Are you advocating for legalizing prostitution? For Any recreational drugs taken in private?
The problem with your suggestion is that the strong penchant of the legalization advocates is to cast the legalization of the illicit as making it licit. The sodomy lobby has done exactly this; in fact, they are now criminalizing those who don’t agree that sodomy is not only licit, but worthy of celebration!
You may not like the sound of this - and I suspect that you won’t - but the law serves as instructive to members of a society when it reflects society’s moral values. Having anti-sodomy laws on the books is society collectively condemning it. Not having a codified prohibition of it, or suddenly lifting a long-standing and universally accepted prohibition, creates the effect of societal approval.
When states were allowed to criminalize homosexual acts, there was a suppression effect even though these laws may have seldom, if ever, been enforced. Public sexual acts are technically illegal anyway, so it was a non-starter that no one would even know that homosexuals were engaging in such acts in private, where all sexual acts belong. In other words, these acts were virtually unenforceable unless a law enforcement official observed them, and if performed in private, that wasn’t going to happen. This helped keep homosexuality a private subculture in all but the most progressive urban areas. So what if the law was never enforced? It accomplished a desirable effect regardless.
The problem is that having the laws allowed for potential violations of people’s private rights even if you suspected they were doing something that was technically outlawed. And the tradeoff was never worth it; having laws in the books by itself was never going to be able to do much of anything to turn the tide unless there was a cultural understanding of what should be encouraged and approved of as normal and moral. As far as anti sodomy laws go, even if they could be brought back in some states, it is most likely that the cultural battles over the validity of anti sodomy laws would be lost by those who advocated for them. Indeed, they would probably not even show up to fight these cultural wars, just like they never showed up to fight the cultural battles when anti sodomy laws were being debated and when legalized same sex marriage was debated in some states and is being debated in other states right now. It is one of those things where the culture has to be won before any progress is made, and that involves getting off of our collective asses to do it.Having laws in the books won’t accomplish it and would ultimately be more effective in allowing for unreasonable privacy invasions and 4th Amendment violations.