Changing Attitudes Toward Homosexual Rights

This paper is a discussion of the changing attitudes toward homosexual rights in America, with particular emphasis on sodomy laws, especially those in Texas. Laws designed to legislate sexual behavior have tended to reflect the prevailing social opinions regarding those behaviors. Homosexuality, which has a long history of social disapproval, has slowly been gaining acceptance, but it remains a difficult issue, and this difficulty is reflected in the ways in which government, at the local, state, and federal levels, has tried to regulate it. Texas remains one of the last states to maintain a law against sodomy that is aimed particularly at limiting and punishing homosexual behavior. Such laws illustrate the conflict between the individual's right to privacy and the desire of government to set standards of public behavior.

A recent Time/CNN poll (Lacayo, 1998, October 26) shows that 64 percent of Americans now believe that homosexual behavior is acceptable; twenty years earlier, only 41 percent believed this. Yet the same poll reveals that 48 percent believe that homosexual relationships between consenting adults are morally wrong (p. 36). These statistics show, as Richard Lacayo (1998, October 26) writes, "An irresistible force of cultural change is meeting an immovable object of political resistance" (p. 34). While being a homosexual is becoming increasingly accepted, this acceptance may never be complete, and government reflects this ongoing conflict.

Related Essays

Changing Societal Views of Homosexuality .... continues to make being openly homosexual in American .... Yet societal attitudes toward changes in the definition of "family .... in large part to the changing views of .... (3897 16 )

The Legal Situation of Gays & Lesbians .... Even though the goal of changing the minds of an .... within American society have different attitudes toward gay and .... Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and .... (4149 17 )

The Modern Gay and Lesbian Political Movement .... sex marriage, gay parental rights, and allowing .... with the purpose of changing attitudes toward homosexuality both .... the heterosexual and homosexual communities. .... (1665 7 )

Abuse of Gay & Lesbian College Students .... Longcope, K. (1990, May 4). Gay rights issue splits Mt. .... programs as a means of changing attitudes toward gay people. Homosexual Counseling Morin, SF, and others .... (9548 38 )

Gay Students The Area of Concern Once m .... has a sociocultural component when there is a question of changing or adding .... Research into the attitudes of college students toward homosexuality and .... (9353 37 )

dges wrote, "There can be no doubt that the right of consenting adults to engage in private noncommercial sexual activity, free from governmental interference, is protected by the privacy clause of the Georgia Constitution" (Dahir, 1999, p. 1). Ironically, the deciding case was not one involving homosexual sex: "Instead, it involved a married man who had been convicted of performing oral sex on his 17-year-old niece while his pregnant wife slept in the next room" (Dahir, 1999, p. 3). The five states that still criminalize same-sex sodomy are all in the South: Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. All are the targets of gay rights activists and supporters of privacy issues. The Advocate, a gay rights newsletter, contends (1999), "Sodomy laws in Texas and Arkansas are believed to stand a good chance of crumbling under current legal challenges making their way through the state courts" (Dahir, p. 2). The Texas law was passed in 1878. It classifies homosexual sodomy as "deviant sexual intercourse" and carries a fine of up to $500. Advocates of the law include Kelly Shackelford, a religious freedoms lawyer who is executive director of the Free Market Foundation. He argues, "Lots of private, consensual behavior is il

Category: Psychology - C