That's a complicated question -- yes, it makes sense. To start to answer it, we have to recall that the coining of "heterosexual" and "homosexual" come at a time when Germany is trying to figure out how to arrange and write its civil law. In the age of revolutions across Europe, civil governments are endeavoring (often for the first time) to create secular versions of areas of law that had previously been based on, or were taken wholesale, from the canon law of the Catholic church. So there was an inheritance of that sinful/not sinful binary, and I think that is perhaps *the* big influence on C19th thinking on the matter of sexual behavior.
In reply to <p>I think it is so by Etta King
That's a complicated question -- yes, it makes sense. To start to answer it, we have to recall that the coining of "heterosexual" and "homosexual" come at a time when Germany is trying to figure out how to arrange and write its civil law. In the age of revolutions across Europe, civil governments are endeavoring (often for the first time) to create secular versions of areas of law that had previously been based on, or were taken wholesale, from the canon law of the Catholic church. So there was an inheritance of that sinful/not sinful binary, and I think that is perhaps *the* big influence on C19th thinking on the matter of sexual behavior.