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News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyJuly 27th, 2016
New Jersey state Sen. Joseph A. Maressa
Through the 1960s and 1970s, a number of states embarked on a massive undertaking of combing through some two centuries’ accumulations of old laws to throw out obsolete laws (flagmen would no longer have to walk in front of automobiles as a warning to people on horseback) and re-codify it into a new easy-to-maintain format. In 1978, when New Jersey Gov. Brendan Byrne (D) signed his state’s new criminal code into law, it had the effect of wiping the state’s old sodomy law off the books. The old law had provided a maximum penalty of up to twenty years.
State Sen. Joseph Maressa (D-Camden Co) discovered the omission and decided to do something about it. On July 27, he introduced Senate Bill 1276, co-sponsored by nineteen of the forty state senators, to keep consensual same-sex sodomy between males (women weren’t covered under the bill) a crime punishable by five year in prison. “I was brought up in the old school,” Sen. Maressa said. “Homosexuality still shocks me. And it galls me when people defend those who desecrate the flag. It’s their right to express themselves that way, they say. I’ll tell you, I’d take them out and shoot them. You might say I subscribe to the old virtues.”
“I checked with Attorney General Degnan,” he added, “and he tells me nobody has ever been prosecuted under the old sodomy law, and I don’t expect anybody will under the new one. We used to beat them up, but we don’t do that anymore.”
Fortunately, his bill didn’t get very far, and he withdrew it, reluctantly, in early 1979 after opposition from the public. “I still agree the male sex role is the macho male,” he said. ” I just hope homosexuals don’t take it out to the streets.”
[Source: “Repression in N.J.” Gay Times, Issue 71 (undated/1978): 5.]
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