No Place for the State

“There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” Pierre Elliott Trudeau told reporters. He was making the case for the most controversial of his proposed reforms to the Criminal Code, those concerning homosexuality, birth control, and abortion.

In No Place for the State, contributors offer complex and often contrasting perspectives as they assess how the 1969 Omnibus Bill helped shape sexual and moral politics in Canada by examining the bill’s origins, social implications, and repercussions. The new legal regime had significant consequences for matters like adoption, divorce, and suicide. After the bill passed, a great many Canadians continued to challenge how sexual behaviour was governed, demanding much more exhaustive changes to the law. Fifty years later, the origins and legacies of the bill are equivocal and the state still seems interested in the bedrooms of the nation. This incisive study explains why that matters.