For crying out loud, it was the law! It is not my job to cure you of your ignorance. But here are some simple facts which are all pretty easy to verify if you actually cared.
Thomas Jefferson advocated for castration of gays, which was considered kind in his day as the penalty for sodomy was death.
I keep learning things from you. I never would have known, for example, that if Thomas Jefferson advocated something, that made it the law. But Jefferson was opposed to having a Supreme Court, and yet somehow the Constitution ended up creating one. I wonder how that can be!
At the time of this country's founding, there was a death penalty in England for all sorts of crimes, even pretty minor ones--but it was very seldom applied for these less serious crimes. And our laws strongly reflected English law. I have no idea which states made sodomy punishable by death, but what counts is how often people were actually executed for it. In Lawrence, which I can see you know about, Justice Scalia, citing an authority, writes that "There are also records of 20 sodomy prosecutions and 4 executions during the colonial period." Four, total, in America during the colonial period.
Lawrence versus Texas in 2003 struck down the sodomy laws in over a dozen states where gays often faced up to 5 years of imprisonment.
Yes. What of it? Fornication was a crime in many states even well into the 20th century, too--but that doesn't mean fornicators were commonly prosecuted, convicted, and punished. They were not.
It's noted in Lawrence that records show there were 203 prosecutions for homosexual sodomy between 1880 and 1995--an average of somewhat less than two per year throughout the U.S. No figure for convictions is given, but obviously not every person prosecuted for any crime is convicted. So the average was one or two convictions per year, and it's doubtful all of the people convicted served jail time.
The reality seems somewhat less lurid and sensational than the image of Nazi concentration camps you conjured up.
The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness up until 1973
Again, what of it? Did the fact the APA took that view cause homosexuals to be castrated, imprisoned, killed in concentration camps, and whatever else was in your parade of horrors?
and it was treated with a variety of harmful methods.
Oh, I see. Can't ask for a much more detailed and well-supported argument than that.
But those are just a few facts.
Yes--a very few, I'd say. But you did flesh them out with a lot of peevish assertions.
You clearly are ignorant of LGBT history and have no desire to educate yourself.
On that, you are right. I couldn't care less about the history of homosexuality.
I am not here to play "who is the most mistreated minority" as you appear to be but rest assured that gays have had there share.
Hey, life's rough all over.
