In 1998, John Geddes
Lawrence and Tyron Garner were arrested in Texas
for having consensual sex in Lawrence ’s
bedroom. Lawrence and Garner were charged and convicted under Texas "Homosexual Conduct" law,
which provided that a "person commits an offense if he engages in deviate
sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex."[1] In a lengthy series of appeals, the lower courts
refused to overturn the law, citing Bowers v. Hardwick as precedent [2]. They finally appealed to the US Supreme Court, arguing
that the Homosexual Conduct Law was unconstitutional because it discriminated
against homosexuals in violation of the right to privacy and the Equal
Protection Clause of the Constitution, which heard the case in the spring of
2003 [3].
The Supreme Court ruled that no state has the right to prohibit any
sexual conduct between consenting adults [4].
The court ruled that the Homosexual Conduct law was unconstitutional and the
law violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause because that clause
protects a substantive right to personal liberty in intimate decisions [5]. The Court argued that its decision in Bowers was
misguided. At issue here was not "the right to engage in homosexual
sodomy" but "the right to privacy in the home" and the right to
freely engage in consensual, adult sex." [6]
The Lawrence decision is one the most momentous pro-individual rights
decisions ever adjudicated by Court, and joins the exalted ranks of the Court's
other benchmark decisions advancing human rights [7].
It was very important to establish the consensual and private homosexual sex is
part of a substantive right to liberty as protected by the Constitution. Second
thing, Lawrence
held that "fundamental rights" are really broad principles of liberty
under which numerous and disparate activities may be protected. This decision
protected the privacy of the bedroom and renewed the Court's power to identify
individual rights above and beyond those historically protected under the law [8].
The Supreme Court declared
all sodomy laws unconstitutional, putting an end to the sodomy laws that
remained on the books in 13 states at the time of the ruling, including laws
that criminalized only same-sexual conduct and laws that criminalized oral and
anal sex irrespective of the sex of the participants [9].
The Court also reversed Bowers v. Hardwick; its 1986 decision that upheld Georgia ’s
sodomy law on reasoning that had been extraordinarily harmful to gay people’s
struggles both for liberty and equality [10].
The decision’s sweeping language about gay people’s equal rights to liberty
marked a new era of legal respect for the LGBT community.
__________________
[1] Lawrence v. Texas
[2] Ibid
[3] Lawrence v. Texas
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] Lawrence v. Texas
[8] Wilkes, D. (n.d.) Lawrence v. Texas
[9]
Lawrence v. Texas
[10] Ibid
