Pat "Hitler had great courage" Buchanan is at it again. He's losing his mind over Judge Walker's decision in Perry, et al., v. Schwarzenegger, et al. Now he's taken to the pages of World Net Daily to put forward a really strange argument that Thomas Jefferson, a founder of this country, was the evilest bastard you ever heard of and he founded this country on the idea that gays should be castrated.
The author of that declaration [of Independence], Thomas Jefferson, equated homosexual acts with rape and wrote that male homosexuals (they used the term sodomites in that time) should be castrated and lesbians should have a hole cut into their noses.
Wow that Thomas Jefferson, who was famously known to be mild-mannered and soft spoken, was really fierce in his hatred of gay people, wasn't he? And he even wrote that "male homosexuals", or "sodomites" as Buchanan says, should be castrated!
What's interesting about this is that the earliest known usage of the term "homosexuality" was in 1869 and the concept of sexual orientation wasn't introduced until the late 1800s and early 1900s. The first extensive study on sexuality and orientation was published in a book in 1948. The consensus in the 1700s was that non-reproductive sex was an aberration and could be considered sodomy. There weren't "homosexuals" per se, because the idea that someone could truly be inclined to want a same-sex partner was just not a concept in existence.
So, I guess, in a way, it's true that Jefferson (and others) were wrong about same-sex sexual acts, but it's only fair to note that from their vantage point, it was only about those sexual acts and not about orientation. It was definitely not about love or coupling or getting married, to most people in those days.
In the 1770s it was acceptable and preferred to punish sodomy by death. This was carried over from British laws into the colonies. When America started to rebel, new laws were crafted, independent of Britain's influence. In 1777, Jefferson worked on an anti-sodomy law for Virginia, which said:
Whosoever shall be guilty of Rape, Polygamy, or Sodomy with man or woman shall be punished, if a man, by castration, if a woman, by cutting thro' the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch diameter at the least.
It's terrifying these days to think that castration was the more liberal punishment for sodomy, but it was. Jefferson could have easily gone with the more conservative law and required death as the punishment for sodomy. But he didn't. This change, in fact, prevented the law from ever being passed and the legislature eventually got what they wanted: death for sodomy.
Once again, Buchanan is incorrect to present the founders as conservative Christians who hated gay people and who would have been disgusted by Judge Walker's decision. The very first law about "homosexual acts" that anyone ever tried to pass in the new country of America was a liberal and more accepting law.