2003
Bush calls for marriage to be codified as one man, one woman
At a Rose Garden press conference on July 30, 2003, George W. Bush said he believed “marriage is between a man and a woman,” that “we ought to codify that one way or the other,” and that he had lawyers looking at the best way to do it.
The timing was not accidental. Five weeks earlier the Supreme Court had struck down the last sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas, making gay sex legal in every state for the first time. The answer came quickly. Bush endorsed a constitutional amendment the following February. That November, voters in eleven states wrote bans into their own constitutions.
The federal amendment never passed.
He got his codification in the end, just not the way he was hoping for. On December 13, 2022 Congress passed the Respect for Marriage Act, protecting same-sex marriage in federal law.
CNN, July 30, 2003: “Bush wants marriage reserved for heterosexuals”
1960
Fléau Social
France classifies homosexuality as a social plague
On July 30, 1960, France promulgated a law that listed homosexuality among the country’s fléaux sociaux - its social plagues - and gave the government power to take whatever measures it liked against it. The other plagues on the list were alcoholism, tuberculosis, drug addiction and prostitution.
It got there almost as an afterthought. Twelve days earlier the National Assembly had been debating a bill on social scourges when Paul Mirguet, a Gaullist deputy from Metz, stood up and moved a sub-amendment adding six words: all measures proper to combat homosexuality. The health minister backed it. The Assembly passed it on a show of hands, 323 to 131, and it went into the law.
What followed was not symbolic. An ordinance that November doubled the minimum sentence for public indecency when the act was against nature with a person of the same sex, which in practice meant the police worked the public urinals and doubled the penalty for anyone they caught. That stayed on the books for twenty years.
The discriminatory clause went in December 1980. France stopped classifying homosexuality as an illness in 1981, and the last of it was cleared away in 1982.
Wikipedia (French), Amendement Mirguet
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