From Medieval Male Marriages to Executions to Marriage Equality

Here is an excerpt from a review of Sex & Punishment on Brain Pickings:“It’s a momentous year for LGBT rights, with Barack Obama’s recent historic endorsement of marriage equality reminding us how far we’ve come since the days of legally punishing sexual orientation — for a grim flashback, we need look no further than computing pioneer Alan Turing, whose centennial we’ll be celebrating next month and who committed suicide shortly after being criminally prosecuted for his homosexuality. Whether bigotry can ever be wholly uprooted from insecure hearts and narrow minds remains to be seen, but we’ve certainly come a long way. How, exactly, did we get here?In Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire, writer and lawyer Eric Berkowitz explores the millennia-long quest to regulate and mandate one of the strongest drivers of human behavior, and the tragic deformities that result from the dictatorship of external authority over the most intimate of inner realities.”For the full article, visit: Brainpickings.org