This is not about the teachings of the Church. Should we enshrine mandatory weekly church attendance in law?
The historical evidence clearly shows that state legislatures have always possessed a broad authority to outlaw private, consensual sex, and that they also prohibited same-sex sodomy specifically since the earliest days of American history. Enactment of the Bill of Rights in 1791 and the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 did not alter that state legislative authority. This Court has frequently looked to the Constitution's "text, history and precedent" to determine its meaning. Eldred v. Ashcroft, ___ U. S. ___, 123 S. Ct. 769, 777 (2003). As this Court recently reiterated in Eldred v. Ashcroft, "a page of history is worth a volume of logic." Id., quoting New York Trust Company v. Eisner, 256 U. S. 345, 349 (1921); see also U. S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, 514 U. S. 779, 790 (1995) (" Against this historical background, we viewed the Convention debates as manifesting the Framers' intent that the qualifications in the Constitution be fixed and exclusive.").
It is a settled constitutional principle within our federal republic that states possess general police powers. Inherent within these powers lies the duty to regulate the "health, safety, and morals" of their members. Barnes v. Glen Theater, 501 U. S. 560, 569 (1991) (referencing public indecency statutes which were designed to protect morals and public order). States have used this police power to promote marriage and direct the sexual activities of their citizens into marriage by criminalizing a wide variety of nonmarital sex acts, such as polygamy, rape, fornication, adultery, prostitution and incest. While crimes such as rape and incest are not consensual, adultery, prostitution, polygamy and fornication are private acts between consenting adults that have been regulated throughout our nation's history. As we shall demonstrate, states have possessed and properly exercised the authority to regulate deviate sexual conduct including sodomy at all relevant times in our nation's history.