Should homosexual criminal charges be dropped?
Homosexuality is defined in the Bible as a sin. In the minds of many people, it is still a sin that God will punish. In the minds of secular people it is a wholesome choice. But it was a crime, when the law stated that homosexuality was against nature and the community and was a deviant behaviour. Nothing has changed, except for liberals they see homosexuality as something good and all charges should be lifted.
It comes as the Victorian government announced yesterday it would erase convictions for sex between two consenting adult males. The state will introduce laws this year that will provide men with the opportunity to have the convictions wiped from their record.
The decriminalisation of gay sex in Australia began in the 1970s, with Tasmania the last state to fall in line in 1997. Before that, men could be jailed for having gay sex.
A cohabiting gay Melbourne couple, "Lindsay" and "John", had been betrayed to police by a friend and were interviewed by ABC's PM program in 1975.
As South Australia had been the only state to decriminalise gay sex at the time, the couple had been handed an ultimatum: go to South Australia or go to jail. "And he said: 'From what I can see these two are still living together, so there's nothing I can do but send them to jail.' All the judge kept saying was, 'jail, jail'," John said.
Human rights lawyer Dr Paula Gerber says the convictions should be abolished nationally, because even if they are erased in one jurisdiction, they could still be a problem interstate. Convictions continue to haunt people, says expert
Dr Gerber says wiping people's records is important because although Australia has moved on (only part of Australia supports homosexuality), the convictions continue to haunt people. "One gentleman indicated to me that he had stayed in the same job his whole career because he was too scared of, if he changed jobs, having to be subjected to a criminal police check," she said.
"Now he's very stressed because they are doing a restructure and everyone has to reapply for their jobs, and that will include a police check."
She says the state with possibly the greatest amount of convictions is New South Wales, because of its historically large gay community.
New South Wales Attorney-General Greg Smith says he is supportive of abolishing gay sex convictions, but the laws did not distinguish between consensual and non-consensual acts.
"We need to work out how we could clear the records of people without running the danger of inadvertently clearing paedophiles from criminal behaviour," he said. Criminal checks more likely in Tasmania, says commissioner
Tasmanian anti-discrimination commissioner Robin Banks is already looking into abolishing immoral homosexual sex convictions in that state. She says hundreds of people are affected by the laws because Tasmania was the last to decriminalise homosexual sex. But what about pedofiles?
"So that means you'd be dealing with people who were younger in Tasmania, more likely to be in the workforce still." Ms Banks says a criminal record check on prospective employees is more likely in the Tasmanian labour market. "A lot of community sector organisations are required to do criminal record checks, but also a lot of jobs in government require a criminal record check," she said.
"The community sector and the government sector are pretty significant employers here." The convictions, and associated criminal records, have never affected Australia's lesbian community because the existence of lesbian sex was never acknowledged by those laws.
In the future, will this happen with murder, rape, incest, polygamy?
