Gay
Rights Group Challenges State Sodomy Law
Associated Press, March 19, 2003
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/local/5423749.htm
COLUMBIA, S.C.—Ed
Madden says he’s a felon under South Carolina sex laws even though he’s
been with the same man for eight years. But he hopes a U.S. Supreme Court case
will change that.
Madden, an associate English professor at the University
of South Carolina, said he breaks the state’s sodomy law that applies to
both same-sex and different-sex partners.
“It’s disheartening,” he said. “Under state law,
I’m a habitual felon because of the buggery law. That’s not how I imagine
myself at all.”
The national gay rights advocacy organization Lambda
Legal is trying to eliminate the laws criminalize certain sex acts in nine
states. Four other states—Texas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma—have laws that only apply to gays and
lesbians.
The organization’s Southern Regional Director Hector
Vargas says the outcome of a U.S. Supreme Court case that challenges state
sodomy laws will affect South Carolinians. The justices will hear the case on
March 26.
“If the court addresses the privacy issue that we’ve
asked them to-that there is a right to privacy for adult, consensual, sexual
intimacy—then what would happen in South
Carolina is that the buggery law would be unenforceable,” Vargas said.
University of South Carolina law professor Eldon Wedlock
says the current state law “opens people to make arguments based on the fact
that a your love life is criminal conduct.”
“Because it’s not used very much, nobody seems to
care about it,” Wedlock said. “But it’s like a ticking time bomb-you
never know when it’s going off in your life if you’re gay.”
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