of the Penal Code can be traced back to the British parliament more than 137 years ago, when a handful of lawmakers passed a"last-minute amendment to an entirely unrelated bill".
This was when then-Attorney General of Singapore C G Howell moved a Bill here stating that Section 377A was being introduced to bring Singapore's laws in line with the UK criminal law. Another school of thought was that he had intended for it to be a"wrecking amendment" to derail and discredit the entire Bill on the protection of women and girls, as he had the reputation of doing so.
"The provision he introduced, which was passed into law, was however much wider than that. It covered all male-male sex acts, including those where the sex acts were done between consenting male adults," added the minister. However, none of these laws were introduced with an explicit need to criminalise homosexual behaviour, he added.
When King Henry VIII was in power, he wanted to reduce the power of the church, and one of the ways in which he did that was to convert many of the church's canon laws into secular laws, Mr Shanmugam said. Another British law was the Vagrancy Act of 1898, which was initially intended to target men who lived off the earnings of female prostitutes, but in practice was used almost exclusively to prosecute men who engaged in homosexual conduct in public.