Homosexuality laws

The world's homosexuality laws are currently diverse. For example, while Denmark law recognizes same-sex marriages, under Saudi Arabian law a person might face the death penalty in regards to homosexuality although other penalties may be used in lieu of the death penalty.

American Homosexuality Laws

For more information please see: America and homosexuality laws

Antonin Scalia

Treatment of homosexuals by the law has increasingly suggested that discrimination based on homosexuality employs a "suspect classification" subject to "strict scrutiny" under modern Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence, with judges and scholars employing language to equate discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation with already forbidden racial discrimination practices. Where federal law forbidding discrimination against homosexuals remains scant, the several states have more than taken up the burden, and many have made sexual-orientation based discrimination actionable at law and equity. Perhaps this can be seen as an example of the robustness of the United States' federal system, as the states are acting just as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Brandeis expressed hope that they would, as "laboratories" of experimentation on the border of developed federal law.

The Supreme Court recently overturned a Texas law banning sodomy. The majority opinion, written by Justice Kennedy, suggests that all forms of discrimination, including that based on sexual orientation, are now subject to rational basis review, and will be frowned upon unless a legitimate state interest in the discrimination is expressed. Justice Kennedy also held that the need to legislate morals by the states' police power is no longer a legitimate state interest, absent specific physical harms being proven. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a blistering dissent, characterizing the opinion as including phrases which will become the "dicta that ate the rule of law."