Posted on 04/09/2007 11:52:32 AM PDT by Lorianne
When the Supreme Court struck down Texas's law against sodomy in the summer of 2003, in the landmark gay rights case of Lawrence v. Texas, critics warned that its sweeping support of a powerful doctrine of privacy could lead to challenges of state laws that forbade such things as gay marriage and bigamy. "State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are ... called into question by today's decision," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia, in a withering dissent he read aloud page by page from the bench.
It turns out the critics were right. Plaintiffs have made the decision the centerpiece of attempts to defeat state bans on the sale of sex toys in Alabama, polygamy in Utah and adoptions by gay couples in Florida. So far the challenges have been unsuccessful. But plaintiffs are still trying. Even using Lawrence to challenge laws against incest.
In Ohio, lawyers for a Cincinnati man convicted of incest for sleeping with his 22-year-old stepdaughter tell TIME that they will make the Lawrence's decision the centerpiece of an appeal to the Supreme Court. "Our view of Lawrence is a fairly narrow one, that there is a Constitutional right under the 14th Amendment's due process clause that says private consensual activity between adults cannot be criminal," said J. Dean Carro, the lead lawyer for Paul D. Lowe, the former sheriff's deputy sentenced in 2004 to 120 days in jail after pleading no contest to incest.
But Houston lawyer Mitchell Katine, one of the attorneys who handled the Lawrence case before the Supreme Court, isn't so sure the court will agree. The state, he said, will likely argue that the intimate facts of family life in this case are different enough from the facts in the Lawrence case that Lawrence's privacy protection should not apply. "That's the hurdle they have to get over."
They have already failed to do so once. The Ohio Supreme Court rejected the plantiffs' argument that Lawrence created a new fundamental privacy right that made laws restricting consensual, private sex among adults unconstitutional. Instead, prosecutors successfully argued that Lawrence said only that anti-sodomy laws bore no rational relationship to a legitimate state interest — the lowest of Constitutional barriers. Agreeing, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that state interests in preventing incest — even among adults or step-relations — were perfectly legitimate.
The issue does not appear to have been challenged in federal court previously, though the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2005 that a Wisconsin law forbidding incest among blood relations (but not including step-relations) did not conflict with Lawrence's ruling. But in upholding prison sentences for a brother-sister couple in that case, the court acknowledged that the language in Lawrence is all but certain to prompt more challenges to prosecutions for sex-related crimes on privacy grounds.
Katine said he hopes the muddied waters can be cleared up by the U.S. Supreme Court soon. "I really hope that the Court will take an issue and explain what they really meant."
Justice Anthony Kennedy's ruling in the Lawrence case was greeted enthusiastically by those who thought it would usher in a new era of privacy rights. But lower courts have been very careful about interpreting the decision. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, for instance, twice rejected efforts to broaden Lawrence. In 2004, it upheld Florida's law prohibiting gay adoptions by saying the importance of providing for children gives the state the right to set rules for their adoption. And later that year, it ruled that a district judge in Alabama had erred in using Lawrence to strike down the state's prohibition on the sale of sex toys . Only in Massachusetts, with its famous gay marriage decision handed down four months after Lawrence, has a top appeals court sided with plaintiffs seeking to use the decision to void state laws regarding sex or marriage.
"When we first read some of the language about dignity and how the state doesn't have a right to impose its moral code on its citizens, we thought this decision would be extremely powerful and widely followed," Katine told TIME. "I am disappointed that the lower courts have not followed some of the language that is contained in Lawrence."
If the Court declines to hear Lowe's case, others less fraught with taboo could take its place in seeking to define the reach of Lawrence. The ACLU has filed suit in several states to challenge the few remaining statutes that prohibit unmarried couples from living together. This is the sort of case that may have a better chance of expanding Lawrence's reach, said Katine.
Bless you for saying this so eloquently! It bears repeating. I love ya, Man! LOL
Neither of us knows what the past held. I’d suspect that he’d been abusing her for years and this was a continuation of the past. Why would she be attracted to him? It’s creepy.
I guess the Scripture went right over your head. Man will not restain himself, never has, never will. Some yes, but not enough, never has, never will.
Government is not eloquence, it is force.
Governments are instituted among men to secure rights.
Personally, I don't think our Creator endowed us with the right to use force to stop consenting adults from engaging in behavior we find repugnant or even immoral.
Our Creator clearly endowed us with the right of non-association with such persons.
Government now forces you to associate. That's wrong. But using government (force) against them is wrong also.
Shun them !
Thanks, now I feel like an idiot, but at least not an ignorant one.
“As long as everybody thinks the Ozarks and Appalachians are a place were people drink moonshine, live in shacks and have sex with their sisters, stuck up Northeasterners will stay away.”
SHHHHHHHH! Don’t post stuff like that. We *want* people to think the south is a backwards hellhole that they’d never want to visit, let alone live in.
Here are some tales about the south that we need to keep repeating: southerners are a bunch of inbred, impoverished hicks who marry their sisters, have broken down pick up trucks in their front yard, bad teeth, and are complete illiterates. If you visit the south, you risk being killed in a shoot out between feuding clans or in a still explosion. There is no air conditioning in the south, the mosquitoes are as big as sparrows, and malaria is a major problem. There is no food other than hamburger helper and grilled roadkill. So avoid the south at all costs!
:-)
If you managed to find a way to make a living in Michigan, perhaps you can give me advice on finding a good job in Tennessee!
Woody and Mia had an illegitimate/out of wedlock child together, whom they name Satchel, after Satchel Paige...the great Negro League baseball player.
I’m in Pennsylvania, which fortunately has relatively decent gun laws, but had been looking at western TN. Best wishes in Michigan! Sorry to hear it’s so bad there.
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Please ping me to all note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of interest.
1. The family is the basic unit of society.
2. Incest (at any age) tends to destroy the natural bonds between family members, thereby destroying families.
3. Therefor, incest (at any age) should be illegal.
... as should divorce, adultery, fornication, masturbation (yes!), and sodomy.
But we’ll have none of that. This day had to come. The questions we as a society are facing now represent the natural progression of an “enlightened” human race. When the family was replaced by the individual as the basic unit of society; when Duties to God, neighbor, and King were replaced by the Rights of Man as the moral coin of society; and when submission to God was replaced by individual liberty as the primary value of society, a process was set in motion that led directly to this day.
Liberty is our goddess now. Her worshipers will not be denied.
Are they pushers or pullers?
I stand corrected, thanks!
With all due respect, it sounds good on paper............but, society will decide which rights will be protected..........
If it is a moral society, then the laws will tend to support high morals.........If it is an immoral society, then the laws will tend to support low morals
Low morals = more crime, more disease, more broken homes, more child abuse, higher taxes, run down roadways, more corrupt officials, more graft, more greed, more supression..............a nation ripe for overthrow.
Look to the nations that have low morals, and you will see nations in serious decline, and in peril.
Anybody can claim anything to be a right in an immoral nation, and find some way to justify it.
Our Constitution protects our rights, but it is still up to the people, through their elected representatives to decide what the laws, both federal and state, will be. Mistakes will be made, but if a nation decides to become immoral and to legislate immorality, then the mistakes will occur on such a grand scale, that that nation will be facing it's final days...........
There is overwhelming proof that our Founding Fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution for a moral society, knowing that if the people became corrupt morally, then.............well, Franklin put it best....."if you can keep it."
If a nation decides that stealing is a "right", then that nation is headed for big trouble........ if a nation decides that lying is a "right", then that nation is headed for big trouble...........if a nation decides that sexual immorality is a "right", then that nation is headed for big trouble.
U.S. citizens, through their elected representatives, have a RIGHT to help steer this nation away from big trouble, that could ultimately lead to its demise...........
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