A COMPARATIVE EVALUATION OF THE LEGAL TREATMENT
AMERICAN PRE-CLASSICAL & CLASSICAL PERIODS
Legal precedent has validated the usefulness of history-based analysis in American law. (See, e.g., Bowers v. Hardwick, 106 S.Ct. 2841 (1986).) As concerns law and the history of sodomy, Western society, in general, has long viewed the conduct with near universal reproach. The United States, in particular, has historically adjudged sodomy to be neither a fundamental right, nor a permissible form of sexual conduct. Without doubt, American law has been influenced by Judeo-Christian beliefs, however, for a proper historical perspective and analysis of the Pre-Classical and Classical American periods, a limited legal survey beginning with ancient Greece is necessary. Prior to a historical accounting, it is helpful to take note of relevant terminology.
"Homosexuality" is generally defined as "the sexual desire for members of one's own sex (Lasson, 1985, p. 648). It is interesting to note that the concept of homosexuality is said to have been non-existent prior to 1870 (Foucault, 1978, p. 43), as "sexuality -- whether tolerated or condemned -- was something a person did, not what he or she was" (Goldstein, 1988, p. 1087).
The conduct proscribed by "Sodomy" laws, i.e., anal intercourse, which sometimes included oral-genital contact, was not always limited to same-sex (primarily male) unions. These distinctions are referenced and discussed more fully below. (Sodomy is named after the name of the Jewish city of Sodom, portrayed in the Bible as being destroyed by fire for its rampant homosexuality (The Bible (King James Version), 1990 ed., Genesis 19:4-12,24 and Romans 9:29).)
One other term -- "buggery" -- was generally used to describe the legal offense in the tradition of English common law (Steegman, 1988, p. 384). Black's Law Dictionary has defined the term as "[a] carnal copulation against nature; a man or a woman with a ...