The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide on the constitutionality of state
sodomy laws and, as a Michigan state legislator, I support repeal of this state's
laws. Violators of Michigan's felony law can be penalized with 15 years of
imprisonment and can even be sentenced to five years for engaging in oral sex.
Michigan's sodomy laws apply to heterosexuals and homosexuals (and everyone in
between), married or unmarried, and cover a wide and vaguely defined range of
private, adult, consensual, non-commercial sexual activities.
While doing research on Michigan's sodomy law, I examined sodomy laws
worldwide. I took a world map and colored black the U.S. states and foreign
countries with penalties as strict or stricter than Michigan's. Countries and
states with no such laws, I left uncolored. The results should be disconcerting
to anyone who cherishes the United States as the standard bearer of freedom
throughout the world: two U.S. states stand with a handful of Islamic theocracies
centered around the Middle East whose names mostly ended with "stan." These
"stans" and some other Muslim nations are joined by several North African
nations, one South American nation (Guyana), and a few places in Asia (Malaysia,
Nepal, Mauritania, the Maldives, and Singapore). Only one modern democracy
outside the U.S. makes the list: India, whose maximum penalty of life
imprisonment is matched by Idaho. In all, there are 18 black-colored countries
and one U.S. state with sodomy penalties stricter than Michigan's.
The uncolored states and countries, those with no sodomy laws, dominate the
map. No European country has sodomy laws. Neither do Canada, Mexico, Central
America, and 37 of the American states, nor do Russia, China, Japan, and the vast
majority of Asian states, nor any place in South America (save Guyana) have any
laws that punish consenting adults, in the privacy of their homes, for making
love as they choose. I colored gray 13 states and several dozen countries (again
centered disproportionately in Islamic regions) because they have lesser sodomy
penalties, ranging from minor fines to less than 15 years imprisonment.
To be fair, U.S. states rarely enforce their sodomy laws
while the same is not true in some Middle Eastern countries. Amnesty
International estimates that as many as 4,000 homosexual men have been
decapitated by the Iranian government since that nation's 1979 Islamic
revolution. In 2000, Saudi Arabia beheaded three men convicted of sodomy, and
nine others were sentenced to more than 2,500 lashes and five years
imprisonment.1 The penalty in
Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban government is uncertain, but before the
regime change the penalty for homosexual sex was to place the offender next to a
stone wall and push it on top of him with a tank or bulldozer. Whether the
offender lived or died was considered to be the judgment of Allah.
