In the Sunday, June 23, New York Times, Kwame Anthony Appiah had an oped titled “Stonewall and the Myth of Self-Deliverance," in which he observed that “England basically decriminalized homosexuality in 1967, fully 36 years before it was decriminalized in the United States in Lawrence v. Kansas.”
He was correct, of course, that the U.S. Supreme Court decided Lawrence v. Texas (not Kansas) in 2003, overturning sodomy laws in the 14 states where they the still existed. It is worth noting, however, that Illinois had become the first state to decriminalize homosexuality on January I, 1962, fully five years before England changed its law. Another 35 states decriminalized gay sex before the decision in Lawrence, although none did so before 1967. Illinois was not usually considered a progressive jurisdiction in the 1960s (see Daley, Mayor Richard J.), but we were years ahead of the rest of the country on at least one issue of gay rights.
NOTE: I am posting this a week late because I was waiting to see if the Times would publish my letter (which included only the reference to the Illinois legislation and did not mention the mistaken SCOTUS citation). The print version of Appiah's essay included the wrong defendant in the Lawrence case, as did the original web edition. It was later changed on the web without any reference to the original error. As far as I can tell, using the Times's search function, there has been no published correction.
The NYT, famous for its layers and layers of fact checkers.