Bowers was a challenge to a Georgia law which made oral and anal sex a crime for everyone same-sex and opposite-sex couples. The case began when a police officer used a flimsy excuse to barge into Michael Hardwick's bedroom one night.
He found him with another man, and arrested him. Although the Georgia law applied to all couples, the Supreme Court described the case as if it were about the constitutionality of making intimacy a crime for same sex couples.
Although the Court said, as it had in the past, that there is an implied right to privacy in the constitution, it said that right did not invalidate the Georgia law.
In a footnote, the Court said that it was not deciding any issues about the equal protection clause of the constitution. The odd nature of the Bowers opinion-that the Georgia law and the right to privacy applied to everyone, but the Court spoke again and again about gay people-set off a long running debate among lawyers. Did Bowers mean that the right to privacy did not prevent states like Georgia from making some kinds of private, adult sex a crime for everyone?
Or was the Court somehow making a ruling about the rights of gay people, even though the law did not single gay people out? But what really made the Bowers decision stand out was not the ruling about privacy so much as the tone-utter contempt. The Court said that it was "facetious" to argue the fundamental right to privacy protected gay people, and said that there was no connection between marriage, family and heterosexual intimacy, and intimacy between same sex couples.
The Court's tone was not lost on lower courts. Bowers became the justification in Court for every kind of discrimination against gay people-from discrimination in the military, to discrimination in custody and visitation cases, to discrimination in employment.
Worse, the Bowers decision became a potent political tool for those who wanted to derail the movement for LGBT equality. In debate after debate on everything from laws against discrimination to domestic partnership, the Supreme Court's decision in Bowers that intimacy could be made a crime for gay people became the major justification of the opposition.
After Bowers, activists continued to push state legislatures to repeal their sodomy laws, but it was slow going. It was seven years before another repeal Nevada and the District of Columbia.
Rhode Island repealed in , and Arizona in In Court, activists turned to state courts, arguing that sodomy laws violated state constitutions. State high courts have the authority to rule that state constitutions give more protection to individual rights than the federal constitution does.
And state courts did just that in Kentucky Commonwealth v. Wasson , Tennessee Campbell v. Sundquist , Montana Gryczan v. Montana, Georgia Powell v. State, and Minnesota Lavender Bar v. Sodomy can also be more broadly defined to include any sexual penetration aside from vaginal intercourse, including oral and anal sex, whether between two men or two women or a man and a woman.
Laws differ on whether sodomy includes digital penetration and cunnilingus. Sometimes, sodomy laws also prohibit bestiality sex with animals. Today, laws against sex crimes prohibit all kinds of forcible acts, as well as sexual behavior against people who do not or cannot consent such as children and people who lack the mental capacity to give meaningful consent. However, historically, there were basically two kinds of sex crimes: rape and sodomy.
Rape laws criminalized vaginal intercourse with a woman who was not your wife. Sodomy laws prohibited non-procreative behavior with anyone. Sodomy laws were a way to prosecute any sex act other than vaginal intercourse, whether consensual or not. For information on other sex crimes, see Sex Crimes. Over a decade ago,in Lawrence v. Texas, U. The Texas law criminalized only sexual acts between people of the same sex, but the court's decision invalidated any sodomy law that prohibits consensual acts between adults.
Sodomy laws have existed for hundreds of years, and originated in religious prohibitions against non-procreative sexual acts.
As the Supreme Court noted in Lawrence v. Texas , historically, sodomy prosecutions were not usually used against consenting adults acting in private, but were often a way indeed, the only way to prosecute a sexual predator who committed any act other than vaginal intercourse against a non-consenting victim. In the 19th century, there were sodomy prosecutions against consenting adults, but these appear to have been for conduct that occurred in public.
In the 's, many states began decriminalizing all consensual, private sex acts between adults including sodomy , and included those engaging in homosexual sex. Around the same time, some states enacted laws prohibiting sodomy between people of the same sex such as the Texas law struck down by the Supreme Court , while other states retained laws that criminalized sodomy between any two people, no matter their gender.
In , the US Supreme Court upheld Georgia's sodomy law, which criminalized oral and anal sex between people of the same or different sex, on the basis that homosexuals had no constitutional right to engage in sodomy. Bowers v. Hardwick , U.
As noted, in modern times, even before the laws were invalidated, sodomy laws were rarely used in criminal prosecutions. The term is most frequently applied to anal intercourse between two men or to sexual relations between people and animals. See pederast. New Word List Word List. Save This Word! We could talk until we're blue in the face about this quiz on words for the color "blue," but we think you should take the quiz and find out if you're a whiz at these colorful terms. Lavers December 31, Washington Blade.
Lavers December 7, Washington Blade. Arlington man charged in sexual assault of hospice patient Dana Hedgpeth November 23, Washington Post.
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