Thursday marked
the five-year anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme
Court decision allowing consensual gay sex to be
decriminalized nationwide. The 6-3 decision in
Lawrence v. Texas overturned a Texas law
that made it illegal to engage in same-sex sodomy. The court
said upholding consensual gay sexual conduct was in
line with the U.S. Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment
equal-protection clause, since the state didn't
prohibit heterosexual sodomy.
The men at the
center of the case, John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner,
were arrested for sodomy in 1998, fined $200 each, and
imprisoned for one night. Police were
responding to a call from a disgruntled neighbor
who faked a distress call. Police went to the apartment,
pushed in the door, and found the two men engaged in
anal sex, which was then a punishable offense.
Paul Smith, the
attorney who represented the couple, told the Dallas
Voice that liberties expanded to gays in the past
five years are at least in part a result of the
overturning of Texas's sodomy law by the 2003
Lawrence decision.
"I think the
amount of progress we have made in the last five years
is quite large overall, the progress both culturally and
legally," Smith said in the article. "It's to
the point now where we have the Democratic candidate
advocating an end to [the federal Defense of Marriage
Act] and marriage starting to happen in California, and
basically the people in Massachusetts are so used to
marriage, it's not even an issue anymore."
As recently as
1960, all states had a sodomy law, but by 2003, 37 states
had repealed the laws or state courts had overturned them.
(The Advocate)
