Zanzibar's parliament late Tuesday unanimously passed a bill outlawing homosexuality, with prison terms of up to 25 years for gay relationships. [...] If the bill becomes law, a person found guilty of sodomizing a minor will receive an automatic life sentence. The penalty for a homosexual relationship between men will be a 25-year sentence, and the punishment for a lesbian relationship will be a seven-year sentence.
Completely aside from the basic premise of the law, which is so patently asinine as to defy comment, this schedule of punishments makes no sense. While I support penalties of some sort for inappropriate contact (homo- OR heterosexual) with a minor, I don't get the gender disparity in the cases between consenting adults. Is it simply that, culturally, women in Zanzibar (and their actions) are of little or no consequence in comparison to men? Or is there something even more insidious at work?
Posted at April 14, 2004 01:52 PM in Social Order