Reply #131: The Old Testament is not a state legal document. [View All]

[Starry Messenger]

Perhaps they did. Did it apply to the entire Empire? Or was it just to co-religionists? Law to me means civil law.

http://www.well.com/~aquarius/rome.htm

The Historic Origins of Church Condemnation of Homosexuality


On May 14, 390,<1> an imperial decree was posted at the Roman hall of Minerva, a gathering place for actors, writers and artists,<2> which criminalized for the first time the sexual practice of those whom we call "homosexual" men -- this had never happened before in the history of law. The prescribed penalty was death by burning. This law was promulgated by an emperor who at the time was under a penance set by St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan,<3> and the law was issued in the context of a persecution of heresies. Homosexual men at the imperial court had been powerful opponents of Catholic doctrine during the fourth-century conflicts over the nature of Jesus Christ, known as the Arian controversies.

Prior to 390, both religious and secular laws had targeted only one particular form of homosexuality: when a man or youth who otherwise exhibited a virile attraction toward women nonetheless agreed to or was forced to play a female role in intercourse with other men. For example, Biblical laws against homosexual acts call it an abomination and prescribe death as a punishment when "a man lies with a male the way one lies with a woman."<4> Meanwhile, only heterosexually-oriented men (including bisexual men) would properly be called "male," since potency with women was the primary proof of masculinity. Augustus Caesar's law against adultery likewise prohibited intercourse with "males,"<5> and may well have provided the impetus for a widely-attested wave of castrations in the early empire -- in order to supply sex partners who were not "male."<6> As late as 342, Constantius II issued a decree imposing an "exquisite punishment" for the crime which occurs "when a male gives himself in marriage to an effeminate and what he wants is for the effeminate to play the male role in sex ," thus for himself to play the female role.<7>