Making Love Legal
After Years of Failure, Activists Are Watching Sodomy Laws Topple with Increasing
Speed
The
Advocate, March 19999
By Mubarak Dahir
As Republican minority leader in the Georgia senate, Eric Johnson has worked on his
share of legislation. Still, Johnson’s latest effort is as likely to be as effective
as stopping the tide from coming in. "I think we ought to be able to ban gay
sex," he declared to the Savannah Morning News.
Johnson’s outburst was prompted by a ruling by the state supreme court in
November. In a surprising decision, the court overturned Georgia’s infamous
165-year-old sodomy law, leaving antigay politicians in the Peach State blustering about
reviving the sodomy statute through new legislation or by an amendment to the state
constitution.
But Johnson and his conservative cohorts appear to be on the losing end of a sweeping,
state-by-state campaign to topple sodomy laws.
In early February a Louisiana appeals court threw out the state’s sodomy law,
stating that consensual acts of oral and anal sex are constitutionally protected as rights
to privacy under the state constitution. In a 3-0 ruling issued on February 9, the court
reversed the conviction of Mitchell Smith, who had been found guilty of "crimes
against nature" by having a woman perform oral sex on him. Under the sodomy law,
which covered heterosexual and homosexual acts, oral and anal sex were felonies punishable
by up to five years in prison. "There can be no doubt that the right of consenting
adults to engage in private noncommercial sexual activity, free from governmental
interference, is protected by the privacy clause of the Louisiana Constitution," the
judges wrote in their decision.
Two other states saw their sodomy laws overturned in 1998. In June the Rhode Island
legislature voted to repeal that state’s 102-year-old law forbidding "abominable
and detestable crimes against nature." And in October a Baltimore judge ruled
same-gender sex was not illegal in Maryland-though she stopped short of declaring that the
sodomy law violated the Maryland constitution.
And sodomy laws in Texas and Arkansas are believed to stand a good chance of crumbling
under current legal challenges making their way through the state courts. The Texas law is
being challenged by John Lawrence and Tyrone Garner, who were arrested after police walked
into Lawrence’s Houston apartment. The officers, who were responding to a false
report of a man with a gun, found the pair having sex and threw them in jail, where they
spent a night before posting bail.
With the Louisiana ruling, there are now 11 states that still criminalize oral or anal
sex between consenting adults. In five states-Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and
Texas- sodomy laws continue to specifically target same-sex couples. But activists and gay
and lesbian legal advocates have been gleefully chipping away at the remaining vestiges of
the codified criminalization of same-gender sex.
"I think we’re going to see the demise of all of the remaining laws in the
next few years," predicts Suzanne B. Goldberg, a staff attorney at Lambda Legal
Defense and Education Fund, which has been instrumental in fighting many of the state
sodomy laws.
But the sweetest victory was clearly in Georgia, where the state supreme court found
6-1 that the sodomy law "manifestly infringes upon a constitutional provision...which
guarantees to the citizens of Georgia the right of privacy." The statute became a
notorious symbol of antigay oppression when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it in the 1986
case Bowers v. Hardwick.
Goldberg, who is the lead attorney in the pending Arkansas and Texas cases, says the
Georgia decision "could well have a domino effect" on other state cases.
"Oh, yeah, it’s a big logroller," agrees John Rawls, the gay civil
rights attorney taking on the Louisiana sodomy law. While no state is bound by rulings in
other states, "every state peeks to see what the others are doing. Without question,
what happened in Georgia is going to impact what’s going on in Louisiana and
everywhere else."
Rawls emphasizes that defeating sodomy laws is important even where they are seldom
enforced. "It’s the government’s way of calling gays scum," he says.
"The laws taint us as unindicted criminals for making love to our partners." The
laws have been used to deny custody to gay and lesbian parents as well as to deny gay men
and lesbians jobs. Echoing other activists, Rawls says he believes there is "no
chance of real gay civil rights at a federal level until we get rid of every last sodomy
law."
The Georgia law had proved frustratingly resilient. As recently as 1996 it withstood a
legal challenge when it was used by undercover police to crack down on cruising at a
highway rest stop. The Georgia supreme court upheld the law then by a 5-2 vote.
But Johnson and his colleagues got it wrong when they condemned the ruling as favoring
gays over other citizens of Georgia. In fact, the case that finally upset the law so
roundly despised by gay men and lesbians around the country had nothing to do with gay
sex. Instead, it involved a married man who had been convicted of performing oral sex on
his 17-year-old niece while his pregnant wife slept in the next room.
Dahir is an editorial writer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
[Home] [News] [USA]
