Jun 20, 2003  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO JR.  | COMMENTS     

In a sweeping victory for gay rights advocates, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday overturned sodomy laws in 13 states, including Virginia, declaring that gay couples, as well as heterosexuals, have a constitutional right to privacy in the area of “private sexual conduct.”

Attorneys called the 6-3 decision in the case, known as Lawrence vs. Texas, a stunning victory for the gay rights movement because of the specific legal changes it will bring about and because of its strongly worded declaration on behalf of privacy rights for gays.

“The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime,” states the majority opinion, written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

The case stems from a decision by two gay men from a Houston suburb to challenge the constitutionality of the Texas “homosexual conduct” law. The law makes it a crime for consenting adults of the same gender to have oral or anal sex in private, while allowing heterosexuals to commit the same acts legally.

The two men, John Lawrence and Tyron Garner, were arrested by Harris County, Texas, sheriff’s deputies on Sept. 17, 1998, after the deputies barged into the bedroom of Lawrence’s apartment and observed the men engaging in anal intercourse.

Authorities said they entered the apartment after receiving a call, which was later found to be false, that an armed intruder was on the premises.

Both men pleaded “no contest” to the charge and were fined $200 each. The plea, which has the legal effect of a conviction, could have resulted in several states adding their names to police sex offender lists.
" We are very pleased with the ruling,” Lawrence said at a news conference Thursday. “We never chose to be public figures. This ruling allows us to get on with our lives and opens the door for gay people across the country to be treated equally."

Attorneys affiliated with Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund, which represented Lawrence and Garner before the Supreme Court, argued that the Texas homosexual conduct law should be overturned on two grounds. One — the ground that the high court invoked in yesterday’s decision — holds that the law violates the Constitution’s 14th Amendment due process clause, which protects an individual’s privacy rights.

The second ground contended that the Texas law violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause because it singled out sodomy committed by same-sex couples and not heterosexual couples.

Had the court chosen the equal protection clause, it would have overturned only the Texas sodomy law and sodomy laws in three other states — Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, all of which outlaw homosexual sodomy only.

By choosing to overturn the Texas law on the “privacy” rights ground, the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws in the four states in which they apply only to gays as well as in nine more states, where the laws apply to both homosexuals and heterosexuals.

The other states include Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Utah. Also included in this category is Puerto Rico.

Perhaps most important, the court’s ruling overturns the court’s own 1986 decision known as Bowers v. Hardwick. That decision upheld Georgia’s sodomy law on grounds that the law did not violate the Constitution’s 14th Amendment assurance of privacy rights.

Gay rights activists viewed the Bowers decision as especially harsh and onerous because it couched its reasoning for rejecting the privacy rights argument in anti-gay rhetoric.

“To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching,” then Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote in a concurring opinion.

“It’s a great victory for all Americans because now all Americans are protected from government intrusion into their bedrooms,” said Paul Smith, a gay Washington attorney who argued the case on Lambda Legal's behalf before the court in March.

“They didn’t make the ‘equal protection’ argument because that argument didn’t need to be reached,” Smith said. “They said anybody, gay or straight, has a right to make choices about their sexual partners and their sexual practices in the privacy of their homes.”

Joining Kennedy in signing on to the majority opinion to overturn the Texas statute on “privacy” grounds were Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor filed a concurring opinion that supported overturning the Texas law, but based her opinion on the “equal protection” argument.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the dissenting opinion, with Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas signing on to Scalia’s dissent. Thomas also filed a ...