[Foundation-l] Concern for the safety of Wikimedians at Wikimania in Alexandria.

[Mark Williamson]

I would change that "didn't see people going to jail" to "very rarely
saw people going to jail".

That is to say, if somebody was suspected to be engaged in sodomy, I
don't believe there was a jurisdiction where that alone was considered
probable cause for an investigation, but if such acts were discovered
in the course of an investigation of some other alleged crime, people
could be charged, even if all other charges were dropped.

The case in which sodomy laws were struck down, Lawrence v. Texas, is
an example of this. Somebody filed a false police report, an armed
officer entered a private residence on suspicion that there was a
domestic disturbance there with a man with a gun "going crazy", and
when this was found to be false, the two men caught in the act of
intercourse were arrested for sodomy.

Certainly, this sort of thing was rare by 2003 - especially compared
to Egypt - but it's not as if it never happened.

Mark

On 04/03/2008, Chad <innocentkiller at gmail.com> wrote:
> The problem was, sodomy wasn't exactly enforced
>  in the United States (it is elsewhere though!). You
>  didn't see people going to jail for practicing sodomy.
>  Striking it down was more of a symbolic change than
>  a real change in American sex lives.
>
>
>  -Chad
>
>
>  On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 3:58 AM, Marco Chiesa <chiesa.marco at gmail.com> wrote:
>  > Mark Williamson ha scritto:
>  >
>  > > I think the main difference here is that drug use is illegal in almost
>  >  > every country, the Netherlands being an exception. Homosexual activity
>  >  > is decriminalized in almost all of the Americas and Europe as well as
>  >  > much of Asia (which is not part of the Western world, so there!).
>  >  >
>  >  BTW, according to
>  >  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy_laws_in_the_United_States it seems
>  >  that until 2003 a few states in the US had laws against sodomy, meaning
>  >  that those places would have been considered unsafe for LGBT people.
>  >  Fortunately things have changed now, but I have the feeling that there
>  >  wouldn't have been such the havoc in this mailing list if Wikimania 2002
>  >  had been scheduled in Idaho or Oklahoma.
>  >
>  >  Every location would have some problems for someone, being it the
>  >  difficulty/impossibility to get a visa or pay for the airfare, diseases,
>  >  restrictive laws, terrorism threats.
>  >  Cruccone
>  >
>  >
>  >
>  >
>  >
>  >
>  >
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