Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1994
Publication Information
69 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1049 (1994).
Abstract
During the past thirty years there has emerged in Europe a standard form of legal regulation of sexual conduct. This standard form or scheme, which I shall call the "standard modem [European] position," is accepted by the European Court of Human Rights and the European Commission of Human Rights (the two supra-national judicial and quasijudicial institutions of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1950), to which almost all European states are party, whether or not they are also party to the European [Economic] Community now known as the European Union). The standard modem European position has two limbs. On the one hand, the state is not authorized to, and does not, make it a punishable offence for adult consenting persons to engage, in private, in immoral sexual acts (for example, homosexual acts). On the other hand, states do have the authority to discourage, say, homosexual conduct and "orientation" (i.e. overtly manifested active willingness to engage in homosexual conduct). And typically, though not universally, they do so. That is to say, they maintain various criminal and administrative laws and policies which have as part of their purpose the discouraging of such conduct. Many of these laws, regulations, and policies discriminate (i.e. distinguish) between heterosexual and homosexual conduct adversely to the latter.
Recommended Citation
John Finnis,
Law, Morality, and "Sexual Orientation",
69 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1049 (1994)..
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/205
Comments
Copyright © 1994, Notre Dame Law Review, University of Notre Dame.
The article was reprinted in 9 Notre Dame J.L. Ethics, & Pub. Pol'y 11 (1995). The author provided additional comments which appear in brackets.