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snousleHow interesting - for much of the 20th century, California imposed harsher penalties for heterosexual oral sex than for gay anal sex. From The History of Sodomy Laws In The United States:
In 1916, an appellate court, deciding People v. Carrell, reached another interesting conclusion. Carrell’s conviction for fellatio was overturned because the word "fellatio" was not English and not of common usage among the public. Carrell himself did not know the meaning of the word. What was overlooked by the court was that Carrell had been charged with committing fellatio on a woman. The physical impossibility of the act was never mentioned by the court in its haste to decry the usage of uncommon terms in criminal laws...
...The issue of Latin terms returned to the California Supreme Court just four months later in the 1919 case of Ex Parte Lockett. For unclear reasons, the Court reversed itself. Justice Melvin, now speaking for a 5-1 majority instead of in dissent, found the law against fellatio and cunnilingus unconstitutional because, by using Latin phraseology, the public was unaware of what acts were criminalized by the law.
Another statute of 1921 attempted to create a constitutional law against oral sex. The new law outlawed "the act of copulating the mouth of one person with the sexual organ of another" and retained the penalty of up to 15 years in prison, thus making oral sex a more serious crime than anal sex....
In the 1941 case of People v. Angier, an appellate court decided, unanimously, that the state’s oral copulation law was not violated by merely kissing or licking a sexual organ. Actual penetration of the mouth had to occur...
California pioneered a law known as the sex offender registration law in 1947. Anyone living in California, and who had been convicted since 1944 of any of several enumerated crimes, including sodomy and oral copulation, was required to register as a sex offender with the county sheriff or chief of police...
After years of lobbying, and after the adoption of the explicit privacy language in the California Constitution, a consenting adults law was enacted in 1975. Although not repealing either the sodomy or oral copulation laws, it excluded private consensual activity among those over the age of eighteen from their reach...
In 1997, the danger of the newly enacted sex offender registration laws was demonstrated in California. Although these laws conceivably pose no threat in states that have repealed consensual sodomy laws (such as California), abuse is possible. Police in the state began sending notices to Gay men arrested on misdemeanor charges, such as solicitation, as long ago as the 1940s and threatening them with arrest under the offender law unless they could prove they were not subject to the law.
In 1916, an appellate court, deciding People v. Carrell, reached another interesting conclusion. Carrell’s conviction for fellatio was overturned because the word "fellatio" was not English and not of common usage among the public. Carrell himself did not know the meaning of the word. What was overlooked by the court was that Carrell had been charged with committing fellatio on a woman. The physical impossibility of the act was never mentioned by the court in its haste to decry the usage of uncommon terms in criminal laws...
...The issue of Latin terms returned to the California Supreme Court just four months later in the 1919 case of Ex Parte Lockett. For unclear reasons, the Court reversed itself. Justice Melvin, now speaking for a 5-1 majority instead of in dissent, found the law against fellatio and cunnilingus unconstitutional because, by using Latin phraseology, the public was unaware of what acts were criminalized by the law.
Another statute of 1921 attempted to create a constitutional law against oral sex. The new law outlawed "the act of copulating the mouth of one person with the sexual organ of another" and retained the penalty of up to 15 years in prison, thus making oral sex a more serious crime than anal sex....
In the 1941 case of People v. Angier, an appellate court decided, unanimously, that the state’s oral copulation law was not violated by merely kissing or licking a sexual organ. Actual penetration of the mouth had to occur...
California pioneered a law known as the sex offender registration law in 1947. Anyone living in California, and who had been convicted since 1944 of any of several enumerated crimes, including sodomy and oral copulation, was required to register as a sex offender with the county sheriff or chief of police...
After years of lobbying, and after the adoption of the explicit privacy language in the California Constitution, a consenting adults law was enacted in 1975. Although not repealing either the sodomy or oral copulation laws, it excluded private consensual activity among those over the age of eighteen from their reach...
In 1997, the danger of the newly enacted sex offender registration laws was demonstrated in California. Although these laws conceivably pose no threat in states that have repealed consensual sodomy laws (such as California), abuse is possible. Police in the state began sending notices to Gay men arrested on misdemeanor charges, such as solicitation, as long ago as the 1940s and threatening them with arrest under the offender law unless they could prove they were not subject to the law.
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Date: 2010-01-30 04:34 pm (UTC)One of the TV news programs just did a story that sex offenders are required to Not maintain a permanent residence. And that the law does not restrict them from being near schools, etc, only living near them.
Not to mention that this law is applied to all sex offenders, although the focus of the law was to "protect the children" from child molesters.