Lawrence v. Texas, legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (6–3) on June 26, 2003, that a Texas state law criminalizing certain intimate sexual conduct between two consenting adults of the same sex was unconstitutional. The sodomy laws in a dozen other states were thereby invalidated. The decision overturned the court’s ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), which had upheld Georgia’s sodomy law. Gay rights groups hailed the verdict as a historic day in the evolution of civil rights in the United States, whereas conservatives castigated the decision as a sign of the country’s moral decay.
On September 17, 1998, police officers in the Houston area responded to a reported weapons disturbance at the apartment of John Geddes Lawrence, a medical technician. The complaint came from a neighbour who told the police that, because of a domestic fight or a robbery, there was a man with a gun “going crazy.” Police entered the unlocked apartment with guns drawn. (The lack of a warrant did not figure in any of the subsequent litigation.) Once in the apartment the police found Lawrence engaging in consensual sex with a companion, Tyron Garner. Police arrested both men, held them in custody overnight, and then charged them under a Texas criminal statute that forbade “deviate sexual intercourse” between people of the same sex. They were tried, found guilty, and fined $200 each. The neighbour, who had earlier been accused of harassing Lawrence and with whom Garner was also romantically involved, later admitted that he had been lying, pleaded no contest to charges of filing a false police report, and served 15 days in jail.
The Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a national legal organization dedicated to gay rights, took up Lawrence’s case and appealed it through the Texas court system on the grounds that it violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (which prohibited the states from denying “to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”) and a similar clause of the Texas state constitution. As expected, the plaintiffs lost at each stage, with the courts relying on Bowers v. Hardwick. Lambda believed, however, that, after the Supreme Court’s favourable opinion in Romer v. Evans (1996)—which voided an amendment to the Colorado state constitution prohibiting laws barring discrimination against gays—there was a good chance that Bowers would be overturned. The justices accepted the case on December 2, 2002, and heard oral arguments on March 26, 2003.
The Supreme Court ruling
The court asked counsel to address three questions:
1. Whether Petitioners’ criminal convictions under the Texas “Homosexual Conduct” law—which criminalizes sexual intimacy by same-sex couples, but not identical behavior by different-sex couples—violate the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws? 2. Whether Petitioners’ criminal convictions for adult consensual sexual intimacy in their home violate their vital interests in liberty and privacy protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment? 3. Whether Bowers v. Hardwick…should be overruled?
In conference, five justices—John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer—voted not only that the Texas law should be struck down but that Bowers should be overruled as well. Sandra Day O’Connor agreed with the first point but not the second, while Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, would have upheld the Texas law. As the senior justice in the majority, Stevens had the authority to choose who would write the majority opinion, and he designated Kennedy.
U.S. courts are, as a rule, reluctant to overturn precedents, especially in recently decided cases. Bowers was less than two decades old, and three of the justices in that case still sat on the court. Kennedy understood that in order to justify such a step, he had to show that the earlier decision failed on jurisprudential as well as societal grounds. He began his opinion with a bold statement of the right to privacy:
Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places. In our tradition the State is not omnipresent in the home. And there are other spheres of our lives and existence, outside the home, where the State should not be a dominant presence. Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct. The instant case involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.
After reviewing the facts, Kennedy went to the nub of the case. The only way that the court could agree that the sexual conduct of two consenting adults fell within the liberty provisions of the due process clause (“nor shall any state deprive any person of…liberty…without due process of law”) was to reexamine Bowers. He questioned the way in which Justice Byron White, who authored the majority opinion in Bowers, had framed the central issue of the case—as whether the Constitution “confers a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy”—and asserted that White’s formulation “discloses the Court’s own failure to appreciate the extent of the liberty at stake.” The very wording “demeans the claim of the individual put forward, just as it would demean a married couple were it to be said marriage is simply about the right to have sexual intercourse,” he wrote.
Test Your Knowledge
A fair-minded understanding of the basic constitutional right of privacy, Kennedy declared, would take seriously, in gay as well as straight sexual relations, the accompanying integrity of the connection between sexual expression and companionate friendship and love. The liberty protected by the Constitution, Kennedy affirmed, allows homosexual as well as heterosexual persons the right to establish a personal bond with a companion, one element of which may be a sexual relationship. For those who argued that the Constitution mentions neither privacy nor the rights of gays, Kennedy responded that the framers had not drafted the document in specific terms because they did not claim to know “the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities” but were themselves open—as the court needed to be—to new arguments and experiences. He concluded that the Texas statute was unconstitutional because it penalized only acts committed by same-sex couples; that acts between consenting adults in the privacy of their home is a liberty and privacy interest protected by the due process clause; and that Bowers should be overruled. Kennedy stated the last point unequivocally: “Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today.”
O’Connor concurred in the part of the opinion that overturned the Texas statute, agreeing that it discriminated against gays, but she defended the right of a state to outlaw certain types of intimate acts, provided that it applied the ban on a nondiscriminatory basis. For her, the case should have been decided not on the basis of a right to privacy embedded in the due process clause but according to the manner in which the law was enforced, measured against the equal protection clause.
Scalia, dissenting for himself, Rehnquist, and Thomas, accused the majority of inconsistency. The court had refused to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973), which recognized a woman’s right to obtain an abortion, but had no qualms in reversing the precedent set by Bowers. Essentially, Scalia, like White, did not believe in a constitutional right to privacy in general or its application to protect either abortion or sodomy in particular. He dismissed Kennedy’s historical analysis, which showed how attitudes toward gays had changed over the years, because he considered it constitutionally irrelevant: a strict construction of the meaning of the Constitution and the intent of its framers would make clear that laws prohibiting abortion as well as sodomy were perfectly acceptable. Only a change in the Constitution itself could alter that fact.
Justice Thomas entered a short dissent of his own in which he termed the Texas law “uncommonly silly.” Were he a member of the Texas legislature, he “would vote to repeal it. Punishing someone for expressing his sexual preference through noncommercial consensual conduct with another adult does not appear to be a worthy way to expend valuable law enforcement resources.” But he could find no constitutional objection to Texas’s doing so.