The gay panic defense is a legal defense, usually against charges of assault or murder. A defendant using the gay panic defense claims that he or she acted in a state of violent temporary insanity because of a little-known psychiatric condition called homosexual panic. Trans panic is a similar defense applied towards cases where the victim is a transgender or intersex person. This defense often fails, and has been ruled inadmissible in many jurisdictions because of a complete lack of scientific research to support it.
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Famous quotes containing the words gay, panic and/or defense:
“KRUMPACKER: Yes London’s a little too gay for us
Don’t think I mean anything coarse
But I’m afraid we couldn’t stand the pace.
What about it Klip?
KLIPSTEIN: You said it, Krum.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one’s stomach the separation from terra ... these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known ... this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“He said, truly, that the reason why such greatly superior numbers quailed before him was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they lacked a cause,—a kind of armor which he and his party never lacked. When the time came, few men were found willing to lay down their lives in defense of what they knew to be wrong; they did not like that this should be their last act in this world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)