Anti gay groups gears up to fight supposed decriminalizing buggery

So as the feamongering continues by antigay groups another report via the Star News has come to light, in a previous post I had looked at the slippy slope phenomenon capitalizing on national ignorance on sexuality is clearly being used to back up a deceptive strategy by Dr Wayne West and company in the aftermath of the Belizean decision on buggery

see: Slippery slope deception & conflation of incest with buggery’s decriminalization 

Gay Marriage Coming? ......... Belizean P.M. Says Section 53 Decision Won’t Cause It

read the judgement in full:

 download HERE

meanwhile:

The Jamaica Coalition for a Healthy Society is hosting a forum today to educate Jamaicans about the possible implications of the recently decriminalized buggery law in Belize in section 53; consent is now allowed between adults for same gender sex in private. It seems however it is the very JCHS that needs some education and a clear need o be reacquainted with something called honesty and true love and tolerance.

Advocacy Officer Philippa Davies told THE STAR that all Caribbean islands should be concerned about the ruling and should therefore be properly informed.

"The Jamaican public needs to know why the case was brought up, what the Chief Justice ruled, and what it means for the rest of the Caribbean," she said.

Belize chief justice Kenneth Benjamin has found that a law that criminalises sex between consenting adults of the same sex is unconstitutional.

Shirley Richards, past president of the Lawyers' Christian Fellowship, told THE STAR that the meeting is a very important one.

"We're expecting discussion in a lively, passionate but respectable manner, but not opposition, as we've never had to deal with opposition before. Jamaica needs to be awakened about the issues we are facing as a nation in order to ignite change. We're really looking to educate our listeners," Richards said.

FLAWED

Meanwhile, Davies described the ruling by the chief justice in Belize as flawed and said that the buggery law must remain because it draws a clear line between what is normal and abnormal sexual behaviour.

"Keeping the law in place means that children will not be taught that perverted sexual behaviour is acceptable. It also facilitates keeping marriage under the right definition, and if the buggery law is removed, then the doors for same-sex marriage will be open."

The forum will be held at the St Andrew High School for Girls auditorium starting at 6 p.m. The Jamaica Coalition for Healthy Society was formed in 2012 and consists of Christians who state that they have a vision to holistically enrich Jamaican society.

ENDS

The foolishness is clear crystal to all to see and the nonsense about same sex marriage coming and so what if it is? this is the same woman in the form of Davies who made comments to the effect on transgdenderism, see 

Transphobic & paranoiac nonsense from The Breath of Change ConnectPray radio show and also see 

CCJ Dismisses Gay Activist case due to lack of evidence.

Others in the antigay world are calling for a referendum on the issue to supposedly race prior to any serious education campaign can be launched hence winning the supposed battle on mere ignorance and what further compounds the situation is that persons do not want to seek out the real issues so as to inform themselves. 

also see:

Belize’s ruling on gay sex supports access to HIV services — UNAIDS 

Jamaica Coalition for a Healthy Society continues its “HIV is a gay disease” campaign with 2014

Have a referendum on homosexuality(Observer Letter) ..... but homosexuality is not illegal 2011

Milk River PNP Councillor says no to buggery repeal ............. 2014

UN Pressure Mounts For Jamaica To Repeal Anti-Gay Laws, Improve LGBT Environment 2014

So the 'war' is on in full effect now.

Peace & tolerance indeed is needed in these times.

H

Slippery slope deception & conflation of incest with buggery’s decriminalization

Slippery slope deception & conflation of incest with buggery’s decriminalization

The recent ruling in Belize by the Supreme Court on the striking down adults same gender sex and opposite gender sex as well seems to have sent some persons into frenzy on the issue as the fear mongering is on in earnest. The believes and misnomers that gay marriage is next when marriage between a man and a woman as defined in the charter of rights is as clear as crystal; such a meaning is so deeply entrenched that it would take forever almost to have removed providing some good well thinking members of parliament decide to take it on. Presently no parliamentarians wants to come close to addressing the present thrust for amending the articles 76, 77 & 79 concerning buggery or the abominable crime under the Sexual Offences Bills.

The latest slippery slope that some persons egregiously use to include religious fanatics while giving the church on a whole a bad name and image is that if consenting adults are allowed to engage in private in anal penetration then what is to stop incestuous relations to occur so long there is consent, some have gone even further such as attorneys Bert Samuels and Shirley Richards of Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship fame that persons may even advocate to be married to animals despite the fact the said ‘buggery law’ also speaks to beastiality, when no such calls have been made to amend that section. According to them as has happened in Europe whilst not able to provide any proof simply make absolutes pronouncements albeit they are attorneys and ought to know better. It is not surprising as other colleagues such as Dr Wayne West on his feverish campaign on seeing HIV is a gay disease ploy has also deceptively (in the name of piety) claimed all other anal acts will be free and open for use for said consenting adults. He has grouped for example scatting, fisting and felching in his public advocacy and also in church presentations over and over again. Obviously it is exaggeration for effect, magnify the problem so that it sounds convincing. Now that the doors are closing the aforementioned referendum on buggery by then opposition leader now prime minister is now the obvious target by antigay voices in a bid to play on the national sentiments if not ignorance.

Phillipa Davies a colleague of West also tried it recently on transgenderism and maybe thought it would have gone unnoticed on the radio show she hosts, since my exposure of the unsubstantiated comments she made on Dr Alfred ‘s work she has hardly appeared on the show but recently turned up in a almost flopped protest outside the US embassy on the rainbow lighting motif they had done some days before and the rainbow flag support they showed immediately following the Florida shooting incident of a gay nightclub. Miss Davies has been groomed well it seems not to mention Helen Coley Nicholson president of the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship who sounds more like someone is pressing her buttons or coaching her on what to say publicly; namely her predecessor Shirley Richards. This is the same woman who some years ago asked that lesbians be also criminalised as gay men in terms of the sexual offences bill although she knows full well (or ought to) as an attorney that that may not be possible as what would the women be so engaged in that would warrant such a call, yet Richards and company are all but silent on other societal atrocities; that was evidenced by a radio interview on BEST 100FM hosted by Rastafarian attorney Miguel Lorne who while haling the aforementioned US Embassy protest mentioned the Mario Deane matter where he effectively said the protests over the two year period saw very little participation of the clergy or churches, he encouraged her to join in on other matters to which Mrs Richards barely gave an affirmative response and quickly went back to the anti gay agenda she was on the radio about.

There seems to be a well orchestrated campaign to target talkshows with this latest strategy to conflate purposely incest with consenting adults sexual activity. Another discussion on LOVE 101FM’s Morning Watch Bert Samuels used the same strategy while claiming gay marriage is next, despite he explained that marriage as defined now is between a man and a woman and is deeply entrenched he claimed if someone wants to marry their dog they can challenge the act while chastising the originators of the ‘buggery law’ of changing morality. He also suggested they were forcing former colonies to accept the ‘new morality’ of which he is greatly opposed. He mentioned the savings law clause briefly in a supposed bid to give the background but persisted that colonies are being pressured or moral imperialism:

“They want to change a law that they imposed on us originally, they gave it to us.” He said among other things.

Even when it is not as if the entire buggery law will go but instead will be very clearly defined as to privacy and consent. Gary Harriot of the Jamaica Umbrella Group of Churches, JUG who also sided with Mr Samuels, the issue of laws and morals came up as well as well as separation of church and state. Samuels also raised the issue of a twenty year old woman who is attracted to her father as an example; he claimed that they are adults and consenting so he asked:

“Where do we draw the line?”

Yet at no point in the near thirty minute discussion no mention was made there and even elsewhere where the matter has been raised incest laws have been brought up. Samuels played on fears that other rights in the charter of rights such as freedom of expression would collide with marriage rights and so on. What is most interesting on all of this is that regarding the savings law clause unlike Belize that amended their ‘buggery law’ some five years after their independence to describe the crime as ‘unnatural acts’ or ‘crime against nature’ Jamaica has left the legislation as we inherited same in 1962. Belize also has a protection of discrimination due to sexual orientation in their constitution but Jamaica does not, if I recall that protection was removed during the charter of rights draft debate in a cleverly orchestrated word meaning linguistic distraction as to the meaning of ‘sex’ as it would have left open a door to something else then.

Incest laws

The attempt to try to marry or suggest a slippery slope for every other conceivable ills and sexual aspersion will come flying through the door if and when the courts rule similarly locally as our UNIBAM success in Belize is simply dishonesty. To think this is being done in the name of God; what misrepresentation. As far as my untrained understanding of incest is concerned even if there is consent with blood relatives engaging in sexual activity the incest legislation which also is included in the sexual offences bill which contain the ‘buggery law’ is clear that it is illegal. To twin such with opposite sex partners is deceptive and clearly shows a kind of desperation by anti gay voices as their cause slowly shrinks before their eyes. Sadly again this is being done in the name of God which makes the hardened positions more tenuous, no wonder why so many LGBT persons claim secularism or aetheism just to strengthen their own hand. Incest is not just about the religious component of it linked to Leviticus but also the biological considerations.

It is well known as common knowledge that the likelihood of a child as a product of an incestuous liaison can lead to birth issues if not a disabled or handicapped offspring as the bloodline is too close causing such outcomes. Probably the only incestuous issue between men is that of cousins or brothers (if so extreme) or Uncle and nephew no children would be the outcome after unprotected sex and ejaculation to create any pregnancy. Even so a buggery charge if provable would stand more so than incest in such a matter. I am not aware of any such case where two adult consenting men have been charged and successfully prosecuted for incest after being charged. Definitely cases involving an older perpetrator and a minor who are related incest are included alongside the other relevant charges so applied.

The 2009 Sexual Offences Act under ‘Incest’ is clear as it states:

Incest

7.--(1) The offence of incest is committed by a male person Incest who willingly has sexual intercourse with another person knowing that the other person is his grandmother, mother, sister, daughter, aunt, niece or granddaughter.

(2) The offence of incest is committed by a female person who willingly has sexual intercourse with another person knowing that the other person is her grandfather, father, brother, son, uncle, nephew or grandson.

(3) For the purposes of subsection (1) or (2), the relationship between the person charged with an offence under any of those subsections and the person against whom the offence is alleged to have been committed includes a relationship determined by the reference to the whole blood or half blood, as the case may be.

(4) A person who commits the offence of incest is liable on conviction in a Circuit Court to imprisonment for life.
Not much change has come to light regarding incest outside of a sex offenders’ registry since despite reviews and amendments over the years.

Touching gay marriage versus civil unions and affording rights to same gender couples Bert Samuels’ resistance was clear:

“Well what is happening is that these groups, these partners want to have the same rights; in other words they want to have the right if their partner is in the hospital and cannot determine, they want to be able to determine whether you turn of life support or they want to be able to inherit property from their partners, that’s another route that has been elsewhere instituted, so that it is a recognition of these unions now being given legal status similar to marriage where people can inherit and pass property from one to the other.

You’re asking my personal view on that, I am old school, I am sorry.”

Reverend Harriot also mentioned the restorative therapy ambit supposedly claiming persons needed to be ‘cared for’ and that of ‘God’s design’ but he did not go down the road of exploring whether said design also include diverse orientation. The misconception of the mention of the word ‘diversity’ as seen by some churches as a bi-word for homosexual activists to invade the church and that it would be resisted strongly or reinterpreted to mean denominations and not a pro-LGBT agenda. Still want more fear mongering well there is the notion of Belize’s supposed destruction post the landmark decision.

We have a good way to go on just sensible discourse from persons who one would have expected better.

Peace & tolerance

H

remember this?:

Lawyers' Christian Fellowship's hypocritical stance on CCJ but keep Buggery Law!

I find it so damned hypocritical and indeed insulting that groups such as the one named in the post's title is quick on the draw to support the idea of changing our final court from the UK Privy Council to the Caribbean Court of Justice, CCJ a move I support but if they want to remove old legal English vestiges from so called colonial masters why not also support removal or decriminalization of buggery too as it is an old 482 year old now irrelevant piece of legislation.

I wonder if the LCF thinks the CCJ will maintain the savings law clauses and such that hold such legislation as buggery or the maintaining of marriage as defined as a woman and a man in a voluntary union is the reason for this strong support and not our independence judicially? 

After all the British repealed the damned thing finally in 1967 where The Sexual Offences Act decriminalized homosexual acts between two men over 21 years of age in private in England and Wales. The 1967 Act did not extend to Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man, where all homosexual behaviour remained illegal. The privacy restrictions of the act meant a third person could not be present and men could not have sex in a hotel. These restrictions were overturned in the European Court of Human Rights in 2000. (SEE loads more below on some of the timeline thanks to the help of a gay researcher as well ....... mwah)

RJR News carried this entry on their website .......

As the Senate gears up to begin debate on whether Jamaica should establish the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) as its final appellate court, several powerful groups issued a statement last night, declaring their full support for the Court.

In a joint statement night, the Jamaican Bar Association (not uploaded on their site as at this blog entry's creation) along with seven leading NGOs, associations and civil society groups urged support for the CCJ as the country's final appellate court.

The list includes the Organisation of Commonwealth Caribbean Bar Associations, National Integrity Action, University of Technology - Law Faculty, Jamaica Civil Service Association, Lawyers Christian Fellowship, Cornwall Bar Association, University and Allied Workers Union, and the Jamaican Bar Association.

The groups are hoping to convince senators opposed to the CCJ that it's time to break away from the Privy Council.

In the statement, the groups reminded the senators that access to the Privy Council is simply not available for the vast majority of Caricom nationals.

They argued that most Caribbean nationals cannot afford to take their case to the Privy Council and that the CCJ offers them an opportunity to get justice. They added that, after ten years, they have seen changes to the CCJ, as originally structured, that better secure its independence and ability to provide justice.

The Senate debate on the CCJ Bills begins on Friday.

ENDS

So we must keep old legislation and I suppose they also want to ditch the queen as our head of state indeed most people do but still we must keep a 482 year old legislation with all its twists and turns with multiple re-enactments. Theocracy at work eh? We cannot make honey from poison not when the original intent of the act was one with an imperative of ill-will in support of the English reformation under King Henry VIII.

see my previous post/podcast: That Buggery Law (UK 1533), Grief & The Ill-informed

Thomas Cromwell the law's author and parliamentarian led on behalf of the King Henry VIII the creation of the law when in the mass expelling of the Catholics and replacing that church with the new Church of England aka as the dissolution of the monasteries labelled the former in a smear campaign as a den of homosexuals essentially (the word never existed then) to do so while acquiring the church lands in what is known as the dissolution of the monasteries ending up with the greatest act of privatization in the history of governance at that time. Though the law was written and passed in 1533 and was to have lasted only one parliamentary cycle.

artwork from the Valor Ecclesiaticus document originally written in Latin

To re-enact the law and achieve the other objectives King Henry requested a report of sorts known as the Valor ecclesiasticus detailing the dollar value of the church lands and the atrocities or sins the Catholics were guilty of and right on the top of the list was buggery; making all male-male sexual activity punishable by death. Buggery related only to intercourse per anum by a man with a man or woman or intercourse per anum or per vaginum by either a man or a woman with an animal. Other forms of "unnatural intercourse" amounted to indecent assault or gross indecency, but did not constitute buggery. The lesser offence of "attempted buggery" was punished by two years of jail and often horrific time on the pillory.

1541 The Buggery Act 1533 only ran until the end of the parliament. The law was re-enacted three times, and then in 1541 it was enacted to continue in force "for ever" 

Thus it was defined as a felony without benefit of clergy, which denied homosexuals in holy orders the right to be tried in the ecclesiastical courts, with the result that a conviction entailed loss of property to the Crown. The statute was re-enacted in 1536, 1539 and 1541 under Henry VIII given new force, with minor amendments. The penalty for buggery remained death, but goods and lands were not forfeit, and the rights of wives and heirs were safeguarded; it was repealed in the first Parliament of Edward VI, along with all new felonies established by Henry VIII, but re-enacted in 1548 with amendments which no longer forfeited the felon's property to the Crown, and stipulations that indictments had to be framed within six months of the commission of the alleged act, and that no person who would benefit from the death of the accused could give evidence against him. 

With Mary's succession in 1553 it was repealed, along with many other statutes, thus giving jurisdiction back to the ecclesiastic courts. In 1563 it was revived by Queen Elizabeth I, in the harsh terms of the 1533 Act rather than with the amendments of 1548, because according to the Preamble, since the repeal of the Act in 1553 "divers ill disposed persons have been the more bold to commit the said most horrible and detestable Vice of Buggery aforesaid, to the high displeasure of Almighty God." Historical evidence fails to reveal any such excessive "boldness" for the years 1553 to 1563, and the only circumstance which prompted this severe reaction of Elizabeth's ministers was probably Elizabeth's desire to establish her claim to the throne as direct heir of Henry VIII: always politically astute, Elizabeth naturally re-enacted her father's laws rather than those of intermediate monarchs.

more related history in the UK where although the law existed there were virtually no punishments exacted etc:

1606 King James I of England (King James Bible) began a relationship with Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset. Carr happened to break his leg at a tilting match, at which the king was present. The king instantly fell in love with the young man, even helping nurse him back to health all the while teaching him Latin. Entirely devoid of all high intellectual qualities, Carr was endowed with good looks, excellent spirits, and considerable personal accomplishments. These advantages were sufficient for James, who knighted the young man and at once took him into favour. James made his lover Viscount of Rochester (1611), Knight of the Garter and Earl of Somerset (1613).

1614 King James I of England met the last of his three close male lovers, George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, the son of a Leicestershire knight. George Villiers could dance well, fence well, and speak a little French. In August, Villiers, reputedly "the handsomest-bodied man in all of England",was brought before the king, in the hope that the king would take a fancy to him, diminishing the power at court of then favourite Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset. Villiers gained support as the kings preferred lover from those who opposed Carr.

1615 King James knighted his male lover George Villiers as a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Restoration of Apethorpe Hall, undertaken 2004–2008, revealed a previously unknown passage linking the bedchambers of King James I of England and Villiers.

1617 King James made his male lover George Villiers Earl of Buckingham

1618 King James made his male lover George Villiers Marquess of Buckingham.

1623 King James made his male lover George Villiers Earl of Coventry and Duke of Buckingham. Villiers was now the highest-ranking subject outside the royal family.

1680 A same-sex marriage was annulled. Arabella Hunt married "James Howard"; in 1682 the marriage was annulled on the ground that Howard was in fact Amy Poulter, a 'perfect woman in all her parts', and two women could not validly marry.

1690 King William III of England had several close, male associates, including two Dutch courtiers to whom he granted English titles: Hans Willem Bentinck became Earl of Portland, and Arnold Joost van Keppel was created Earl of Albemarle. These relationships with male friends, and his apparent lack of more than one female mistress, led William's enemies to suggest that he might prefer homosexual relationships. Keppel was 20 years William's junior, described as strikingly handsome, and rose from being a royal page to an earldom with some ease.

In 1697 The Earl of Portland wrote to King William III of England that "the kindness which your Majesty has for a young man, and the way in which you seem to authorise his liberties... make the world say things I am ashamed to hear". This, he said, was "tarnishing a reputation which has never before been subject to such accusations". William tersely dismissed these suggestions, however, saying, "It seems to me very extraordinary that it should be impossible to have esteem and regard for a young man without it being criminal."

1724 Margaret Clap better known as Mother Clap, ran a coffee house from 1724 to 1726 in Holborn, London. The coffee house served as a Molly House for the underground gay community. Her house was popular, being well known within the gay community. She cared for her customers, and catered especially to the gay men who frequented it. She was known to have provided "beds in every room of the house" and commonly had "thirty or forty of such Kind of Chaps every Night, but more especially on Sunday Nights."

1726 Three men (Gabriel Lawrence, William Griffin, and Thomas Wright) were hanged at Tyburn for sodomy following a raid of Margaret Clap's Molly House.

1727 Charles Hitchen, a London Under City Marshal, was convicted of attempted sodomy at a Molly House. Hitchen had abused his position of power to extort bribes from brothels and pickpockets to prevent arrest, and he particularly leaned on the thieves to make them fence their goods through him. Hitchen had frequently picked up soldiers for sex, but had eluded prosecution by the Society for the Reformation of Manners.

1736 Stephen Fox PC, a British peer and Member of Parliament, had been living in a homosexual relationship with lover Lord Hervey for a period of ten years, from 1726 to 1736. Love letters (The Gay Love Letters of John, Lord Hervey to Stephen Fox) between Stephen and John testify their love.

1772 The first public debate about homosexuality began during the trial of Captain Robert Jones who was convicted of the capital offence of sodomizing a thirteen-year-old boy. The debate during the case and with the background of the 1772 Macaroni prosecutions considered Christian intolerance to homosexuality and the human rights of men who were homosexual.Jones was acquitted and received a pardon on condition that he left the country. He ended up living in grandeur with his footman at Lyon, in the South of France.

1785 Jeremy Bentham becomes one of the first people to argue for the decriminalisation of sodomy in England, which was punishable by hanging.The essay written about 1785, Offences Against One's Self, argued for the liberalization of laws prohibiting homosexual sex. He argued that homosexual acts did not weaken men, nor threaten population or marriage.

1810 The nineteenth century began with a wave of prosecutions against homosexual men. On 8 July, the Bow Street Runners raided The White Swan, a tumbledown pub of Tudor origin near Drury Lane. Twenty-seven men were arrested on suspicion of sodomy and attempted sodomy.

1812 FTM transgender James Miranda Barry graduated from the Medical School of Edinburgh University as a doctor. Barry went on to serve as an army surgeon working overseas. Barry lived as a man but was found to be female-bodied upon his death in 1865.

1828 The Buggery Act 1533 was repealed and replaced by the Offences against the Person Act 1828. Buggery remained punishable by death.

1835 The last two men to be executed in Britain for buggery, James Pratt and John Smith, were arrested on 29 August in London after being spied upon while having sex in a private room; they were hanged on 27 November.

1861 The death penalty for buggery was abolished. A total of 8921 men had been prosecuted since 1806 for sodomy with 404 sentenced to death and 56 executed.

1866 Marriage was defined as being between a man and a woman (preventing future same-sex marriages). In the case of Hyde v. Hyde and Woodmansee (a case of polygamy), Lord Penzance's judgment began "Marriage as understood in Christendom is the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others."

1871 Ernest 'Stella' Boulton and Frederick 'Fanny' Park, two Victorian transvestites and suspected homosexuals appeared as defendants in the celebrated Boulton and Park trial in London, charged "with conspiring and inciting persons to commit an unnatural offence". The indictment was against Lord Arthur Clinton, Ernest Boulton, Frederic Park, Louis Hurt, John Fiske, Martin Gumming, William Sommerville and C.H. Thompson. The prosecution was unable to prove that they had either committed any homosexual offence nor that men wearing women's clothing was an offence in English law. Lord Arthur Clinton killed himself before his trial.

1885 The British Parliament enacted section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, known as the Labouchere Amendment which prohibited gross indecency between males. It thus became possible to prosecute homosexuals for engaging in sexual acts where buggery or attempted buggery could not be proven.

1889 The Cleveland Street scandal occurred, when a homosexual male brothel in Cleveland Street, Fitzrovia, London, was raided by police after they discovered telegraph boys had been working there as rent boys. A number of aristocratic clients were discovered including Lord Arthur Somerset, equerry to the Prince of Wales. The Prince of Wales’s son Prince Albert Victor and Lord Euston were also implicated in the scandal.

1895 Oscar Wilde tried for gross indecency over a relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, was sentenced to two years in prison with hard labour.

1897 George Cecil Ives organizes the first homosexual rights group in England, the Order of Chaeronea. Dr Helen Boyle and her partner, Mabel Jones, set up the first women-run General Practice in Brighton, including offering free therapy for poor women. Helen Boyle also founded the National Council for Mental Hygiene (which subsequently becomes MIND) in 1922. British sexologist Havelock Ellis publishes Sexual Inversion, the first volume in an intended series called Studies in the Psychology of Sex. He argues that homosexuality is not a disease but a natural anomaly occurring throughout human and animal history, and should be accepted,not treated. The book is banned in England for being obscene; the subsequent volumes in the series are published in the US and not sold in England until 1936.

1910 London homosexuals began to gather openly in public places such as pubs, coffee houses and tea shops for the first time. Waitresses ensured that a section of Lyons Corner House in Piccadilly Circus was reserved for homosexuals.The section became known as the Lily Pond.

1912 London's first gay pub (as we now know the term), Madame Strindgberg's The Cave of the Golden Calf opened in Heddon Street, off Regent Street.

1913 The British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology is founded by a group of theorists and activists, with Edward Carpenter as president. Carpenter was a proponent of the theory of the homosexual as a third sex, and lived openly with his lover, George Merrill. The society was particularly concerned with homosexuality, aiming to combat legal discrimination against homosexuality with scientific understanding. Members included George Cecil Ives, Edward Carpenter, Montague Summers, Stella Browne, Laurence Housman, Havelock Ellis, George Bernard Shaw, and Ernest Jones.

1956 The Sexual Offences Act recognizes the crime of sexual assault between women.

1957 The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (better known as the Wolfenden report, after Lord Wolfenden) was published. It advised the British Government that homosexuality should not be illegal.

1958 The Homosexual Law Reform Society is founded in the United Kingdom following the Wolfenden report the previous year, to begin a campaign to make homosexuality legal in the UK.

1963 The Minorities Research Group (MRG) became the UK's first lesbian social and political organisation. They went on to publish their own lesbian magazine called Arena Three.

1964 The North West Homosexual Law Reform Committee was founded, abandoning the medical model of homosexuality as a sickness and calling for its decriminalisation. The first meeting was held in Manchester. The North West branch of the national Homosexual Law Reform Committee became the national Campaign for Homosexual Equality in 1969.

1965 In the House of Lords, Lord Arran proposed the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts (lesbian acts had never been illegal). A UK opinion poll finds that 93% of respondents see homosexuality as a form of illness requiring medical treatment.

1966 In the House of Commons Conservative MP Humphry Berkeley introduce a bill to legalise male homosexual relations along the lines of the Wolfenden report. Berkeley was well known to his colleagues as a homosexual, according to a 2007 article published in The Observer and was unpopular. His Bill was given a second reading by 164 to 107 on 11 February, but fell when Parliament was dissolved soon after. Unexpectedly, Berkeley lost his seat in the 1966 general election, and ascribed his defeat to the unpopularity of his bill on homosexuality. The Beaumont Society, a London-based social/support group for people who cross-dress, are transvestite or who are transsexual, was founded.

1967 Ten years after the Wolfenden Report, MP Leo Abse introduced the Sexual Offences Bill 1967 supported by Labour MP Roy Jenkins, then the Labour Home Secretary. When passed, The Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexual acts between two men over 21 years of age in private in England and Wales. The 1967 Act did not extend to Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man, where all homosexual behaviour remained illegal. The privacy restrictions of the act meant a third person could not be present and men could not have sex in a hotel. These restrictions were overturned in the European Court of Human Rights in 2000.

The book Homosexual Behavior Among Males by Wainwright Churchill breaks ground as a scientific study approaching homosexuality as a fact of life and introduces the term "homoerotophobia", a possible precursor to "homophobia". The courts decided that transsexuals could not get married; Justice Ormerod found that in the case of Talbot (otherwise Poyntz) v. Talbot where one spouse was a post-operative transsexual their marriage was not permitted. Justice Ormerod stated that Marriage is a relationship which depends on sex, not on gender.

1969 Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) formed as the first British gay activist group.

1980 The Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1980 decriminalized homosexual acts between two men over 21 years of age "in private" in Scotland.British documentary 'A Change of Sex' was aired on the BBC, enabling viewers to follow the social and medical transition of Julia Grant and also provides a snapshot of the Gender Identity Clinic, Charing Cross Hospital, London. The Self Help Association for Transsexuals (SHAFT) was formed as an information collecting and disseminating body for trans-people. The association later became known as 'Gender Dysphoria Trust International' (GDTI). The first Black Gay and Lesbian Group was formed in the UK.

1981 The European Court of Human Rights in Dudgeon v. United Kingdom struck down Northern Ireland's criminalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults. The first UK case of AIDS was recorded when a 49-year-old man was admitted to Brompton Hospital in London suffering from PCP (Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia). He died ten days later.

1982 The Sexual Offences Act decriminalized homosexual acts between two men over 21 years of age "in private" in Northern Ireland. Terry Higgins dies of AIDS in St Thomas' Hospital London, his friends and partner Martyn Butler set up the Terry Higgins Trust (which became the Terrence Higgins Trust), the first UK AIDS charity.

1992 UK Crown Dependency of Isle of Man repealed sodomy laws (homosexuality was still illegal until 1994). The first Pride Festival was held in Brighton. Europride was inaugurated in London and was attended by estimated crowds of over 100,000.

2000 The Labour government scraps the policy of barring homosexuals from the armed forces. The Labour government introduces legislation to repeal Section 28 in England and Wales - Conservative MPs oppose the move. The bill is defeated by bishops and Conservatives in the House of Lords. Scotland abolished Clause 2a (Section 28) of the Local Government Act in October though it remains in place in England and Wales. HIV charity London Lighthouse merged with Terrence Higgins Trust as the Aled Richards Trust and Body Positive London, closed. Shrinkage of the HIV charity sector occurred largely as a result of Management of HIV/AIDS HAART treatment allowing people living with HIV to be more self-sufficient.

Tony Blair's Labour government enacted the Civil Partnership Act 2004

2001 The last two pieces of unequal law regarding gay male sex are changed.In 1997 the European Commission of Human Rights found that the European Convention on Human Rights were violated by a discriminatory age of consent; the government submitted that it would propose a Bill to Parliament for a reduction of the age of consent for homosexual acts from 18 to 16. The Crime and Disorder Bill which proposed these amendments, was voted for in the House of Commons but rejected in the House of Lords. In 1998 it was reintroduced and again was voted for in the House of Commons but rejected in the House of Lords. It was reintroduced a third time in 1999 but the House of Lords amended it to maintain the age for buggery at 18 for both sexes. Provisions made in the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949 made it possible to enact the bill without the Lords voting it through. The provisions of the Act came into force throughout the United Kingdom on 8 January 2001, lowering the age of consent to 16. Under the act consensual group sex for gay men is also decriminalized.

2002 Same-sex couples are granted equal rights to adopt. Alan Duncan becomes the first Conservative MP to admit being gay without being pushed. Brian Dowling becomes the first openly gay children's television presenter in the UK on SMTV Live.

2004 The Civil Partnership Act 2004 is passed by the Labour Government, giving same-sex couples the same rights and responsibilities as married heterosexual couples in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. The Gender Recognition Act 2004 is passed by the Labour Government. The Act gives transsexual people legal recognition as members of the sex appropriate to their gender (male or female) allowing them to acquire a new birth certificate, affording them full recognition of their acquired sex in law for all purposes, including marriage.

2005 Francis and Peter Scott-Morgan, the first civil partners in Devon, at their televised ceremony at Oldway Mansion

The first civil partnership formed under the Civil Partnership Act 2004 took place at 11:00 GMT 5 December between Matthew Roche and Christopher Cramp at St Barnabas Hospice, Worthing, West Sussex. The statutory 15-day waiting period was waived as Roche was suffering from a terminal illness: he died the following day.[111] The first partnership registered after the normal waiting period was held in Belfast on 19 December.The Adoption and Children Act 2002 comes into force, allowing unmarried and same-sex couples to adopt children for the first time. Twenty-four-year-old Jody Dobrowski is murdered on Clapham Common in a homophobic attack. Chris Smith one of the first openly gay British MPs, (1984), becomes the first MP to acknowledge that he is HIV positive.

2006 The Equality Act 2006 which establishes the Equality and Human Rights Commission (CEHR) and makes discrimination against lesbians and gay men in the provision of goods and services illegal, gains Royal Assent on 16 February. The age of consent is equalized and Section 28 "successfully repealed" in the UK Crown Dependency of the Isle of Man. Labour MP, Ben Bradshaw holds a civil partnership ceremony with partner, Neal Dalgleish, a BBC Newsnight journalist. David Borrow, a Labour MP also holds a civil partnership with his boyfriend in May. In May, Margot James becoming the first 'out' lesbian to be elected as a local councillor for the Brompton ward of Kensington & Chelsea. She subsequently became the first Tory Lesbian MP. In total 3,648 couples formed civil partnerships in England and Wales between 21 December 2005 and 31 January 2006. Male partnerships are more popular (2,150 ceremonies) than women's (1,138).

2007 The Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations becomes law on 30 April making discrimination against lesbians and gay men in the provision of goods and services illegal. Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham declared his opposition to the act, saying that the legislation contradicted the Catholic Church's moral values. He supported efforts to have Catholic adoption agencies exempted from sexual orientation regulations (they were ultimately successful in a judgement given on 17 March 2010).Some 8,728 Civil Partnerships were conducted in 2007.Dr Lewis Turner and Professor Stephen Whittle publish Engendered Penalties Transsexual and Transgender People's Experience of Inequality and Discrimination (Equalities Review) which is instrumental in ensuring the inclusion of trans people in the remit of the new Commission for Equalities and Human Rights. Channel 4 released Clapham Junction, a TV drama partially based on the murder of Jody Dobrowski almost two years after his murder, to mark the 40th anniversary of decriminalization of homosexuality in England and Wales. Four openly gay, lesbian or bisexual MSPs are elected in the 2007-2011 Scottish Parliament, Ian Smith, Patrick Harvie, Margaret Smith and Joe FitzPatrick.

2008 Treatment of lesbian parents and their children is equalized in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008. The legislation allows for lesbians and their partners (both civil and de facto) equal access to legal presumptions of parentage in cases of in vitro-fertilization ("IVF") or assisted/self insemination (other than at home) from the moment the child is born. Angela Eagle becomes the first female MP to enter into a civil partnership (with partner Maria Exall). Parliament passes provisions in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, creating a new offence of incitement to homophobic hatred. Some 7,169 Civil partnerships were conducted in 2008.

2009 The Labour Government Prime Minister Gordon Brown makes an official public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Alan Turing was chemically castrated for being gay, after the war. Opposition leader David Cameron apologizes on behalf of the Conservative Party, for introducing Section 28 during Margaret Thatcher's third government. Welsh rugby star Gareth Thomas becomes the first known top-level professional male athlete in a team sport to come out while still active. Nikki Sinclaire becomes first openly-lesbian member of the European Parliament for the UK delegation. Some 6,281 Civil Partnerships were conducted in 2009.

2013 The coalition government unveils its Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill on 25 January. On 21 May it passes its third reading in the House of Commons by a vote of 366 to 161. Altogether 133 Tories opposed the bill, along with 15 Labour MPs, four Lib Dems, eight Democratic Unionists and an independent. On 17 July 2013, Royal Assent is given to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013. Queen Elizabeth II grants Alan Turing a posthumous pardon. Nikki Sinclaire comes out as transgender, thus becoming the United Kingdom’s first openly transgender Parliamentarian.

2014 Same-sex marriage becomes legal in England and Wales on the 29th of March under the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013. Legislation to allow same-sex marriage in Scotland was passed by the Scottish Parliament in February 2014, received Royal Assent on 12 March 2014 and took effect on 16 December 2014.  Queen Elizabeth II praises the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard for their 40-year history, the first time the Crown has ever publicly supported the LGBT community. The Switchboard receives a comment from the Queen saying: "Best wishes and congratulations to all concerned on this most special anniversary." 

2015 Mikhail Ivan Gallatinov and Mark Goodwin became the first couple to have a same-sex wedding in a U.K. prison after marrying at Full Sutton Prison in East Yorkshire.

2015 The Royal Vauxhall Tavern became the first ever building in the U.K. to be given a special “listing” status based on its LGBT history; it was accorded Grade II listed status by the U.K.’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

Finally this old buggery law we still cling so dearly to needs to go and replaced with sensible laws though while offering privacy coverage, allowing consent between adults and possible marriage rights eventually it must also clearly show punishment of paedophiles as a separate matter so as to avoid regular conflation by some of the two. Just the brief history above shows us a guide to how to get there.

Also we must I cannot leave out the preservative where we are still stuck with this stupid law via the Savings Law Clause In a statute, an exception of a special item out of the general things mentioned in the statute. A restriction in a repealing act, which is intended to save rights, while proceedings are pending, from the obliteration that would result from an unrestricted repeal. 

The provision in a statute, sometimes referred to as the severability clause, that rescues the balance of the statute from a declaration of unconstitutionality if one or more parts are invalidated. With respect to existing rights, a saving clause enables the repealed law to continue in force that essentially came into effect on the night of our so called independence:

Savings Law Clause

• S. 26 (8)
 Nothing contained in any law in force immediately before the appointed day (Independence 1962) shall be held to be inconsistent with any of the provisions of this Chapter; and nothing done under the authority of any such law shall be held to be done in contravention of any of these provisions.
Offences Against the Person Act (1864)

Unnatural Offences
• 76. Whosoever shall be convicted of the abominable crime of buggery, committed either with mankind or with any animal, shall be liable to be  imprisoned and kept to hard labour for a term not exceeding ten years.

• 77. Whosoever shall attempt to commit the said abominable crime, or shall be guilty of any assault with intent to commit the same, or of any indecent assault upon any male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof, shall be liable to be imprisoned for a term not exceeding seven years, with or without hard labour.

Outrages on Decency

• 79. Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of the court to be imprisoned for a term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour.

also see: Buggery Law challenges & overlooked judicial solutions 2013

But really the LCF are hypocrites wanting to hold on to an old law and not even bothering to do the research as to its origin but quickly describing it as a 'Christian law', oh please!

Anyway peace & tolerance

H

That Buggery Law (UK 1533), Grief & The Ill-informed

also see my previous related entry on my sister blog in 2009: 

The Buggery Act in the early years (England under Henry VIII)

and my latest supportive podcast:

That Buggery Law (UK 1533), Grief & The Ill-informed (2nd Take) 21.10.15 

That Buggery Law (UK 1533), Grief & The Ill-informed 03.10.15 (Part 1) (soon to be archived; the 2nd take will remain official)

I thought it opportune for October LGBT History Month to highlight the real reasons for the buggery law debated and passed in 1532/3 in England under King Henry VIII’s reign and his chief minister and author of the problematic legislation Thomas Cromwell which created nothing but grief over these many hundreds of years with repeals and re-enactments. He clearly presented himself as a radical evangelical reformer and a merciless politician changing his look and tone when it suits the occasion. After listening a podcast with someone claiming to be an LGBT advocate as these days any fly by night can do so and then have some online social media presence/persona while having no real world experience I said to myself no wonder why we cannot or have not reached very far in the struggle; or the crap that keeps coming as facts from them. I guess social media has come to show up the men from the boys and the similarly daft anti gay folks just add more fuel to the flames. I aint no lawyer but just sheer common sense and wide availability of materials makes or ought to make our grasp of the issues far more wider and thus making us informed.

Usually LGBTQ history month is used to highlight noted achievements or milestones but with the recent gay marriage and destruction of the family paranoia by some religious crackpots essentially and equally idiotic members of the public who simply lap up the vomit they are fed then regurgitate it with the greatest of ease we must understand that the buggery law as it is often coined was not some morally curative legal device to address some wholesale societal infection of some sort of national faggotry or sexual sins as is postured by anti gay groups in recent times. As its text was short with only 16 sentences its shelf life was to also have been short as the last sentence outlined. I am of the opinion that the very text in the act is an anathema in a sense linguistically speaking as the Brits tend to enhance loquacity both in wording and substance when it comes to legislation in particular and writing in general.

See previous LGBT History posts from Gay Jamaica Watch, GLBTQ Jamaica (Blogger), GLBTQ Jamaica (Wordpress) and GJBTQJA (Blogger)

Their calls for the buggery law to remain is so nonsensical and is laughable at best but it is a serious matter as it is done in the name of so called moral values and preserving the family when the family as we knew it and presented has been damaged already by the very same folks who enjoy marriage rights with very little help from those who are same sex attracted or of other sexual orientation/gender identity. These groups will never ever do or encourage the research on the timeline of the buggery law and its true origin and use as they may be left embarrassed and the laughing stock of the country; especially when information is so easily available literally at our fingertips. Remember my post on grooming where in just five minutes as an untrained counselor I found so much material to debunk anti gay voices deliberately conflating homosexuality with paedophilia (See more HERE when you’re done reading). Ask anyone of these homophobic religious fanatics why the law was passed they cannot tell you and conversely the very LGBTQ lobbyists and advocacies real or imagined too are ignorant to the trajectory in British parliamentary history hence they have been unable to tidy up their rebuttals to the poor researched nonsense despite there are lawyers and such supposedly on the frontline (mostly social media) but not on the ground with any real world experience to boot.

Interestingly the law was to have had a short shelf life as its last sentence in the original 16 sentenced long text outlined:

“Forasmuch as there is not yet sufficient and condign punishment appointed and limited by the due course of the Laws of this Realm for the detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery committed with mankind of beast: It may therefore please the King’s Highness with the assent of the Lords Spiritual and the Commons of this present parliament assembled, that it may be enacted by the authority of the same, that the same offence be from henceforth ajudged Felony and that such an order and form of process therein to be used against the offenders as in cases of felony at the Common law. And that the offenders being hereof convict by verdict confession or outlawry shall suffer such pains of death and losses and penalties of their good chattels debts lands tenements and hereditaments as felons do according to the Common Laws of this Realme. And that no person offending in any such offence shall be admitted to his Clergy, and that Justices of the Peace shall have power and authority within the limits of their commissions and Jurisdictions to hear and determine the said offence, as they do in the cases of other felonies. This Act to endure till the last day of the next Parliament.”

Thomas Cromwell, House of Commons

Note: This act was extended through Parliament three additional times. Notable convictions under the act included: Walter Hungerford, 1st Baron Hungerford or Heytesbury in 1540; Mervyn Tuchet, 2nd Earl of Castlehaven in 1631; John Atherton, Bishop of Waterford in 1640; Vere Street Coterie in 1810; and Percy Jocelyn, Bishop of Clogher in 1822.

Sir Thomas Moore and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey both former chief ministers in the order listed preceding Cromwell; both died due to failing the king or defying him in Moore's case.

The buggery law was nothing more than an extension of existing legislation in Italy (namely Florence under the Medici popes etc), France (under Phillip the fourth and used to smear the knights Templars etc) and other parts of Europe for varying reasons. It was a legal instrument to bolster the smear campaign in the English reformation to label catholic priests/bishops/clergy or those who did not subscribe to the emerging protestant movement as designed by the monarch as same sex practicing or lovers of choir boys and the usual homosexuality/paedophilia conflation (words such as paedophilia or homosexual never entered the English Language as yet till hundreds of years later) and as part of the expulsion exercise under King Henry VIII also called the dissolution of the monasteries ways legal and theological were employed to bring the imperative into effect. 

Ann Boleyn queen in waiting for the rejected divorce request by King Henry VIII to the pope

The pope at that time did not grant the divorce King Henry VIII wanted from his first wife Catherine of Aragon (Henry’s deceased brother’s wife and daughter of King Ferdinand & queen Isabella of Spain and devote Catholics); Henry sought the divorce as she was thought to be beyond child bearing years and he desperately wanted a male heir. The pope realizing the implications of the catholic connections with Queen Catherine and Charles the fifth of Spain the then world power and who also happens to be the queen’s nephew.

The Medieval Basis of Modern Law

Although the Middle Ages, extending from about the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, is not a single cohesive epoch, the copious citation of trials and laws would merely accumulate evidence of homophobia rather than give us insight into its causes. Throughout this period anti-homosexual attitudes and stereotypes changed only in so far as they became more rigid, and were used increasingly to bolster certain social institutions such as the papacy and state governments. The real reason for the persecution of the Templars — the most powerful crusading order of its time — derived from political and economic hostility, greed and envy. The Church and the State defeated a real threat to their authority, confiscated their great wealth, and achieved an object lesson which struck terror into the hearts of much less powerful potential enemies. The unquestioned authority of Church and State was reaffirmed.

Since medieval asceticism was virtually identical with an obsession about sex, it was inevitable that charges of heresy and treason were always accompanied by charges of sexual deviation. Popular writers such as Dante used the same technique to attack their personal enemies. It is embarrassingly clear that certain men are condemned as sodomites in his Inferno, Canto XV, simply because it was a convenient smear tactic. Most of those literary men and clerks assigned to the seventh level of hell were Dante's political opponents; some, such as Guerra, Rusticucci, Aldrobandi, Latina, and perhaps Borsiere, were Guelfs, those responsible for Dante's exile from Florence.

In order for the Church and State to maintain control over what they perceived as a disorderly population, medieval people were increasingly forbidden to deviate from the right path in anything. Religious orthodoxy, political orthodoxy, and intellectual orthodoxy were all firmly bolstered by the savage imposition of sexual orthodoxy. Medieval secular law almost universally deferred to ecclesiastic law, in ever more rigid sanctions.

In French legislation, in Beauvais sodomites were burned and their property confiscated; in Touraine-Angou, they were burned and their goods fell to the local baron. In Italy, in such cities as Perugia, Bologna, and Ancona, lay confraternities were created in 1233 and entrusted with the task of ensuring religious and sexual conformity with particular attention to sodomy. In Perugia, the law provided for 40 men (8 from each of the 5 sections of the city) to investigate and denounce sodomites. At Ascoli Piceno a bounty was given to those who denounced sodomites. At Pisa, people who harboured sodomites were fined 100 lire. At Bologna, whoever dwelt in a building where sodomy was practised might be burnt along with the house. In Sienna, if a sodomite could not pay the 300 lire fine for a first offence, he was suspended by his genitals.

In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence — where men were fond of sodomy to such an extent that the Germans dubbed pederasts Florenzer and the German word for sodomy became florenzen — the laws were precise with a vengeance: pederasts were castrated; consenting boys under 14 were beaten, driven naked through the city, and fine 50 lire; youths between 14 and 18 were fined 100 lire; houses or fields where the act took place were laid waste; men found in suspicious circumstances were presumed guilty; torture could be used to elicit a confession; conviction resulted in burning at the stake. The chief city officials could investigate, punish, and torture in any way they saw fit, and could ban suspects from the city; even songs about sodomy were fined 100 lire. It is not much of an exaggeration to call this a campaign of extermination, although the penalties were gradually lowered toward the end of the fifteenth century, and a fine was often sufficient for those enforcers of the law who were more interested in money than in morals.

The persecution of homosexuals was one of the tools in the repertoire of repressive measures by which the Inquisition strengthened the Church and contributed to the centralization of the papacy. Modern defenders of Christianity, who point out that canon law emphasized the punishment of homosexuals within the clergy, usually ignore the fact that the law confraternities and mendicant orders had a brief to seek out and punish homosexuals in all sectors of the community. The fact that that ecclesiastical authorities turned over the heretics / witches / sodomites to the civil authorities for execution or punishment was of course a pious hypocrisy. The Inquisition's spawn of lay confraternities and the mendicant orders established sexual oppression throughout much of northern Europe as well as Italy, and every secular law justified itself with references to the Church Fathers, Scripture, and the papal decrees. Burning at the stake, and laying waste the fields were sodomy occurred, were directly inspired by the Christian interpretation of the store of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the severity of the anti-homosexual secular laws was a Judaeo-Christian inheritance.

The more specific detailing of homosexual crimes and punishments may be due to the rapid rise of political democratization in Italy, the reduced power of the oligarchy and the ethics of the petit bourgeois — though again, the Church's hatred and fear of material pleasures formed the basis of this morality.

The Penitential System had a devastating effect upon the laws of England (and consequently the laws of America). In 960 St Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, began a moral reform of the Church and society, and under his influence ecclesiastical law became the core for civil law. Thus "penances" came to be enforced as "sentences" in the courts of law. The eleventh-century court of the Normal William Rufus and Robert Duke of Normandy was believed to have been rife with homosexuality, and the successor King Henry I set about cleaning it up. At a Council in London he laid down new penalties for "those who commit the shameful sin of sodomy, and especially for those who of their own free will take pleasure in doing so." Homosexual clerics were to be expelled from their orders, and homosexual laymen were to be deprived of their civil rights. Henry's orders were moderated by Archbishop (later Saint) Anselm (himself probably at least a repressed homosexual, to judge by his love letters to several young men), who directed the clergy to exercise discretion: "It must be remembered that this sin has been publicly committed to such an extent that it scarcely makes anyone blush, and that many have fallen into it in ignorance of its gravity."

The first significant reference to civil laws against homosexuality in England occurred in 1376, when the God Parliament unsuccessfully petitioned King Edward III to banish all "Lombard brokers" because they were usurers, and other foreign artisans and traders, particularly "Jews and Saracens," who were accused to having introduced "the too horrible vice which is not to be named" which they thought would destroy the realm. But it was not until 1533 that a statute was actually enacted against homosexuals. The Act (25 Henry 8, chapter 6) adjudges buggery a felony punishable by hanging until dead. The Buggery Act was piloted through Parliament by Thomas Cromwell in an effort to support Henry VIII's plan for reducing the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, as the first step towards depriving them of the right to try certain offences, which supported his policy of seizing Church property. 

King Henry VIII by his favourite artist Hans Holbein

artwork from the Valor Ecclesiasticus, the document by Cromwell as requested by Henry VIII giving credence to extended or re-enacting the legislation in 1535/6 detailing the monasteries' dollar value and sins with buggery making the top of the list. The Valor gave the government for the first time a solid understanding of the scale of the wealth of the church as a whole and particularly of the monasteries. It was not long before King Henry began planning ways of seizing much of these riches for himself, starting with the smaller religious houses. Figures from the Valor were a vital part of the process of the Suppression of Religious Houses Act 1535, Henry's first move in the dissolution of the monasteries, which dissolved all monasteries with a declared income of less than £200 per year.

The Valor is a document of the first importance for historians of the later mediæval and Tudor church, the English Reformation, and the Dissolution. It is also valuable to economic historians of the period.

also see when done reading: 
Lawyers' Christian Fellowship's hypocritical stance on CCJ but keep Buggery Law!

Thus buggery was defined as a felony without benefit of clergy, which denied homosexuals in holy orders the right to be tried in the ecclesiastical courts, with the result that a conviction entailed loss of property to the Crown. The statute was re-enacted in 1536, 1539 and 1541 under Henry VIII; it was repealed in the first Parliament of Edward VI, along with all new felonies established by Henry VIII, but re-enacted in 1548 with amendments which no longer forfeited the felon's property to the Crown, and stipulations that indictments had to be framed within six months of the commission of the alleged act, and that no person who would benefit from the death of the accused could give evidence against him. With Mary's succession in 1553 it was repealed, along with many other statutes, thus giving jurisdiction back to the ecclesiastic courts. In 1563 it was revived by Queen Elizabeth I, in the harsh terms of the 1533 Act rather than with the amendments of 1548, because according to the Preamble, since the repeal of the Act in 1553 "divers ill disposed persons have been the more bold to commit the said most horrible and detestable Vice of Buggery aforesaid, to the high displeasure of Almighty God." Historical evidence fails to reveal any such excessive "boldness" for the years 1553 to 1563, and the only circumstance which prompted this severe reaction of Elizabeth's ministers was probably Elizabeth's desire to establish her claim to the throne as direct heir of Henry VIII: always politically astute, Elizabeth naturally re-enacted her father's laws rather than those of intermediate monarchs.

The long and short of it is King Henry VIII and his chief enforcer prior to his death Sir Thomas Wolsey and hired sidekick Thomas Cromwell who excellently displayed his skills prior that brought him some notoriety then promoted to his master’s post decided to split from the Vatican and form his own church as the church of England or Protestantism. Ironically Cromwell managed to survive the fall and death of his master and previous chief minister Sir Thomas Wolsey who in failing to gain the divorce King Henry needed ended up getting the boot aided and abetted by queen in waiting Ann Boleyn. 

Thomas Wolsey painting

In 1529 Wolsey was charged for exercising a foreign authority over the king for purely doing his job as the pope’s representative but it was more about the poison fed to the king via the queen in waiting Ann Boleyn. Cromwell then thrives in the aftermath and goes on to get rid of the very queen Ann Boleyn via false accusations of adultery and incest with her brother George Boleyn and five other men (Cromwell’s political enemies conveniently) which led to her and that of the five trial and execution. Queen Boleyn also lost some power as her inability to bare a son went against her. That episode proved how ruthless this man was yet while displaying a false piety. Cromwell came to the attention of the Cardinal and others after he successfully negotiated an extension of a license in 1517 known as the ‘stairway to heaven’ sold as a spiritual indulgence that allowed persons dead or alive to fly out of purgatory into heaven for a price. Only certain abbies were allowed to do so as granted by the pope himself, in this case it was Leo 10th and the great Boston Stump in Leicester was one such church where they made a killing from church congregations when prior to this indulgence licensing the church made money by reading sheep’s wool.

Those who refused to adhere to the new order under Henry were executed and church property looted, seized and sold by Cromwell that came to be known as the dissolution period; the sale of the monasteries brought in unprecedented wealth and assured England fortification of the south coast nearing the English Channel and the isle of white. The immediate effect however of the 1533 Act is unknown. It was on the books primarily as a symbolic token of the supremacy of the secular courts over the ecclesiastical courts. The prosecution of homosexuals was rare during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, and as far as one can discover, homosexual acts were not prosecuted with vigor until the second and third decades of the eighteenth century. The first recorded instance of any legal action was in 1541 (one of the years in which the Buggery Act was re-enacted), when Nicholas Udall, headmaster of Eton, was convicted of buggery; but strings were pulled in high places, and he was set free within a year. Homosexual prosecutions throughout the sixteenth century are sparse; in 1570 John Swan and John Lister, who were smiths and servants of the same master, with whom they lived, were charged with mutually consenting sodomy in Edinburgh, and in 1580 Matthew Heaton, a clergyman in East Grinstead, was prosecuted at the Sussex Assizes for a relationship with a boy in his parish. Fewer than a dozen prosecutions are recorded up through 1660, though this may reflect inadequate research into the subject, and a scarcity of extant legal records.

Convictions and punishments in other countries seem to have been more frequent and more severe. When William Lithgow visited Malta in 1616 he "saw a Spanish soldier and a Maltese boy burnt in ashes, for the public profession of sodomy," and by the end of the following day more than one hundred young men had fled to Sicily for fear of suffering a similar fate. In Geneva there were frequent prosecutions for sodomy from 1560 to 1610, linked to peaks of religious revival; a typical case was that of Pierre Canal, who in 1610 was tortured for high treason and murder, and before this inquisition was finished he had accused some 20 men of sodomy. Most of the sodomy charges throughout this period of Genevan history were leveled against French religious refugees. In Ireland, in 1640 John Atherton, Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, and his lover and tithe proctor John Child were convicted of buggery and hanged.

One of the tragedies of the New World is that it took over much of the legal system of the Old World. The Buggery Act of Henry VIII (as re-enacted by Elizabeth I in 1563) was adopted, often verbatim, by the original thirteen Colonies, and buggery was punished by death. The records of convictions are scarce, but they were not systematically recorded and are therefore difficult to discover. In 1624 Richard William Cornish, Master of the ship Ambrose, anchored in the James River, Virginia, was hanged for committing sodomy with the 29-year-old cabin boy William Couse. We know that sodomites were prosecuted in Plymouth Plantation in the 1640s. In 1646, in Massachusetts Bay Colony, William Plaine was executed for having committed sodomy with two persons in England before going over to the colonies; and in the same year, in Manhattan, New Netherland Colony, Jan Creoli, a negro, was sentenced to be choked to death and burned to ashes for a second offence of sodomy. In New Netherlands Colony there is a reference to attempted sodomy by N. G. Hillebrant or Hillebrantsen in 1658; and to alleged homosexual rape by J. Q. van der Linde (or Lijnden) in 1660 — he was tied in a sack and drowned in a river, while his partner was whipped and "sent to some other place." In 1674, in Massachusetts, a young man named Benjamin Goad was castrated for a crime which seems to have involved masturbating himself in front of, or with, other boys. Over the years, the death penalty was gradually replaced by whipping, imprisonment, castration, and forfeiture of all lands and goods, though in several states the death penalty was reintroduced.

Indeed the reform of anti-homosexual laws has been exceedingly difficult despite the increasingly liberal attitudes of more recent times. The Judaeo-Christian abhorrence of homosexuality and the buggery laws are likely to be with us for a long time to come, exacerbated by the fear of AIDS and as clear shown in modern times via groups such as Jamaica Coalition for a Healthy Society, JCHS and Dr Wayne West. In March 1991 for example, during the debate in the parliament of the Isle of Man as to whether or not to decriminalize homosexual acts in accordance with the British Government and the European Convention on Human Rights, the majority of the Council of Ministers wished to retain their law against homosexuality. The argument of the select committee which rejected a proposal to bring their law into line with the rest of Western Europe pretends to be modern in its assertion that private homosexual activity should be banned in order to protect public health by preventing the spread of AIDS, but the vocabulary of prejudice has not changed over the centuries. It was summarized in the words of Mr Edgar Quine, opposed to reform of the Manx laws, who said "Dress it up as we will we are still talking about the unnatural offensive and abominable act of buggery."

Fast forward to modern times the same strategy is used despite wider knowledge of HIV/AIDS and the debunking of the epidemic as a gay disease; crackpots such as Dr Wayne West continue to misuse studies and old papers to justify hatred.

Cromwell was promoted in 1532 to chief minister after his successes in getting the divorce through and the supremacy launching the church of England effectively while given more power over the management of monasteries hence as part of the smear campaign to vilify Catholics the timing of the buggery law was most convenient, as a removed or absent Vatican control with its ecclesiastical courts and moral control a vacuum came following the passage of both the Act of Restraint of Appeals to essentially block Queen Catherine from appealing to Rome attempting to block the divorce and greater Acts of Supremacy overall both predicated on the patriotic fantasies of writers such as 

Geoffrey of Monmouth and his work on Merlin, King Arthur and the Knights of the roundtable which was a fictional piece and not viewed as legit by historians. With the breach secure a previously near impotent parliament that had as its main activity raising funds on behalf of the monarch now found itself with powers to decide more personal freedom matters. The deception effectively that carried both acts through parliament was that England was always an empire and the monarch an emperor but some amnesia made him forget this power hence no power can usurp and emperor’s authority, not even the pope. Cromwell wanted to discredit the monasteries so apart from the labeling of them being centres of gay activity playing on the celibacy tradition and nearly all male positions of power held he also tapped into the widely held perception of church corruption to bolster his campaign. Frankly I think he pretended to be a pious man in order to achieve his goals as he knew all too well what can happen to those who do not please the king, case in point his very late master Wolsey. The Hailes monastery in Gloucester that claimed to have the holy blood of Christ became a showcase example for Cromwell addressing ‘church corruption’ he sent the blood to be examined in 1538 and after centuries of veneration it was declared as honey clarified in saffron. A year later the monastery was closed down and ironical one year after that Cromwell himself was executed for treason in 1540; some conclude he got his just desserts especially after his clash with the Duke of Norfolk Thomas Howard his arch enemy on the council who battled with him for years on various matters including theological ones. Cromwell in what was seen by some historians as his rapid self destruction he basically managed to close down one of the last two remaining monasteries known as Thetford Priory where the ancestors of Norfolk were buried which angered the Duke who had to exhume and rebury the bones in a most humiliating exercise in 1540; after which the Duke plotted his revenge. Cromwell was responsible for dissolving over 800 monasteries and church houses which effectively led to the greatest privatization exercise in the history of governance at the time with property sold off to a new gentry class thus securing King Henry VIII’s firmness on the throne as he did not trust the existing nobles who in a civil war when his own father came to the throne. Monasteries occupied some one sixth of all of England so the wealth from the land sales poured into the strengthening of the army, newly create a navy and the aforementioned fortification of the south susceptible to French and Spanish invasion prior. The Duke got through parliament a bill of attainder thus stripping Cromwell of his titles and estates and precipitously he came crashing down added to the King blaming him for the mismatch and falsity in the embellished meeting and subsequent wedding of Henry to Ann of Cleves based on a portrait that bore no resemblance to the actual woman when she arrived in England.

Ann of Cleves in English headdress instead of her German attire she wore for the actual portrait and full frontal face shot instead of the traditional angled presentations in contemporary art

King Henry was forced to testify in front of a church court (his own Church of England as its head embarrassingly) that replaced the now evicted ecclesiastical systems under Catholicism as to why he could not consummate the marriage with Ann of Cleves who he eventually divorced and named her as his sister instead in the settlement papers much to her embarrassment but with wealth afforded to her until Henry died. In granting the testimony of impotence King Henry VIII needed to blame someone especially for a king who prided himself with his virility so he laid it all at Cromwell’s feet and with the combination his end was inevitable in my eyes. Deception effectively made him and deception ended up being his downfall. The very church corruption he pretended to fight in later years was what brought him to power.

28 July 1540 – The Executions of Thomas Cromwell and Walter Hungerford -While Henry VIII was busy marrying wife number 5, his former chief minister Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, was being beheaded on Tower Hill. Cromwell had passed against him awful charges on 29th June 1540 for the crimes of corruption, heresy and treason.

Cromwell climbed the scaffold on Tower Hill and addressed the gathered crowd:

“I am come hether to dye, and not to purge my self, as maie happen, some thynke that I will, for if I should do so, I wer a very wretche and miser: I am by the Lawe comdempned to die, and thanke my lorde God that hath appoynted me this deathe, for myne offence: For sithence the tyme that I have had yeres of discrecion, I have lived a synner, and offended my Lorde God, for the whiche I aske hym hartely forgevenes. And it is not unknowne to many of you, that I have been a great traveler in this worlde, and beyng but of a base degree, was called to high estate, and sithes the tyme I came thereunto, I have offended my prince, for the whiche I aske hym hartely forgevenes, and beseche you all to praie to God with me, that he will forgeve me.

O father forgeve me. O sonne forgeve me, O holy Ghost forgeve me: O thre persons in one God forgeve me. And now I praie you that be here, to beare me record, I die in the Catholicke faithe, not doubtyng in any article of my faith, no nor doubtyng in any Sacrament of the Churche. Many hath sclaundered me, and reported that I have been a bearer, of suche as hath mainteigned evill opinions, whiche is untrue, but I confesse that like as God by his holy spirite, doth instruct us in the truthe, so the devill is redy to seduce us, and I have been seduced: but beare me witnes that I dye in the Catholicke faithe of the holy Churche. And I hartely desire you to praie for the Kynges grace, that he maie long live with you, maie long reigne over you. And once again I desire you to pray for me, that so long as life remaigneth in this fleshe, I waver nothyng in my faithe.”

Cromwell then knelt at the block and was beheaded “by a ragged and Boocherly miser, whiche very ungoodly perfourmed the office” – a botched execution in other words.

Walter, Lord Hungerford of Heytesbury, a client of Cromwell’s, was also executed on that day. He has gone down in history as the only man to be executed for the crime of “treason of buggery” in the Tudor period, but the charges against him also included:

• Treason for pretending to arrest Pilgrimage of Grace supporter William Bird, Vicar of Bradford-on-Avon, when he actually supported him by employing him as chaplain.

• Using magic, along with Sir Hugh Wood and Dr Maudlin, to predict how long Henry VIII would live.

As for the “buggery” charge, Hungerford had allegedly “exercised and frequented, and used the abominable and detestable vice and sin of buggery with William Master, Thomas Smith” and others in his household.”

Hungerford was also beheaded on Tower Hill, following Cromwell on to the scaffold, and his head joined Cromwell’s on London Bridge for public display. Retha Warnicke believes that it was the information that the King’s council gleaned about Hungerford, and his association with sorcerers and witches, that caused the heresy charges to be added to Cromwell’s bill of attainder because there was a “connection between sodomites and heretics.” Cromwell’s connection with Hungerford was definitely a way to blacken his name.

Henry VIII did come to regret Thomas Cromwell’s fall and execution. Marillac, the French ambassador, reported that the King had said that the King reproached his council for using “false accusations” to bring down Cromwell, complaining that “they made him put to death the most faithful servant he ever had.” 

St Peter ad Vincular burial place for traitors

Ironically Cromwell ended up in the same cemetery for traitors St Peter ad Vincular just yards away from executed queen Ann Boleyn whose death he single-handedly orchestrated, headless of course as his head was placed on a spike for display at London bridge.

Although centuries later we must not overlook the fact that James VI of Scotland (King James Bible) son to Mary Queen of Scots who came to the English throne after the death of Elizabeth 1 with the law still in place was openly bisexual and was not prosecuted for buggery; yet it was under him that the most successful English translation of the Bible came forth out of the puritanical debate in 1610 and theological clashes concerning piety, abundance of wealth in the church and monarchy. His infamous line during one of the one on one sessions still lingers “No bishop no king” as he recognized that the nakedness of the church in terms of reduction in wealth and display would essentially wipe out the look and feel of the monarchy as it had become.

If the country of origin has so changed their arrangements finally to permit equality to homosexuals and such then why are we still holding on four hundred plus aged outdated legislation given the calls for reparations for slavery and dropping the UK Privy Council as our final court?

Also we must I cannot leave out the preservative where we are still stuck with this stupid law via the Savings Law Clause In a statute, an exception of a special item out of the general things mentioned in the statute. A restriction in a repealing act, which is intended to save rights, while proceedings are pending, from the obliteration that would result from an unrestricted repeal. 

The provision in a statute, sometimes referred to as the severability clause, that rescues the balance of the statute from a declaration of unconstitutionality if one or more parts are invalidated. With respect to existing rights, a saving clause enables the repealed law to continue in force that essentially came into effect on the night of our so called independence:

Savings Law Clause

• S. 26 (8)

 Nothing contained in any law in force immediately before the appointed day (Independence 1962) shall be held to be inconsistent with any of the provisions of this Chapter; and nothing done under the authority of any such law shall be held to be done in contravention of any of these provisions.

Offences Against the Person Act (1864)

Unnatural Offences

• 76. Whosoever shall be convicted of the abominable crime of buggery, committed either with mankind or with any animal, shall be liable to be  imprisoned and kept to hard labour for a term not exceeding ten years.

• 77. Whosoever shall attempt to commit the said abominable crime, or shall be guilty of any assault with intent to commit the same, or of any indecent assault upon any male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof, shall be liable to be imprisoned for a term not exceeding seven years, with or without hard labour.

Outrages on Decency

• 79. Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of the court to be imprisoned for a term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour.

also see: Buggery Law challenges & overlooked judicial solutions 2013

I hope some persons who take up spokes-person duties would please do some research before embarrassing themselves effectively on such matters; if we do not understand how we got here then we cannot plan and execute said plans for the future.

Peace and tolerance

H

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Some SOURCES: Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (London and New York, 1955); Vern L. Bullough, "Heresy, Witchcraft, and Sexuality," Journal of Homosexuality, 1, 2 (1974), 183-201; Michael Goodich, "Sodomy in Ecclesiastical Law and Theory," Journal of Homosexuality, 1, 4 (1976), 427-34; Michael Goodish, "Sodomy in Medieval Secular Law," Journal of Homosexuality, 1, 3 (1976), 295-302; Montgomery H. Hyde, The Other Love (London: Heinemann, 1976); Jonathan Katz, Gay American History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976); John J. McNeil SJ, The Church and the Homosexual (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1977); William E. Monter, "La sodomie à l'epoque moderne en Suisse romande," Annals: E. S. C., 29 (1974), 1023-33; Rictor Norton, "The Biblical Roots of Homophobia" and "A Rejoinder”