Article 190, Part 1 of the Soviet Criminal Code criminalized "the dissemination of the intentionally false insinuations defiling the Soviet state and social order".
The next question concerns the proper scope of the criminal law: what kinds of conduct should be criminalized?
This natural response to this example points us towards one common way of identifying the kinds of wrong that do properly concern the criminal law the idea that conduct which is to be criminalized ought to constitute a 'public', rather than a merely 'private', wrong.
If so, we might still be able to preserve some form of negative Legal Moralism, and hold that conduct that is not immoral cannot properly be criminalized; but we would need to look elsewhere for positive reasons for criminalization.
By the early 21st century, all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia had criminalized stalking, and similar policies had been adopted by countries around the world.
In 1986 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Georgia antisodomy law in Bowers v. Hardwick, but the decision was reversed in 2003, when the court struck down a Texas law that criminalized consensual sex between adults of the same gender.
Named for Anthony Comstock, a zealous crusader against what he considered to be obscenity, the act criminalized publication, distribution, and possession of information about or devices or medications for "unlawful" abortion or contraception.
In 1883, acting on the advice of Bureau of Indian Affairs personnel, the U.S. secretary of the interior criminalized the Sun Dance and a variety of other indigenous religious practices; under federal law the secretary was entitled to make such decisions without consulting Congress or the affected parties.
Male roles were further defined in the 1880s with the consolidation of male homosexuality as a distinct social identity, given legal definition at the time (in the Labouchere amendment of 1885, which criminalized homosexuality as gross indecency), not least in the famous case involving the arrest and imprisonment of Irish poet and dramatist Oscar Wilde.
In December the parliament approved legislation, submitted by Lukashenka, that criminalized protests and other acts that "discredited" the government.
"We made it clear that in our law homosexual activities are criminalized and that any person who commits homosexual activities will be arrested," Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa told U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay in an urgent meeting in 2012.
