Posted on 03/19/2003 12:48:02 AM PST by RJCogburn
The constitutional challenge to the Texas "homosexual conduct" law that the Supreme Court will take up next week has galvanized not only traditional gay rights and civil rights organizations, but also libertarian groups that see the case as a chance to deliver their own message to the justices.
The message is one of freedom from government control over private choices, economic as well as sexual. "Libertarians argue that the government has no business in the bedroom or in the boardroom," Roger Pilon, vice president for legal affairs at the Cato Institute, said today, describing the motivation for the institute, a leading libertarian research organization here, to file a brief on behalf of two gay men who are challenging the Texas law.
Dana Berliner, a lawyer for the Institute for Justice, another prominent libertarian group here that also filed a brief, said, "Most people may see this as a case purely about homosexuality, but we don't look at it that way at all." The Institute for Justice usually litigates against government regulation of small business and in favor of "school choice" tuition voucher programs for nonpublic schools.
"If the government can regulate private sexual behavior, it's hard to imagine what the government couldn't regulate," Ms. Berliner said. "That's almost so basic that it's easy to miss the forest for the trees."
The Texas case is a challenge to a law that makes it a crime for people of the same sex to engage in "deviate sexual intercourse," defined as oral or anal sex. In accepting the case, the justices agreed to consider whether to overturn a 1986 precedent, Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld a Georgia sodomy law that at least on its face, if not in application, also applied to heterosexuals.
While the Texas case has received enormous attention from gay news media organizations and other groups that view the 1986 decision as particularly notorious, it has been largely overshadowed in a busy Supreme Court term by the challenge to the University of Michigan's affirmative action program. The justices accepted both cases on the same day last December, and briefing has proceeded along identical schedules. The Texas case will be argued March 26 and the Michigan case six days later, on April 1.
Although libertarian-sounding arguments were presented to the court as part of the overall debate over the right to privacy in the Bowers v. Hardwick case, they were not the solitary focus of any of the presentations then. The Institute for Justice had not yet been established, and the Cato Institute, which dates to 1977, had not begun to file legal briefs. Whether the arguments will attract a conservative libertarian-leaning justice like Clarence Thomas, who was not on the court in 1986, remains to be seen.
More traditional conservative groups have entered the case on the state's side, among them the American Center for Law and Justice, a group affiliated with the Rev. Pat Robertson that is a frequent participant in Supreme Court cases.
The split among conservatives demonstrates "a diversity of opinion among our side," Jay Alan Sekulow, the center's chief counsel, said today. He said the decision to come in on the state's side presented a "tough case, one that we approached with reluctance." He said he decided to enter the case after concluding that acceptance of the gay rights arguments by the court might provide a constitutional foundation for same-sex marriage.
The marriage issue also brought other conservative groups into the case on the state's side. "The Texas statute is a reasonable means of promoting and protecting marriage — the union of a man and a woman," the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family told the court in a joint brief.
While the Texas case underscores the split between social and libertarian conservatives, it is evident at the same time that the alliance between the libertarians and the traditional civil rights organizations is unlikely to extend further. The two are on opposite sides in the University of Michigan case, with both the Cato Institute and the Institute for Justice opposing affirmative action while nearly every traditional civil rights organization has filed a brief on Michigan's side. The Bush administration, which filed a brief opposing the Michigan program, did not take a stand in the Texas case.
In 1986, when the court decided Bowers v. Hardwick, half the states had criminal sodomy laws on their books. Now just 13 do. Texas is one of four, along with Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, with laws that apply only to sexual activity between people of the same sex. The sodomy laws of the other nine states — Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia — do not make that distinction. The Georgia law that the Supreme Court upheld was later invalidated by the Georgia Supreme Court.
The Texas law is being challenged by John G. Lawrence and Tyron Garner, who were found having sex in Mr. Lawrence's Houston apartment by police officers who entered through an unlocked door after receiving a report from a neighbor that there was a man with a gun in the apartment. The neighbor was later convicted of filing a false report. The two men were held in jail overnight, prosecuted and fined $200 each. Represented by the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, they challenged the constitutionality of the law and lost in a middle-level state appeals court. The Texas Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
The United States Supreme Court's decision to take the case has been interpreted on both sides as an indication that the court is likely to rule against the state. Both Texas and the organizations that have filed briefs on its side devote considerable energy in the briefs to trying to convince the justices that granting the case was a mistake, a choice of tactics that is usually an indication of concern that a decision that does reach the merits will be unfavorable.
If the justices do strike down the Texas law, the implications of the decision will depend on which route the court selects from among several that are available. The court could find that by singling out same-sex behavior Texas has violated the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. Because the Bowers v. Hardwick decision did not address equal protection, instead rejecting an argument based on the right to privacy, such a decision would not necessarily require the court to overrule the 1986 precedent.
The Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund's brief for the two men urges the court to go further and rule that any law making private consensual sexual behavior a crime infringes the liberty protected by the Constitution's due process guarantee. Several arguments in its brief appear tailored to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who voted with the majority in Bowers v. Hardwick but is now assumed, on the basis of her later support for abortion rights and her votes in other due process cases, to be at least open to persuasion.
For example, the brief includes a quotation from Jane Dee Hull, then the Republican governor of Arizona, where Justice O'Connor once served in the Legislature, on signing a bill repealing the state's sodomy law in 2001. "At the end of the day, I returned to one of my most basic beliefs about government: It does not belong in our private lives," Governor Hull said.
This would be the a dumb call for the SCOTUS. They don't seem to realize that the culture wars are about to come back, big time.
Why? Because the left-wing media dominance of the last 40 years is collapsing. They are increasingly less able to promote and enforce their pro-homosexual, pro-abortion dogma. There are now other outlets, and we are not going away.
This would be a stupid, stupid move to overturn that statute. It's not the '70s anymore, and my generation (Gen-X) has lived through the cultural minefield of the last 40 years. Many of us are not amused.
That's it in a nutshell. Well said.
It's even in the Constitution.
Exactly. It's a prudential judgement, to be made by the people of Texas, not a robed elite confecting yet another "right" from the text of the Constitution. SCOTUS--stay out of it.
But they can't have same sex marriages like the Founding Fathers intended --- er, uh, or something like that.
The Texas Fourteenth Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, earlier upheld the state’s same-sex sodomy prohibition under the state and federal constitutions. The court’s majority disagreed with a decision by its three-judge panel, which had found that the law violated the rights of the two men arrested at home for private, consensual sex.I'm going to say it for the last time.The three-judge panel had held that the “Homosexual Conduct” law violated the mens’ right to equal protection under the Texas Equal Rights Amendment by criminalizing conduct between same-sex partners but leaving the identical conduct legal for different-sex couples. On rehearing, the full court held that the law does not violate the right to equal treatment under the laws or to privacy from government prying into intimate adult conduct.
In a strong dissent from the en banc decision, Justice John Anderson said that the “Homosexual Conduct” law’s prohibition on sodomy for same-sex couples “cannot... be explained by anything but animus toward the persons it affects” - which is not a legitimate motive for government discrimination against one group of people.
I do not see anything unconstitutional in banning sodomy across the board, at the state level or county level.
Nevertheless, banning sodomy between woman and woman, or man and man, wil not survive constitutional scrutiny.
My personal views on whether cunnilingus is a sin or unnatural or acceptable will have little to do with the Supreme Court's decision.
Your concern for the health of homosexuals is touching.
Locking them up will prevent them from being violated.
Ok, how about this:
Prohibiting actions that do not in themselves advance the public good is the ultimate in collectivism.
Think about it. "You want to do something? How does it help me? It doesn't? Well, then you can't do it."
This implies a slave type relationship between an individual and his nosy neighbor. That one cannot do something simply for himself reeks of socialism and communism.
I would think a libertarian would rather do this legislatively, instead of having a judge do the heavy lifting for him.
Lots of name calling from the libertarians here - calling people Nazis, comparing people to the Taliban and Hillary.
No wonder nobody takes them seriously.
I think you'll find Nessie in Loch Ness before you'll find one of those...
Again, the doctrine that government is constrained only by such considerations, and not by absolute principles which draw a bright line around personal liberties, is the essence of totalitarianism.
Yes -- there are those who believe that there are absolute moral standards which bind the powers of the State (libertarians) and those who take the moral relativist view that the State is bound only by prudential considerations (statists).
Not everything prescribed or proscribed in the Bible belongs in law.
Shall we execute adulterers?
What punishment sall be enacted for those who take the Lord's name in vain?
I know, let's send squads out with machine guns to shoot shoppers and storekeepers on Sundays !
You and I both have rights to our views about sodomy. There is absolutely no right to make them law. That violates the right to liberty and to pursuit of happiness. While I may agree that those who are pursuing happiness through homosexual sex are on the wrong path, we have no right to criminalize private, consensual sex between adults.
None.
But I see no problem whatsoever with ratifying male-female sex as the norm and discouraging homosexual sex as a threat to the social order.
Your racial/gender analogy fails because we do have laws that pertain only to one sex because of biological reality. Equal protection survives only as far as the male and female body are reasonably equal. There you have it. Two hundred and fifty posts and no one's layed a glove on me.
Probably because social conservatism is actually more logical than libertarianism, by far.
***BBBBZZZZTTT***! The reason censorship of speech is evil is precisely because it violates the rights of the speaker.
George, I'm sure we're on the same page regarding morality. This kind of sick, Bacchanalian debauchery in public should be punished...
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