A Gay Pride Day to Remember
New
York Daily News, June 29, 2003
450 West 33rd Street, New York, NY 10001
Fax: 212-682-4953 Email: voicers@edit.nydailynews.com
When gays rose up against police during the Stonewall
Riots in 1969, they were living in a country that considered them criminals.
But when their descendants in the struggle for equal rights march down Fifth
Ave. in today’s Gay Pride Parade, they will do so in a nation whose Supreme
Court has forcefully ruled that they are “entitled to respect for their
private lives.”
In the matter of Lawrence vs.
Texas, the justices ruled 6 to 3 Thursday that the sodomy law in
Texas, which criminalized consensual sexual activity between homosexuals, was
unconstitutional. But the court didn’t leave it at that. In a breathtaking
majority opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court overturned its 1986
decision in Bowers vs. Hardwick,
which had upheld a similar statute in Georgia, saying that ruling “demeans
the lives of homosexual persons.”
The ruling was stunning for another reason: For the first
time in history, the rights of gays to live their lives with dignity, free
from state persecution and prosecution, was vigorously defended by the
nation’s highest court—a conservative one, at that.
Noting that intimate contact is but one expression of a
deeper bond between two people, Kennedy wrote, “The state cannot demean
their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual
conduct a crime.” He added, “Their right to liberty under the Due Process
Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without
intervention of the government.”
Not everyone is thrilled. Most notably Justice Antonin
Scalia. The man who aspires to be the next chief justice penned a dissenting
opinion laden with intolerance. Scalia blasted the majority for eroding moral
codes across the country, for imposing its views on the nation, for having
“taken sides in the culture war” and for “largely sign[ing] on to the
so-called homosexual agenda.”
The retrograde language in Scalia’s opinion reflects a
time when gays and lesbians were considered abnormal, a queer oddity, if you
will. But society—in the state, the country and the world—has changed and
continues to change for the better.
This paper has changed too. Stonewall—the advent of the
gay rights movement—was heralded by a then very different Daily News
with the July 6, 1969, headline “Homo nest raided, queen bees stinging
mad.” The story dripped with the condescension toward homosexuals that was
customary for the time—because it reflected the sentiments of much of the
city. And America.
Thirty-four years later, the sentiments have matured. And
now, with last week’s historic decision, gays and lesbians have won
something they always deserved but never expected to get from the Supreme
Court: respect.
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