Sodomy

Representation of an erotic scene of a man practicing anal sex with a woman, performed by the French painter Édouard-Henri Avril (1848-1928). Currently in Spanish, sodomy is synonymous with anal intercourse.

Édouard-Henri Avril: Ancient Greek penetrating a goat. Sodomy involved several sexual practices related to zoophilia and non-reproductive sex in the ancient world.

Sodomy is a word of biblical origin, derived from the Genesis episode that recounts the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and their subsequent destruction by God as punishment for the sins of their inhabitants. In its contemporary meaning, it refers to sexual practices other than vaginal intercourse, variables from culture to culture, in order to disqualify them.

Currently in Spanish, according to the Royal Spanish Academy, it is used exclusively as a synonym for anal intercourse regardless of the sex of the people involved, but formerly in Spanish and currently in other languages, the term is used to refer to a range broader range of sexual behaviors, including oral sex and bestiality, and even as a synonym for male homosexuality. Sodomy, with that name, was established as a crime in many countries of the world with Christian, Muslim or Jewish roots, and still does so. it continues to be in many, including the United States. Some religions establish that sodomy is a sin, but the concept varies in each religion with different scopes in its content. In Spanish, the verb "sodomize" also implies an act of "submission" of the person anally penetrated.

The word comes from Sodom, a city whose population, according to the Bible, was exterminated by God due to the sins that were committed there. As a heritage of Judeo-Christian culture, in various Western languages the name sodomite is used to designate those who practice various kinds of sexual practices such as masturbation, homosexuality, anal sex, oral sex, etc.

«The Emperor Adriano and his lover Antinoo in Egypt» by the French painter Édouard-Henri Avril. In Spanish anal intercourse is synonymous with sodomy.

Sculpture of the 1st century BC which represents the Greek god Pan performing sexual acts with a goat. Sodomy as a sexual sin only begins to appear in the Christian world after the third century.

Etymology

The term "sodomy" comes from the name of the ancient city of Sodom (Sedom in Hebrew, derived from the root sod= secret) which, according to the Bible it was destroyed by Yahveh due to its many sins. (see Sodom and Gomorrah). The biblical account mentions that the sodomites tried to sexually abuse the messengers sent to rescue Lot.

History

Details of a homoerotic representation illustrated in a Japanese Shunga, mid-centuryXVIII.

The word "sodomy" derives from the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, although the identification of the "sin of Sodom" with anal sex or homosexuality does not appear explicitly until the V, although previous Judeo-Christian authors such as Philo of Alexandria or Methodius of Olympia already attributed homosexual and similar practices to biblical cities.

In the first half of the VI century, the Christian Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, Justinian, and his wife Theodora, prohibit "acts against nature" for political reasons, relying on religious reasons. The law provided as punishment for castration and a public walk through the streets. There is no evidence that the Western or Eastern (Orthodox) Church, then united, supported the civil edict.

It was not until the 11th century that the word «sodomy» appeared in the Liber Gommorrhianus of the Benedictine monk Petrus Damianus, for whom the word included all those sexual activities that were not used for reproduction. Because the words to describe homosexuality did not appear until the 19th century, the term "sodomite" was used to refer to men who had sexual relations with other men. Lesbians were largely ignored, although women who engaged in anal sex also fell under the epithet "sodomite." In late Renaissance Italy, the painter Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (1477-1549) was known as Il Sodoma ("the Sodomite").

Until the 13th century, sodomy was not punished in most European countries; it was just one of many sins that appeared in ecclesiastical texts. The attitude changed in the course of the Crusades, in which anti-Islamic propaganda identified Muslims with sodomites who raped Christian bishops and children. Soon after, sodomy was identified with heresy, and between 1250 and 1300 laws were introduced. that punished with death said sin. These laws were used above all as political tools, as was the case with the Templars or the assassination of Edward II of England, or in cases of endangering social peace, such as in cases of rape or pedophilia. In general, homosexuality it was quite widespread, the key element being discretion. In England Henry VIII of England introduced the Buggery Act in 1533, which made sodomy (called buggery) punishable by hanging. In some places, such as London and Amsterdam (in 1730 and 1733), there were waves of persecution against sodomites.

With the Conquest of America, the Europeans established the crime of sodomy in America, punished by institutions such as the Inquisition and the violent repression of the original peoples who in general admitted sexual practices considered sodomitical by Europeans. In some parts the Spaniards massively killed the indigenous people for dressing in "women" -referring to the absence of pants in indigenous clothing- qualifying them as sodomites. Fray Bartolomé de las Casas recounts one of those barbaric acts:

Some Spaniards found in a certain corner of one of the said provinces three men clothed in the habits of women, whom they judged to be of that corrupted sin (sodomy) and not by any other probation they then cast them to the dogs they carried, that they fired them and ate alive, as if they were their judges.

Fray Bartolmé de las Casas

During the Spanish conquest, European conquistadors and chroniclers assiduously reported that indigenous people habitually had sexual relations between men or women, and presented the fact as evidence of indigenous savagery and their distance from the Christian God. These stories gave rise to the myth of the giant sodomites of Patagonia. Sodomy was considered one of the just causes that enabled the Spanish conquistadors to declare "war" against the indigenous population.

At the end of the 18th century, the French Revolution removed the crime of sodomy from the Penal Code of 1791. In the In Latin American countries, once independence from Spain was achieved in the 1820s, this crime was gradually eliminated, in some cases more immediately and in others very slowly. Dominican Republic 1822, El Salvador 1826, Bolivia 1831, Argentina 1851, Guatemala and Mexico 1871, Cuba 1979 and Colombia in 1981.

In general, in other Western countries the simple sexual relationship between men was maintained as a crime until recently. In Spain, the inclusion of homosexual people in the Law on dangerousness and social rehabilitation was repealed in 1979. In the United Kingdom it was fully decriminalized in 1982, with the sanction of Order No. 1536 of 1982 on Homosexual Offenses. In Germany, paragraph 175, which punished sodomy, was not completely abolished until 1994. In the United States, it was not until 2003 that the Supreme Court ruled that criminal laws punishing sodomy in ten states were unconstitutional, by a vote of 6 to 3 in the case & #34;Lawrence vs. Texas", despite which, in 2020 there were still sixteen states in which laws criminalizing sodomy were still in force.

Spain

As in the rest of the medieval West, in the Iberian kingdoms sodomy was considered the worst crime against morality for what was known as the "abominable& #3. 4; or "nefarious" (the "sin that cannot be named"). Those convicted of this crime were castrated and stoned to death. Jerónimo Muntzer, who visited the Iberian Peninsula between 1494 and 1495, recounted that those accused of sodomy were hung by their feet, castrated and then their testicles were tied around their necks.

In Spain it was not the Crusades but the perception of the Muslim peninsular kingdoms that led to the identification of sodomy with Islamism and heresy.

A pragmatic of August 22, 1497 promulgated by the Catholic Monarchs ordered that they be applied the punishment that was more usual in the rest of the European states —being burned alive—, together with the confiscation of their property.

The Spanish Inquisition, following in the footsteps of the medieval Pontifical Inquisition, initially dealt with crimes of sodomy but in 1509 the Supreme Council ordered the courts not to act against homosexuals, except if they were involved in cases of heresy —which was the exclusive competence of the Holy Office. Previously there had been protests from some institutions, such as the one presented by the city of Cartagena in 1504 or that of Murcia the following year, because they considered that sodomy should not be tried for the Inquisition but by the ordinary courts. According to the historian Joseph Pérez, it was the pressure of the civil powers —including the Courts of Castile— that forced the Supreme Court to exclude sodomy from the inquisitorial jurisdiction.

However, the Inquisition of the Crown of Aragon managed to get Pope Clement VII to authorize it in 1524 to persecute "sodomites", regardless of whether they were heretics or not. Thus, jurisdiction over this crime differed between the Crown of Castile —here the inquisitorial courts complied with the order of the Supreme Court and did not deal with the "heinous sin", whose jurisdiction corresponded to the ordinary secular and ecclesiastical courts—, and that of Aragón, where the Inquisition was the court in charge of persecuting those who practiced non-reproductive sexual acts, a competence that "the inquisitors would never renounce despite the repeated complaints made in the Monzón Courts of 1533". It was also the only inquisitorial court in all of Europe that had jurisdiction over sodomy, because neither the Roman inquisition nor the Portuguese inquisition, as in the Crown of Castile, had jurisdiction over it.

The Aragonese Inquisition applied the penalty of being burned alive to homosexuals (both men and women), although those under the age of twenty-five, "which were inevitably a large proportion of these accused", were sentenced to galleys, after being publicly flogged. In addition, the Supreme Council commuted many death sentences, especially for members of the clergy, which, according to Henry Kamen, "always made up a very high proportion of the accused." They showed the same benevolence towards homosexuals who were nobles, as happened in the case of Pedro Luis Garcerán de Borja, Grand Master of the Order of Montesa who, after a process that lasted three years, the Valencia court sentenced to pay a heavy fine, being able to return later to hold positions.

Of the three courts of the Crown of Aragon, the most severe was undoubtedly that of Zaragoza; between 1570 and 1630 he judged 543 cases (among which are also included those of "bestiality" since the Inquisition counted them in the same category as sodomy), of which 102 ended with the death sentence.