Gay Rights

The article that I read was very intersting and talked about how there was hate crime lesgislation on people who were Gay and Lesbian and people were killed because they were gay and lesbian. Before the 1960's gays and lesbians were not protected by the U.S. Constitution. In England,in 1533, Parliament passed the Buggery Act, which made homosexual intercourse a capital offense punishable by hanging. Also the article talks about how before the 20th century, if someone was gay or lesbian it was private and the public did not really know about this. In response to a visible gay culture, government authorities moved to clamp down on homosexual behavior. For the first time in America, moral reform societies identified homosexuality as a specific social problem to eradicate.In the article it says, "Though gay men were now open targets of law enforcement, it was not until the 1930s that concerted antigay campaigns began to flourish, most of which developed in reaction to the perceived lawlessness of the Prohibition era. Homosexuality became linked in the popular mind to a criminal underworld populated by prostitutes, child molesters, and murderers". This shows how America was not used to change and didnt see gays and lesbians as people, but as a stero type to a specific thing. When i read this it bothered me because someone should not be sterotyped based on their sexuality, or the color of their skin. Those things do not base off the character of a person. Also this article talks about the movement of events that took place in America it says, "Although the success of gays and lesbians in securing civil rights has increased markedly since the 1970s after activists began to challenge federal and state laws, aspects of homosexual behavior remained criminalized in many parts of the United States until the landmark decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which ruled antisodomy laws unconstitutional". This shows how some people and states are just against this and the negative affects towards that. At the end of the article it talks about AIDS and its very interesting for me to read what it has to say about it. It says, " Part of the difficulty that gays and lesbians have faced in securing the legalization of same-sex relationships stems from the rise of the Christian Right and misinformation generated during the early phase of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, when gay men were thought to be the only carriers of the disease. AIDS generated a backlash among conservative Americans, who used the disease as an excuse to justify violence against homosexuals and their exclusion from civil rights and hate crime legislation. Colorado's Amendment 2 (1992), which was later declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in Romer v. Evans (1996), sought to deny sexual orientation as a possible basis for discrimination and thus protection under Colorado law"."gay rights." American History. ABC-CLIO, 2010. Web. 28 Jan. 2010. .