The high court also struck down its own 1986 ruling upholding Georgia’s anti-sodomy law in Bowers v. Hardwick, which, the justices affirmed, “demeans the lives of homosexual persons.”

The Supreme Court judges, the majority of whom were appointed by Republican Party administrations, rooted their decision in “our laws and traditions in the past half century,” that is, the impact of the social gains made in the struggle for Black and women’s rights in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

The sodomy ruling came three days after the court’s decision upholding affirmative action programs in higher education. In a third decision beneficial to working people the same week, the Supreme Court ruled in two death penalty cases that those on death row not only have the right to a lawyer but to effective counsel. By an 8-1 vote, the high court ordered the federal appeals court to grant a habeas corpus hearing to a Texas death row inmate, Thomas Miller-El, who said the selection of his jury had been infected by racist bias. In the second related case, the Supreme Court overturned the death sentence of Kevin Wiggins on the grounds that a federal appeals court should have granted him a writ of habeas corpus on the basis of ineffective assistance of counsel. The justices ruled that the failure of Wiggins’s defense lawyer to investigate and inform the jury of the childhood abuse Wiggins had suffered fell below the minimum constitutional standards of competence.

Lawrence v. Texas began with the September 1998 arrest of John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner. Harris County sheriffs broke into Lawrence’s apartment in Houston after a neighbor reported a man with a gun “going crazy.” They found the two men having sex and arrested them on charges of sodomy. Lawrence and Garner were each fined $200 and ordered to pay $141 in court costs. Their appeals were rejected in the Texas courts.

Writing for the Supreme Court majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy outlined some of the history of legal changes that were brought about as a consequence of the battles to abolish segregation and strike blows against sexist discrimination in the United States. He pointed to the importance of the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut and 1972 Eisenstadt v. Baird cases, in which the court overturned state laws that banned the use of contraceptives first for married couples, and then unmarried individuals.

“The opinions in Griswold and Eisenstadt were part of the background for the decision in Roe v. Wade,” wrote Kennedy in reference to the 1973 landmark decision legalizing a woman’s right to choose abortion. “Roe recognized the right of a woman to make certain fundamental decisions affecting her destiny and confirmed once more that the protection of liberty under the Due Process Clause [of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution] has a substantive dimension of fundamental significance in defining the rights of a person.”

Kennedy also noted that before 1961 all 50 states outlawed “sodomy.” By 1986 that figure had dropped to 25. Today all but 13 states have dropped these reactionary laws from the books. Because of public opposition to such discrimination, even in those states this law is rarely enforced.

In the dissenting opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the court majority “has taken sides in the culture war” over social issues ranging from affirmative action and abortion to school prayer. He argued that the six other judges were “the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda,” and that “mainstream Americans” should be backed up in their efforts to prohibit gay men and lesbians from becoming scoutmasters and teachers.

While Scalia stated he has “nothing against homosexuals,” he added that the court was now opening the door to “fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity.” The overturning of Bowers would result in “a massive disruption of the current social order,” he claimed.

The administration of U.S. president George Bush declined to take a public stand on Lawrence v. Texas. The day after the court ruling, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said simply, “And now this is a state matter.”

The victory in the case gave a boost to gay pride day parades across the United States, as hundreds of thousands turned out the last weekend in June from New York and San Francisco, to Atlanta and Chicago. Participants wore T-shirts with slogans such as “My bedroom, my business,” as they celebrated the successful outcome of a case that has drawn international attention.

In another victory for working people, just two weeks prior to the U.S. Supreme Court decision, the Liberal Party government in Canada announced it would enact legislation granting legal status to same-sex marriages, which would grant rights to health-care and other benefits to homosexual couples. In 1996 the administration of William Clinton banned same-sex marriages in the United States in its so-called Defense of Marriage Act. That bill was passed by Democrats and Republicans alike 342-67 vote in the House of Representatives, and 85-14 in the Senate.  
 
 
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