Some history of our lives as a wedge issue

For the pure pleasure of it, I'm reading Diarmaid MacCullough's Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life. This is an intricate story of how the first semi-modern European state came to be; I may write more as I go along. Or not. For now, I just want to pass along a tidbit that speaks to the ongoing struggle here and everywhere to win legal acceptance of those of us whose sexual and gender orientations strike our neighbors as non-conforming.

As is true about many things that make English history, legal repudiation of queers and queerness was tied into King Henry the Eighth's effort to escape his childless marriage to Katherine of Aragon. We got the Church of England as the island's quasi-contribution to the Reformation. We also got a legal prohibition of "buggery" by act of Parliament in 1534. 

... one of the earliest pieces of legislation, actually the first considered in the Lords after Parliament opened, was a curious initiative for which one would expect a history of previous public grievance or discussion, but there is little previous trace. It was a statute making buggery a felony, that is a criminal offence in common law, with the death penalty attached to it.

The annoyingly unnamed peer who advocated this Act for the Punishment of the Vice of Buggery linked it to the misuse of ecclesiastical sanctuary jurisdictions, which suggests a context: this was the first symptom of the new attack on Church privilege. The well-informed anonymous commentator on the Reformation whose fragmentary account remains in the Wyatt papers directly linked its enactment not just to the unnaturalness of clerical celibacy generally but to monastic corruption in particular, and so the buggery statute looks like a new try-out of Cromwell's program of intervention in the affairs of monasteries and friaries. 

Over the previous four years, William Tyndale [translator of the Bible to English] in his literary duel with [Sir Thomas] More had launched the long English Protestant tradition of linking sodomy to clerical celibacy. Yet the Act had a wider significance, quite apart from forming the basis of all punitive action in England against male homosexuals up to the nineteenth century. After the Papacy had created a body of canon law and church courts, such matters of morality as this had been the concern of church lawyers in the Western Church, and not the King's courts. The Act was the first major encroachment in England on that general principle, a phenomenon that occurred right across sixteenth-century Europe, Catholic and Protestant alike ...

That is -- LGBT people were a convenient foil for Cromwell's facilitation of Henry's power grab ...