In the Bible the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were said to be destroyed by the Lord with brimstone and fire on account of the wicked and sinful natures of the men who resided in the cities. The wicked and sinful part of their nature is that the men of Sodom would rather have sex with other men than with the virginal daughters that Lot had offered them. This is where the word sodomy comes from and it is defined as a person given to the sin of Sodom, in other words someone who engages in homosexual acts (Norton, 2013). To combat this kind of “detestable” and “unnatural” behavior the English government created laws which strictly prohibited homosexual acts between men and also women. Although it should be noted that the church already viewed sodomy as a sin before the English judicial system did.
Sodomy was a capital offense in eighteenth century England (Greene, 204). A capital offense simply means it is a charge which carries the death penalty. Between 1700 and 1800 many cases involving sodomitical acts came before the English criminal courts, and while the majority were cases of assault with sodomitical intent, there were a few cases of sodomy. The individuals convicted of sodomy were sentenced to be hanged at Tyburn.
Just as there were laws against sodomy on land so were there on the sea. Specifically Article 29 of the 1749 Articles of War which stated:
If any person in the fleet shall commit the unnatural and detestable sin of buggery, of sodomy with man or beast, he shall be punished with death by the sentence of a Court Martial. (Gilbert, 79)
Although Article 29 is very clear about the expected punishment for a sailor convicted of sodomy the king had the power to pardon any sailor found guilty of a capital crime. According...
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Works Cited
Asal, Victor, Paul G. Harwood, and Udi Sommer. "Original Sin: A Cross National Study of the Legality of Homosexual Acts ." Comparative Political Studies. no. 3 (2012): 320-351. http://www.sagepublications.com/ (accessed November 24, 2013).
Greene, Jody . "Public Secrets: Sodomy and the Pillory in the Eighteenth Century and Beyond." Eighteenth Century: Theory & Interpretation. no. 2/3 (2003): 203-232.
Gilbert, Arthur N. . "Buggery and the British Navy, 1700-1861." Journal of Social History. no. 1 (1976): 72 98.
Norton, Rictor. Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700-1830. Gloucestershire: The Chalford Press, 2006.
Rictor Norton (Ed.), "Homosexual Terms in 18th-century Dictionaries", Homosexuality in Eighteenth Century England: A Sourcebook, 13 May 2008, updated 15 July 2013 .
Specifically addressing the charges of fornication and bastardy, he writes “Virginia courts may have shown somewhat more interest in undertaking such prosecutions, but in both colonies death rates were so high and birth rates so low that any birth, whether legitimized by marriage or not, was cause for celebration rather than criminal prosecution.” Further mitigating the more violent elements of Virginia law was the fact that the death penalty was seldom carried out except for the most heinous crimes due to the chronic labor shortage in the
In the Hebrew Bible, adultery is considered a capital crime, punishable by the population stoning the adulterous wife and her lover to death. Deut. 22:20 commands this communal punishment in order to “sweep away evil from Israel.” The question remains as to why this crime was considered to be such a transgression. Several explanations exist to account for the seriousness of the crime.
No doubt deviant sex is almost as old as the race. There are few innovations in moral weakness. What is new is the homosexual ideology which has made devastating inroads into the Church from the ambient culture. One is made to believe that recalling the Church's teaching is an uncharitable act and that the Christian thing to do is to act as if sodomy were as normal as marital sex. Of course it is scarcely a defense of homosexuality to point out that many people commit sexual sins. The tu quoque here is singularly inappropriate. We began with the observation that we are all sinners. The question is, what next?
He does go on to suggest that those who are sections of androgynes are “adulterers” “adulteresses” (191 d-e), but this can only show the rather bizarre belief that sexual intercourse with a member of the same sex does not constitute adultery.
Fag. Poof. Fairy. Homo. Dyke. Those are all words that are used on a daily basis to put down those who do not fit into the Bible’s supposed cookie-cutter, straight sexual orientation label. Homophobia has been around since the eleven hundreds, but before then homosexuality was viewed as healthy, normal, and at times it was even worshipped. However, society’s view of homosexuality has somehow been warped into a violently negative opinion. How did this happen? The main perpetrators of homophobia are the Bible and those who preach its word, or at least their version of its word. Which brings up the translation issues scattered throughout the Bible. The New Testament was written in Greek and there are not always direct translations of each word in English. The messages in the Bible that are said to condemn homosexuality can be interpreted in a more accepting way than they are usually preached.
Capital Punishment is the legal authorization for killing someone who committed a crime. The first date for which the death penalty first started goes back as far as Eighteenth century B.C, Fourteenth Century B.C.'s Hittite Code, and the Seventh Century B.C.'s Draconian Code of Athens. These codes made the death penalty open for anyone who committed a crime. Some death sentences punishments in the Roman law of the twelve tablets were Crucifixion, drowning, beating to death, and burning alive. Britain also used capital punishment for crimes. In the Tenth century they hung people. When King Henry was the ruler as many as 72,000 people have been executed. Some methods for executions during this time were boiling,burning, and beheading. You could have been executed for marrying a Jew,Treasoning, and not confessing to a crime. Capital punishment in Britain had influenced America. When the Europeans settled to america they brought capital punishment along. It started to spread from colony to colony. The 1960’s brought new obstacles of the legalization of the capital punishment. The Fifth, Eighth and Fourteenth amendments said that capital punishment was illegal. In the
* Halley, Janet E.; "Reasoning About Sodomy;" Virginia Law Review; Vol. 79:1721; 193 p. 1740-1772.
As harsh as it may seems now a days back then i know more than half the population would agree this is a sin worth death. “ this woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to
“I did not intend to pay, before the gods,/for breaking these laws/because of my fear of one man and his principles.”
19). Same-sex marriages may seem an abomination to the union of man and woman through marriage, but just because it was not written in the Bible does not mean that it goes against Christianity. Some traditions from the Bible is not valid today because it is either not relevant nowadays or it attacks the morals of humanity. An example of a tradition is forcing women to marry the man who rapes them (Deut. 22:28-29). In the Old Testament there’s a story in Genesis 19:1-11 about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is interpreted that God punished the city because of its homosexual acts. This reasoning is flawed. The story actually begins at Genesis 18, when the Lord revealed to Abraham that He would go to Sodom and judge the fatality of their sins. In the book “A Question of Truth” by Gareth Moore, he states that: “Abraham’s hospitality and the destruction of Sodom are closely linked” (Moore, 70). In Genesis 18, Abraham showed hospitality and welcomed three strangers and served them as if he was their servant. Later on, the man who remained revealed Himself as the
In times of war, the Letter of Marque and Reprisal was issued, giving privateers the license to attack an e...
So powerful is the compulsion of the law, that even if a man slays one who is his own chattel [i.e., his slave] and who has none to avenge him, his fear of the ordinances of god and of man causes him to purify himself and withhold himself from those places prescribed by law, in the hope that by so doing he will best avoid disaster.
When Shakespeare was born in 1564, Queen Elizabeth had taken power a mere 6 years prior, and her justice system was very different from ours. In this paper, I hope to explore some of the ways punishments were different, such as how many crimes had individual punishments, often times depending on how severe the crime was. I will also go in-depth to one of the most infamous cases of the medieval period.
During the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the battle for complete colonial domination over Newfoundland had become exacerbated through military and diplomatic hostilities between England and France. These ethnic and nationalist conflicts devolved many decades of cooperation and solidarity amongst fisherman in Newfoundland, which would result in continual warfare between Britain and France. During 1696-1697, the French military under Pierre Le Moyne d 'Iberville had attacked British fishing settlements and destroyed many of them during this conflict. This aspect of the military competition to gain complete control of Newfoundland brought about a major setback to British fishing communities:
Anti-sodomy laws started before 1779 where it was against the law in every state and the punishment for Virginia was death as the maximum penalty. The progression of the laws has continued to adapt to time. As the laws progressed the punishment for the crimes did as well, some punishments (depending on state) were imprisonment, fines, or hard labor. In some foreign countries being gay the punishment was death. A way to help the punishment the Model Penal Code that was created by the American Law Institute to make sure that states were on the same page and to help remove consensual acts of sodomy out of the criminal system (Canaday). The first state to accept the idea of removing consensual acts was Illinois and it would take many years fo...