‘Rampant Homophobia’: Democrats Blast Republicans for Voting to Keep Homosexuality in Pennsylvania’s Obscenity Laws

Republicans in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives on Monday voted to keep the word “homosexuality” included in the state’s public indecency and obscenity laws, angering top-ranking Democrats including those who introduced legislation to remove the classification from the books.

Currently, for example, Pennsylvania law on prostitution characterizes “homosexual” sex among “deviate sexual relations.”

Pennsylvania’s obscenity law even includes this archaic definition in relation to “Obscene and other sexual materials and performances.”

“Sexual conduct means acts of masturbation, homosexuality, sexual intercourse, sexual bestiality or physical contact with a person’s clothed or unclothed genitals, pubic area, buttocks or, if such person be a female, breast.”

SB 609 would have removed the word “homosexual” or “homosexuality” from obscenity laws.

But on a party line vote every Republican, led by Speaker Brian Cutler (photo), elected to abuse, attack, demean, mock, and marginalize the state’s LGBTQ community by voting against the bill.

Democratic Rep. Brian Sims, the state’s first openly gay elected lawmaker who is running for Lieutenant Governor in the 2022 election, blasted his GOP colleagues:

HOMOSEXUAL OBSCENITY?!? My House colleagues just voted on Party lines NOT to remove “Homosexuality” from Pennsylvania’s obscenity laws. House Republicans voted to have the amendment killed rather have the courage of their broken convictions and actually vote on the issue. #Broken

— Brian Sims (@BrianSimsPA) May 24, 2021

“Compounding the rampant homophobia of the Republican caucus with this type of aggressive cowardice is so painfully on brand. May you never have to see your colleagues vote to keep the ways you love a ‘crime,'” Sims also tweeted.

If your Rep is a Republican, they voted to keep homosexuality in the Crimes Code as obscenity. If they’re a Democrat, they voted to remove it.

— Brian Sims (@BrianSimsPA) May 24, 2021

The Democratic House and Senate sponsors of the bill also blasted Republicans:

A shameful day in Harrisburg. @RepZabel and I introduced legislation to remove homosexuality from the state’s obscenity statue, after Upper Darby did the same locally.

This is an issue of basic equality. We won’t give up this fight. https://t.co/MCX32NSZTx

— Senator Tim Kearney (@SenTimKearney) May 24, 2021

Photo: Pennsylvania GOP House Speaker Brian Cutler. Image by Gov. Tom Wolf via Flickr and a CC license