Decriminalizing Homosexuality: A Global Overview Since the 18th Century (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Decriminalizing Homosexuality: A Global Overview Since the 18th Century (2022)

hal.science

25 pointstherabbithole13 comments

It's funny because criminalisation in Poland is stated as 1815 but Poland was not existing at that time. It's had been divided by three countries (Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary) three times, last done on 1795 which made Poland inexistent for next 123 years. I wonder which territory was taken into account because there were three different law systems on the three partitions.

Possibly the Free City of Cracow (Kraków) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_City_of_Cracow - which was arguably the only 'Polish' state that existed at the time, surviving until 1848?

Although I suspect it may be coming from the Wikipedia article, or its source (which is in Polish so I can't verify exactly what it says) - reproduced below.

> The Napoleonic Code, introduced in the Duchy of Warsaw in 1808, was silent on homosexuality. After 1815, all three countries that partitioned Poland explicitly declared homosexual acts illegal. In Congress Poland homosexuality was criminalised in 1818, in Prussia in 1871 and in Austria in 1852. Russia's new code of law (called Kodeks Kar Głównych i Poprawczych/Уложение о наказаниях уголовных и исправительных 1845 года) in 1845 penalized homosexuality with forced resettlement to Siberia.

This map gives a tl;dr of which countries still criminalise being gay. Somber reading. In many countries penalties include imprisonment and death.

https://www.humandignitytrust.org/lgbt-the-law/map-of-crimin...

What is the source of the criminalisation of homosexuality? The original sin that started the wave?

Is it tied in any way to backlash to the Romans? It seems to randomly pop up in Christian Rome and then percolate across the Abrahamic faiths from there [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminalization_of_homosexua...

Given that most of the listed countries are hot, a more reasonable take is climate change.

> Given that most of the listed countries are hot, a more reasonable take is climate change

If you’re looking at the modern map, it’s largely one of Islam.

It must be hard to do research on this since I can imagine that prosecutions were possible even if homosexuality were not actually illegal (one can find other crimes to prosecute such as 'corrupting the youth') and the conflation between various sexual acts in law (e.g. consentual versus non-consentual sexual activity).

I do appreciate the idea that it may have been prompted by anti-homosexual moral panics though. That resonates.

> it may have been prompted by anti-homosexual moral panics

I suppose I’m curious about how those panics arose. It seems to have gone from generally accepted to generally feared in an ambiguous way.

No, it's in the Old Testament as well.

> it's in the Old Testament as well

How old are the relevant lines in Leviticus 18 and 20? From what I can tell, homosexuality wasn’t referenced in the first versions from 800 BCE [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Hebrew_Leviticus_Scrol...

Not sure how you get that from the link.

Am I missing something?

Kind of an absurd metric. At one point, no countries criminalized homosexuality. A nation state in general is a European concept. The earliest accepted date for the first nation state is 1648, but even then it didn't really turn into a global concept until after WW1 or even WW2. Most countries that criminalized homosexuality did so while under colonial rule

It just seems silly to start the timeline to when France, a country that criminalized homosexuality in its colonies, decriminalized it

> At one point, no countries criminalized homosexuality. A nation state in general is a European concept

Your confusion arises from mixing up the terms country and nation state. Nation states are modern [1]. States, what you’re calling countries, are as old as history.

States criminalised homosexuality well before there were nation states [2]. (The point at which no country criminalised homosexuality appears to be in the neighbourhood of the first centuries AD.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminalization_of_homosexua...

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