'Righting past wrongs': The Americans fighting US 'sodomy laws' | LGBTQ | Al Jazeera
peter.suber's bookmarks 2020-09-06
Summary:
"It was 1999. Cooper was about to have her first encounter with Louisiana's Crimes Against Nature laws, part of a web of so-called sodomy laws that once existed across the United States. In specifically criminalising oral and anal sex, advocates have long argued that sodomy laws were tools for discrimination against the LGBTQ community, even in cases where sexual orientation was not written into the law itself....
A 2012 class-action lawsuit took aim at the CANS statute, identifying the sex offender registry requirement as unconstitutional. Cooper was among nine anonymous plaintiffs. The Center for Constitutional Rights, one of the organisations behind the lawsuit, found that CANS convictions at the time amounted to 40 percent of registered sex offenders in the New Orleans area. Most CANS defendants were female or Black.
Ultimately, the state was forced to remove nearly 900 individuals convicted under CANS from the sex offender registry. Cooper was one of them. She remembers crying when she heard the news...."