Lawrence v. Texas

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.

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[1] Lawrence v. Texas – case brief summary. Retrieved from http://www.lawnix.com/cases/lawrence-texas.html

[2] Ibid

[3] Lawrence v. Texas (2003). Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/future/landmark_lawrence.html

[4] Ibid

[5] Ibid

[6] Ibid

[7] Lawrence v. Texas. Retrieved from http://www.lambdalegal.org/in-court/cases/lawrence-v-texas

[8] Wilkes, D. (n.d.) Lawrence v. Texas: An historic human rights victory. Retrieved from http://www.law.uga.edu/dwilkes_more/47lawrence.html

[9] Lawrence v. Texas, five years later. Retrieved from http://www.lambdalegal.org/sites/default/files/publications/downloads/impact_200806_lawrence-v-texas.pdf

[10] Ibid