Same-sex sexual activity is legal in Nebraska , and same-sex marriage has been recognized since June as a result of Obergefell v. The state prohibits discrimination on account of sexual orientation and gender identity in employment and housing following the U. Supreme Court's ruling in Bostock v.
In addition, the state's largest city, Omaha , has enacted protections in public accommodations. In a survey, about half of LGBTQ people in Nebraska had seriously considered suicide at some point in their lives. Prior to European settlement of Nebraska, there were no known social or legal punishments for engaging in homosexual activity. Among several Native American tribes, customs of " two-spirit " individuals existed, where male-bodied or female-bodied people would dress, act and live as the opposite gender, as well as perform tasks associated with the opposite gender.
Such individuals are known as mix'uga in the Omaha-Ponca language , spoken by the Ponca and Omaha peoples. The Native Americans did not share the typical Western views of gender and sexuality. In , a few years after the creation of the Nebraska Territory , a prohibition on sodomy "crime against nature" , whether heterosexual or homosexual, was passed into law. Punishment varied between one year to life imprisonment.
In the case of Kinnan v. State , the Nebraska Supreme Court unanimously ruled that fellatio oral sex was not a violation of the sodomy statute. In response, the Nebraska Legislature revised certain parts of the law in , outlawing fellatio and reducing the maximum penalty for sodomy to 20 years in jail. In , Nebraska amended its sterilization law to make it applicable to state inmates who were "feeble-minded, insane, habitual criminals, moral degenerates or sexual perverts".
By , people had been sterilized. The law was repealed in , having almost only being used on the "insane or mentally retarded". All sodomy laws were repealed at the state level when a revised criminal code was enacted in June , effective on July 1, James Exon by the minimum margin, 32 to No other state repealed its sodomy criminalization statute by such a veto override. The extent to which the state's anti-sodomy statute was enforced is unclear; Nebraska has no published sodomy cases during the s or s.
