The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a state ban on same-sex sexual relations June 26, overturning one of its own recent decisions and handing the homosexual rights movement an important victory.
By a 6–3 vote, the high court held a Texas law that prohibited homosexual sodomy as unconstitutional, asserting that the “liberty protected by the Constitution allows homosexual persons the right to make” private sexual choices. The ruling prevents the enforcement of a section of Alabama law that prohibits consensual sodomy between people who are not married, according to Attorney General Bill Pryor.
In a scathing dissent, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia said the justices had “taken sides in the culture war” and warned the court’s reasoning could be used to validate homosexual marriage.
Opponents of homosexual rights believe the ruling could further the attempt to legalize workplace and housing rights on the basis of homosexuality, as well as homosexual adoptions and same-sex “marriage.” They feared the court would strike down the Texas law after observing oral arguments in the case in March, but it remained possible the justices could do so without revisiting their 1986 opinion in support of a Georgia sodomy law. In that decision, Bowers vs. Hardwick, the court ruled 5–4 there is no fundamental right in the Constitution for homosexuals to participate in sodomy.
The majority, however, overruled that opinion. “Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today,” Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the court’s opinion. “Its continuance as precedent demeans the lives of homosexual persons. It ought not to remain binding precedent.”
Rulings by the high court in the 1960s and 1970s — including the Roe vs. Wade opinion legalizing abortion — recognized a right to privacy, Kennedy wrote. Homosexuals are “entitled to respect for their privates lives,” he wrote. “The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.”
States increasingly have repealed their sodomy laws, and so have other countries, Kennedy wrote in support of the ruling. Only 13 states have laws against sodomy, four against same-sex acts only and nine others against heterosexual or homosexual sodomy.
Scalia, however, said in his dissent the majority never describes “homosexual sodomy as a ‘fundamental right’ or a ‘fundamental liberty interest.’”
“If, as the court asserts, the promotion of majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest,” laws against “fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality and obscenity” cannot survive the justices’ basis in their ruling, Scalia wrote.
“Today’s opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as formal recognition in marriage is concerned,” said Scalia, who read his opinion from the bench, a sign of a particularly strong dissent. “If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is ‘no legitimate state interest’ for purposes of proscribing that conduct … what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising ‘[t]he liberty protected by the Constitution.’”
According to the Birmingham News, Pryor filed a brief in the Texas case comparing homosexual sodomy with various sex crimes.
He argued that states “should be free to legislate in such sensitive areas as family definition, child-rearing and sexual conduct,” the News reported.
In addition to Texas and Alabama, the states that still had sodomy laws were Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia.
Of those, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas prohibited only homosexual sodomy. (BP)
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