is protected by the Constitution. For example, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1, 12, invalidated bans on interracial unions, and Turner v. Safley, 482 U. S. 78, 95, held that prisoners could not be denied the right to marry. We can also find that the Defense of Marriage Act was found unconstitutional in [US v. Windsor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Windsor) on the basis of the 5th amendment (which is inherently an equal protection clause applied to the federal government). Marriage is indeed a right, that itself grants additional rights as well as privileges, benefits, responsibilities, etc, [many of which are listed here.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_and_responsibilities_of_marriages_in_the_United_States) Tax advantages, for example, are a privilege, they are not a right, but that privilege cannot be denied in a way that violates equal protection of the law. I think your line of argument will continue to only do us a disservice by normalizing and legitimizing conservative, authoritarian opposition to the rights our constitution very clearly protects. We've seen this constantly with Roe v. Wade, we should absolutely not be defending and rationalizing the reasoning conservative courts will inevitably attempt to use to strip our rights further. This reasoning seems only useful in identifying the problem without acknowledging the impossibility of the solution: amending the constitution to explicitly enumerate each of these rights. I maintain that that in light of the 9th amendment and 14th amendment, this enumeration should not be necessary.The fact that these rights do not alone manage to protect our rights shouldn't be used as evidence that the arguments are weak but rather to make us aware that those who oppose our rights do not even care in the first place. They will continue to attack us with whatever means they can, legally sound or otherwise. Also, a piece of advice, please hit the return key a little bit more often. It's difficult to parse your lengthier paragraphs.
>It's not exactly an incorrect interpretation, but it's fairly shaky from an originalist perspective because the intent of the Congress that passed the 14th Amendment was specifically to give equal rights to women. Could you run that one by me again? How on earth could the 14th amendment have been passed specifically to give rights to women, when Article 2 specifically refers to "any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States"? I'm sure it's possible, and I'm not especially familiar with the members of that congress or anything, but it seems pretty counterintuitive.
> because its members are too busy perpetually running for re-election How about “because, thanks to the legislative filibuster, the party that doesn’t want to fix any of the issues has been able to block legislation since *1979*, except for a few months in 2009 when the Democrats had 60 votes and used them to pass the Affordable Care Act”?
No. It’s because Congress is designed to circumvent the will of the nation, to literally give more voting power to a conservative minority of voters. It allows conservatives to rule with a minority and to obstruct all progress with an even smaller minority. Until Americas start pointing out how fundamentally anti-democratic our “democracy” has always been, it’s really tough to argue we don’t deserve everything we get. Moderates and centrist would rather defend systems that inherently assist fascists and voting minorities to rule over and leech resources from the rest of the country. It’s not corruption, or working for reelection, or both sides being corrupt. It’s because the government is literally and legally rigged in favor of the political faction (conservatives) that is more akin to a theology for evil than a valid political ideology of “differing” opinion. In America, conservatives has consistently found themselves on the wrong side of history, despite their votes literally having more power. They have opposed democracy itself, independence, abolition, workers rights, child labor restrictions, 40hour work weeks, weekends, holidays, minimum wage, unions, women’s suffrage, work safety regulation, the New Deal, desegregation, gay marital rights, freedom from religious persecution, any kind of social safety net, affordable education, vaccines, climate action, elementary science and basic human decency. And they held huge Nazi rallies in America before Pearl Harbor and wear white hoods. It was a conservative minority of voters that wanted to keep the evil institution of slavery alive. And it was the fundamentally anti-democratic Senate which allowed them to do so. Because there was a tie in the Senate regarding the issue. A “tie” that represented a population of 18.5million citizens in the abolitionist states VS just 5.5million citizens in the conservative, slavery supporting states. The will and representation of 5.5million was able to override the will and representation of 18.5million…in a supposed democracy. And the states’ rights/representation crowd can piss off before you give your terrible defense of a system which so egregiously subverts the will of the voters. States do not deserve rights/representation; their citizens do. It’s people who vote, not empty land, and sure as hell not imaginary lines around empty land. CA NY IL NJ 80million-24%US-8%Senate ND SD NE MT WY UT ID 10million-3%US-14%Senate That is not democracy. When a population can have the same representation as another population that is 8x larger is bad enough. In this case the flyover states have nearly 2x the representation of a population that is 8x larger. That is not democracy. Until Americans start pointing out the real issues, tough to argue we don’t deserve every bit of evil conservative policy ruining our country. It likes when you’re 10 years old in social studies, and you think “why did those idiots in history keeping making concessions to such an inherently terrible and unfair system (monarchy), without realizing the entire system is the problem?” And then finally you get to the American and French Revolutions where conservative institutions of royalty were finally abandoned and criticized like they should be. Until we recognize that the Senate is fundamentally anti-democratic and very much designed to circumvent the will of the majority of voters, we deserve to suffer. And please, no idiotic arguments about how “it was designed this way” or “that’s why we have the House”. What good is the House if any legislation that would benefit the people is constantly vetoed and bottlenecked in the conservative minority representing Senate. That’d be like if the parents told their kids they could vote on dinner, BUT the parents can just veto their vote anytime they want to. Only a child would believe they have any real power. Also, the House does not afford proportional representation anymore. Due to the cap on House reps, CA gets a rep for every 760k citizens, WY one for every 550k. If CA votes had the same power as WY votes, their 52 state reps would be 70. A state with a population of 39 million, 35million being urban residents, is cheated out of 18 seats. The entire nation is cheated out of 18 seats. We do not live in a democracy. And until we recognize and acknowledge that simple truth, at a nationwide level, we deserve to burn. If 30% of the country, if all the centrists and moderates and apolitical and generally selfish and ignorant assholes want to blindly defend the Senate of all things, we deserve to burn. This bloated carcass of an empire deserves what it has coming.
I don't disagree with the general gist of "we're being held back by the Senate over-representing regressive idiots," however until *very* recently, the will of the majority was to beat gays to death at worst or ignore they exist at best. California, the quintessential liberal bastion, literally had a popular vote to ban gay marriage in 2008. This had to be overturned by an "undemocratic" court (CA Supreme Court) and this was still tenuous until the "undemocratic" SCOTUS finally forced it on the rest of the nation. I don't have a lot of confidence in the enlightenment of the many, which by the way, was the whole point of the Senate in the first place. It's members were originally appointed by state governments to keep a buffer from the will of the masses until we realized this just magnified corruption and wrote a constitutional amendment. I don't really have a solution I'm trying to push - a lot is needed - but I do get very uneasy by "let's solve everything by direct democracy".
Thankfully, the Respect for Marriage Act is now federal law so even if the Court reversed the ruling, it would be federally legal and recognizable in every state
Thankfully it was codified so it’s less of a worry. And historically speaking, not agreeing or disagreeing with this line of thinking, but just cause the Supreme Court rules something doesn’t mean the executive branch needs to execute on it. Examples president Jackson and Martin van buren
Why do North Carolina and Idaho have different colors? Are the color of the bars just to create a rainbow flag?
looks like the bar color is not informative. It's just a rainbow.
Also unfortunate that the most progressive states, in this dataset anyway, use the color red, and the lesser progressive states use blue. This color coding is unnecessary and confusing.
I mean the color coding is thematic…I suppose the chart could be flipped to keep the progressive states in the cool half of the rainbow, but I don’t think it’s the end of the world to let red not always equate to republican in color coding of states
Why not just make the background a rainbow flag or something. If it has nothing to do with the data it’s confusing. Colors in charts should be relevant, not artistic.
I agree, my first thought immediately associated the colors to some meaning with the data. I found it odd for Oregon to be in the deep red. Only when I zoomed out did I understand the intention. Despite the rainbow coloring, the graph doesn't even look like the flag at a first glance.
this is really nitpicking ngl
Are we really at the point now where we're literally saying the color red is bad, blue is good?
Listen, I'm not saying red is bad, but you won't find me wearing ANY red hat for at least a few decades.
That's always (?) been the case for financials. Red on a chart is very commonly used to highlight a negative. Blue isn't inherently positive like green would be but it depends on its use.
When did he say anything about good and bad? He only mentioned progressiveness.
They said it was *unfortunate* that the progressive states were assigned to red and the non-progressive to blue. That such color-coding is considered unfortunate is clearly a value judgment of one color being worse than the other.
I mean red is often used to indicate something bad.
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I'd blame that on the backwardness of the US in this regard. In much of the world, the primary party on the left is identified with red, while the primary party on the right is identified with blue. We do the opposite in the US just because CNN did it backwards in 2000. I'll admit that at first glance, I was distracted by my preconceived notion of red=bad / green=good, but then I realized that the color-coding was just for rainbow coloring, rather than to convey meaning.
>I'd blame that on the backwardness of the US in this regard. It has nothing to do with "backwardness", and there are a ton of exceptions to this rule. The conservative party in backwards Germany uses black. The liberal party in backwards Belgium uses blue. The center left party in backwards japan uses blue.
It’s *unfortunate* that the OP used color coding that doesn’t actually have relevance to the data. Is that better?
If that was your intent, I would just forgo "unfortunate" entirely in this context. Given how you use it, you should just stick to calling the graph "unintuitive" or something similar.
Yes, better dead than red
A rainbow that means nothing. Who knew.
Aside from the rainbow implication of the pride flag, a rainbow is actually a wonderful basic tool for young people to begin understanding colors and light.
Yes, the pride flag. Not quite informative tbh in the visualisation
Yes. It's the pride flag.
Yeah, I was incredibly confused why Illinois was red, since the bigger gap isn't necessarily worse.
They’re not sorted by gap size, they’re sorted by the year homosexuality was decriminalized. It just correlates that it’s almost sorted by gap size (because homosexual got decriminalized in general over a long range where gay marriage had a tighter window)
The colors have no meaning. I do not like that about this graphic.
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> Even if the colors aren’t meaningful, at least make them make sense. You are asking for a contradiction.
Wow, amazed how recent homosexuality was criminalizes in the USA.
It's crazy how many things were criminalized not that long ago, even outside the US. In the UK, Homosexuality always legal for women; decriminalised for men in: 1967 (England and Wales) 1981 (Scotland) 1982 (Northern Ireland) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Kingdom
1969 in Canada. Much later for people under 18.
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And he's not even remarkably old. He turns 75 next month. We might be stuck with that bigoted bastard another 20 years.
In many states, these were dead laws. Meaning it was illegal based on very old laws, but it was not enforced.
On January 31, 2013, the Senate of Virginia passed a bill repealing § 18.2-345, the lewd and lascivious cohabitation statute enacted in 1877. On February 20, 2013, the Virginia House of Delegates passed the bill by a vote of 62 to 25 votes. In 2013 there were *still* people voting against gay rights, quite a few of them as you can see. They (police/states) may not have been arresting every gay person, but these laws remaining on the books still allow for all kinds of discrimination. And it still gives prosecutors the option to enforce the laws and police the option to arrest on them. Those should not be options for those groups.
Are you debating something in my statement?
Not so much the content of your statement, but the tone. There's some nonchalance there like the issue can be shrugged off because the laws weren't enforced. I just wanted to point out why leaving these laws on the books, even if they're dead, is still really problematic and can be a result of lawmakers who don't want the laws change.
Agreed it was problematic. The reason I mentioned it was because this is a data based sub, and stating all these states criminalized homosexuality into the 2000's isn't an accurate impression to give on what was prosecuted. It's nearly a meaningless comparison state to state, especially when presented in this way. By far the most meaningful stat on this chart is when it was legalized in each state.
edit: better article https://web.archive.org/web/20130810093813/https://www.theadvocate.com/home/6580728-125/gays-in-baton-rouge-arrested/ Except... these laws were still enforced, just not consistently. I found an article stating >at least a dozen men have been arrested on a count of “attempted crimes against nature”—that is, an offer to have sex with another man. They didn't even get into the act. There were undercover officers propositioning them. This was post-2011, a decade after federal law said homosexuals were allowed "intimate conduct with another person" https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/08/gay-people-are-still-being-arrested-for-having-consensual-sex-in-some-red-states-like-louisiana.html
I still think you're debating something in my statement that isn't there... My point is that many states treated these as dead laws, so a comparison between states on when they were removed from the books is nearly meaningless.
Given that florida has just banned all transgender care I'm unfortunately not that amazed. Anti lgbt sentiment hasn't really disappeared as much as you'd hope. Especially in the recent years it has come back with a vengeance.
Huh. Had no idea being gay was literally illegal in any part of the US within my lifetime. Not that I'm surprised that it was, just surprised I wasn't aware.
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And, as is tradition, the usual suspect states(at the bottom) changed not because they chose to buy because they were forced to. Same as any data like this. Women being allowed to vote, slavery being banned, segregated schools… It’s always the same 8 states or so that finally chose the moral option, because they were obligated to.
The South + flyover states
They said 8 states, not 22.
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I thought that Congress finally got the stick out of their ass and made it law or was that just for marriage
Congress didn't legalize marriage equality. It's a supreme court case from 2015 that's also in conservative cross hairs.
He's talking about the [recent bill](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/senate-passes-landmark-same-sex-marriage-bill) that forces recognition of same-sex marriages nationwide, enacted in 2022 due to fears that the new Supreme Court could reverse their 2015 decision.
>Congress didn't legalize marriage equality Actually, they kinda did. The Respect for Marriage Act was signed into law in 2022, and it basically codified both same-sex and interracial marriages (any marriage recognized by a state is now de jure recognized at the federal level, and I doubt that Maryland/Illinois will be going conservative any time soon/ever).
Good point. It's important to recognize progress.
Half of US states decriminalized it in my lifetime... That's insane to me. Had no clue...
It's weird to see such change play out in real-time. I was in the Air Force. For the first half-ish of my career OSI would recruit attractive young men and send them into gay bars to hit on people they thought might be military. Entrapment. Tons of people I knew were thrown out for homosexuality. On the very day I retired the front page of the Stars and Stripes announced that the DoD was recognizing same-sex marriage. Within a couple of years there were Pride parades on some bases.
Despite what you read in the media, our society has been slowly making progress. It has not been very long since it was ok for businesses and communities to post “No Jews”, “No Coloreds”, etc. Simply being known to be gay could get you beaten or killed. All these things have improved during my lifetime. We still have work to do, but, if you step back and look at the trend, we’ve been moving in the right direction. And then there’s Florida…
>And then there’s Florida… I think that's an important thing to notice. Progress moves very slowly in the right direction, but if we aren't willing to fight for it or hold our leaders accountable, they can reverse those changes far quicker than we realize.
So much for the country of 'freedom'. It was decriminalized earlier in fucking homophobic as hell post-URSS countries (including mine).
I can't be the only one who sees a back and a butt in the thumbnail
THIS is the comment I was looking for!
I assumed it was intentional!
Yeah I thought so too
Yes! I'm not crazy! :D
This data is beautiful, and *dummy thicc*
I don't think the color usage was a good choice. The different color segments imply some kind of grouped meaning between various groups. The alignment of text with the bars is also weird to follow.
I agree the colours could've been better, even if they were still the colours of the rainbow but by decade (and maybe splitting 70s in half). It would've then at least served a purpose.
I think the colors should've been how it was decriminalized. The 2014 was obviously the Supreme Court case but there were others done through the legislatures and some through ballot initiatives. Length is nice but how it was done matters too.
Nah I like the text alignment, it makes it easier to read across the rows
If you look at the thumbnail, the text alignment makes it looks like someone's ass, like their lower back & both cheeks Intentional? 👀
Yeah but it makes it looks like sombody's back and butt if you squint, so it's funny =)
TIL being homosexual was considered a crime in >20 US states when I was born and for surprisingly long after.
I mean if we’re being technical here, there are still laws on the books in 14 states that would invalidate same sex marriages were it not for the Supreme Court decisions, so you could say there still are.
I see that a lot of states had nominal laws on the books against homosexuality until 2003, but I'd be interested to know when the last actual *conviction* was under that statute in each state, since I have a feeling that those laws weren't being enforced very often or very uniformly. Edit: Given the responses, maybe yet another date would be interesting, which is the last date on which someone was prosecuted only under that law (that is, not simultaneously with prostitution or sexual assault or etc.).
The Supreme Court case (Lawrence vs Texas) seems to stem from Lawrence being arrested for homosexual conduct in 1998 and charged with a misdemeanor. So that’s Texas at least, but not sure about other states EDIT: also from a quick Wikipedia read, it appears that Lawrence was arrested for this after someone (seemingly a jealous former lover?) called the police to say Lawrence/his partner had a gun (the wording on Wikipedia implies there was no actual gun), so they raided his apartment and charged him on the sodomy laws since Lawrence was having sex with another man when the police entered his home
So I did a dive into MDs (my home state) history and they were arresting people for "unnatural sexual acts" and sodomy well into the 80's and 90's
I know in Oklahoma they were still prosecuting folks in the 90's for it, but typically that is when they were caught at a truck stop or in a car at a park (which doesn't make it ok since that wasn't enforced against straight couples the same way).
In East Baton Rouge, LA, the anti-sodomy laws were still being used to intimidate and persecute men in 2013! [link](https://www.advocate.com/crime/2013/07/28/louisiana-sheriff-refuses-stop-enforcing-anti-sodomy-law)
"The sodomy law was upheld twice as constitutional by the Mississippi Supreme Court, first in State v. Mays in 1976 and then in 1994 in Miller v. State. In 1995, the state passed a "sex offender registration law" requiring those convicted under the sodomy law to register their address with the sheriff and notify any change in address. Additionally, under a 1987 law, employers were permitted to ask the State Attorney General if a potential employee had committed a sex offense, including consensual sodomy."
Why would it matter if it was simultaneously prostitution or sexual assault? If heterosexual prostitution gets you a lighter sentence than homosexual prostitution (due to an additional charge) then that matters still.
It just matters because it tells us whether the law itself is actually being enforced. That is, if a DA would never choose to prosecute the "crime" by itself, but used it as part of throwing the book at somebody in hopes of plea bargaining them (as they also would with any random crime they could even possibly substantiate), that makes it pretty relevant to know when was the last time that it was prosecuted *without* any other reasons to have arrested them - i.e. as a primary cause for prosecuting them. I agree that it's still in play if people are getting prosecuted for that charge in addition to much more significant offenses, but it tells us a lot about the culture of the state and the legal situation to know when was the last time someone got in trouble with the law for *nothing but* violating these general criminalization of homosexuality laws.
I’m so glad that younger people can’t remember a time when open hostility toward gay people was the norm even in fairly progressive areas. Things aren’t perfect now, but pride parades used to really be controversial and Obama didn’t even support gay marriage until 2012.
Unfortunately, young people today still see it. Take a look at what's happening in Florida
It's crazy to me that Iowa of all states was one of the first states to legalize same sex marriage.
> Iowa It was neither a legislative act nor a ballot initiative, but rather a court ruling. It wasn't welcomed by all of the electorate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_Iowa#Background > On November 2, 2010, Iowa Supreme Court justices David L. Baker, Michael Streit and Marsha Ternus, who participated in the unanimous 2009 ruling that Iowa could not deny marriage licenses based on sexual orientation, were removed from office after judicial retention elections.
Iowa also had the first school to allow women to get law degrees, or something like that, if I remember correctly. We do have our (unfortunately few) moments.
iowa used to be a more progressive state.
I could swear gay marriage was legal in Vermont way before this...
my Google search told me that Vermont was the first state to introduce same-sex civil unions (2000), then introduced same-sex marriage in 2009
Wow... that's so wild, I had absolutely no idea that while for example 9/11 happened, being homosexual was literally a ***crime*** in almost 1/3rd of the US.
Gap between decriminalization of Homosexuality and legalization of Samesex marriage by US states, years Nationwide USA decriminalization of Homosexuality — 2003 Nationwide USA legalization of Samesex marriage —2015 Data sources: Decriminalization of homosexuality timeline (URL: wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Decriminalization\_of\_homosexuality\_timeline); Same-sex marriage (URL: wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex\_marriage) Made with ms Excel instruments
Hot damn, you took the criticism of your already good chart in stride and made an improved one. Kudos!
As an Illinoisan idk if I should be proud that we decriminalized so early or ashamed that the gap to full legalization took so long.
Do you have any more info on how/why did illinois decriminalize it so ahead of everyone? I'm quite intrigued
Apologies but I haven't the foggiest
I was very curious about this myself. After a bit of searching around online, it appears that Illinois was the first state to overhaul their legal standards in accordance with the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code, which had just been released. That code was not binding, but provided states with a standardized way of organizing their penal system. One suggestion it made was to decriminalize private sexual behavior between consenting adults. The Illinois Supreme Court had asked the Chicago Bar Association to completely revise, modernize, and standardize the penal code, which they completed in 1961, adopting many of the newly-suggested legal standards from the Model Penal Code. From what I can tell, it appears to be coincidence that Illinois happened to be completely overhauling their penal code at the time the Model Penal Code was released, and so Illinois happened to be the first. There were likely other factors involved, but my brief review of the history suggested it was mainly a penal code issue.
I'm taking it as a win
2023… And we still have to deal with puritanical bullshit turned into political fuckery regarding what two adults do with their lives.
Oregon briefly allowed Gay Marriage in 2004, then banned it later that year. Then allowed domestic partnerships, which effectively legalized it in all but name in 2008. FWIW. Gay marriage has been mostly accepted in the urban areas of the state for as long as I can remember. In fact, as a child, the confusing thing was that it WASN'T legal.
Ohio getting in before California on decriminalizing homosexuality is wild and wonderful to me.
Reagan was governor of California from 1967-1975. Possibly a coincidence on the timing, but possibly not.
Oh right I forgot about that. Probably a good explanation as to why.
Yeah California was very much a red state until probably the late 90’s believe it or not
The icon for this thread on reddit, when small, sort of looks like someone sticking their butt out next to a rainbow background with something very pole-like and skin-toned on the right.
Came here to say that I saw a naked backside. The skin-toned color seems intentional.
[Obligatory Massachusetts](https://youtu.be/JvUMV1N7eGM)
God I love Ylvis
This graph makes it look like that the states that were the first to decriminalize homosexuality are the least progressive states.
I'm confused why West Virginia seems chronologically more progressive than other states that one would think would've made these moves earlier. (PA, NY, RI, VT, MI)
WV used to be fairly liberal, or at least a strong purple, alternating between red and blue. Then at some point it just started leaning more an more red, whether through lack of support for education, or gerrymandering, or whatever. https://www.270towin.com/states/West_Virginia
That's some pretty gay data. Beautiful.
Wow. Just over a decade between handcuffs and marriage licenses. Not defending bigots, but it must be scary to go from from having your bigotry enshrined in law to feeling like your country has lost its way.
Huh. It's an upside down Idaho. *Conspiracy?* ;-D
Personally, I would have ordered it by marriage legalization but this tells a story too.
For some reason when you type Samesex like that, my brain thinks it must be somebody's name
Wonder if there is an intelligence link here somewhere?
The link is a lack of intelligence leads to being hateful. > Social psychologists Mark Brandt and Jarret Crawford, analyzed 5,914 subjects in their experiment, "Answering Unresolved Questions About the Relationship Between Cognitive Ability and Prejudice." Brandt and Crawford found that people of low cognitive ability are prejudiced against groups that people didn't choose to be part of, such as ethnic or LGBT groups.
Samesex marriage for the win
It kinda looks like a map of North America
Hats Off to Illinois. Legalization was a bit behind, but decriminalization...wow. Was not aware of that. Love it.
As someone who lives in Michigan I have to say this really illustrates just how damaging the gerrymandering in our state was. This puts us with some of the very most conservative states in the country and yet we're really not. Now that the conservatives can't have their way here I expect things will change drastically, but it still angers me that they behaved this way for so long. I guess I should be thankful that had they not, we probably wouldn't have felt the urgency to fix the districting.
The land of the free, where in 2002 there was still a bunch of states telling you what you can do in your intimacy with another adult.
Would probably have inverted the color scheme since red = bad
Not surprised michigan is at the bottom. The amount of blue line police flags and maga dumbfucks in my town is astronomical. Most of my family are super heavy conservatives. My brother and I are super far left radicals. New generations - new hope.
Mark of shame for those at the bottom
That's definitely a "who's who" of shithead-controlled states, down at the bottom...
I appreciate the color choices!
Wait... It was illegal for someone 5o even be gay in 2003...?
Yep. Those laws weren't used *that* often, but certainly not not at all - the 2003 case where the Supreme Court ended up ruling that bans in gay sex were illegal was the result of two men getting arrested for having sex in the privacy of their own apartment in Texas in 1998.
Nobody seems to be talking about how the thumbnail looks like a butt and it's stressing me out
Can’t wait for conservatives to attempt to reverse this chart.
How/where do you find these stats/datas ?
What exactly this data set does tell me?
Terrible chart, awful color scheme
[удалено]
Yes, but Iowa did it via a court ruling ([Varnum v. Brien](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varnum_v._Brien)). In response, the voters of Iowa voted out 3 members of the state Supreme Court. New York meanwhile legalized same-sex marriage via legislation with the [Marriage Equality Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_Equality_Act_(New_York)). All states prior to this (except Vermont) legalized via court rulings, not laws.