I was going to save that title for Election Day 2004, but I'm just so overjoyed by yesterday's decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the Texas sodomy law, I can barely think straight (pun very much intended!).
Okay, I'll try to calm down and explain this for those who haven't been following along. And I'll explain to my straight visitors (who, naturally, make up the majority of my readers), why you too should be overjoyed by this landmark decision.
In fact, I'm going to address just my hetero readers for a moment:
Let's say you're a chick who gives your boyfriend a blow job, or a guy who goes down on your girlfriend (or complies when she asks you to stick your penis somewhere other than the "usual" place), and you're caught in the act in one of the nine states (or Puerto Rico) with sodomy laws that apply to heterosexuals still on the books.
Do you really know what that would mean?
You'll be a felon. You'll go to prison. You'll lose your right to vote. After you get out of the joint, you're going to find it hard to get work, and on every job application you're going to have to check the box that asks if you've ever been convicted of a crime. If you ever do get a job again, you'll never be able to work with children -- and you'll certainly never be able to get a job with any company that does government contract work, because you'll never pass the security clearance. And in some states (like Mississippi), you'll have to register as a sex offender with the local police.
Waking up every morning is just going to lack a certain joie de vivre, isn't it?
Now do I have your attention, straight folks?
Good.
Despite the headlines you've seen (the front page of the Washington Post described yesterday's ruling as "a victory for gay rights"), this is not merely a "gay-rights" issue. It affects you, no matter whether your orientation runs to men, women, inanimate objects, or Mary Palm and Her Five Lovely Daughters. (That's an age-old, snarky euphemism for male masturbation. I couldn't find a single reference to that exact phrase anywhere on the 'Net, so I expect I'll be its lone Googlewhacker soon. No, dear hearts, "whack" pun not intended... even if I am chuckling over it upon re-reading.)
Whoever and whatever you are, this decision involves your right to privacy, and your right to decide what it proper (or not) to do with your body. (Heteros, this means you!)
You see, not everybody agrees that you have the right to be left alone, or make moral judgments for yourself. It may sound, Mr. or Ms. Heterosexual, like you're safe from intrusion on your right to privacy, but that's simply not the case. Rick Santorum, the Republican Pennsylvania senator who compared homosexuality to bestiality (and worse), made that clear, even though very few of us realized it at the time; we were too outraged by his anti-gay rhetoric and hard-right moralizing to notice what he was really saying: that no one other than married heterosexuals has the right to privacy -- and that the right to privacy is a myth:
"...if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does....
"It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold [v. Connecticut]"
As Jennifer Vanasco wrote in the April 30th issue of the Chicago Free Press:
What's really shocking is that Santorum didn't attack only gays and lesbians. He attacked every adult woman and man in America.
Because what he really said in that Associated Press interview is that he's against an American right to privacy.
That's right. Santorum wants to peer into your bedroom. Or at least he wants the government to regulate what happens there whether you're gay or straight. ...
[N]otice Santorum didn't say, "right to consensual gay sex." He said "right to consensual sex." And I don't think it's a slip of the tongue. I think that Santorum, and others like him, really mean it. To them, sex and sexuality in any form other than a rigid husband-and-wife definition is dangerous. If a sexual relationship isn't solemnized by the state or the church (and preferably both) than it has no right to exist. Since just over half of Americans are married, Santorum is basically saying that the rest of us should be celibate. Not just gays and lesbians everybody.
Tom Ferrick, Jr., in the April 27th Philadelphia Inquirer, agrees:
You see, Santorum said, permissive liberalism has led to a decline in values because it condones deviant behavior, and this has undermined the central institution of our society: the family.
How do the liberals get away with it? The courts let them. Using bogus "privacy rights" under the 14th Amendment, the court has stopped the states from fulfilling their proper role of regulating morality. ...
"You say: 'Well, it's my individual freedom,'" Santorum said. "Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong, healthy families." ...
This interview reminds us that behind that Boy Scout face lies a right-wing ideologue. You can read variations of the Santorum riff on any number of conservative and religious-right Web pages and publications.
These groups particularly hate "privacy right" rulings, which they believe prevents the state from upholding morality through the use of laws and sanctions. (Read: fines and jail.)
[In the Manichean world of the hard right, there] is no middle ground. You are either with us or you are evil. It's as simple as that.
Santorum put a happy face on these arguments. But don't kid yourself. He's pure Cotton Mather. It's an assertion of faith, not an invitation to debate.
And Dan Reines (of Nerve.com) not only caught the significance of Santorum's meaning, but explains exactly why this affects you, Mr. or Ms. Heterosexual:
Not consensual gay sex, but consensual sex. Period. It seems Rick Santorum is making a pretty classic slippery slope argument, the twist here being that the slope begins sloping not in the bedrooms of West Hollywood and the West Village, but in your bedroom and mine as well. In the Senator's eyes, the right to sexual privacy among consenting adults is not a given...
[Griswold v. Connecticut was the] 1965 case that established the Constitutional right of heterosexual couples to use contraception within the context of a marriage. Yeah. So if Santorum can't get behind that, he's not going to get behind any form sexual privacy, your own particular kinks or lack thereof notwithstanding.
All of which brings us to the heart of the matter. Santorum has been vilified by the left and abandoned by some on the right for turning a legal case into a platform for his bigoted views, and rightly so. But in reality, Lawrence v. Texas isn't about gay sex at all... what Lawrence v. Texas is really about is privacy. In Texas and in more than a quarter of all states, it's worth noting it remains illegal for consenting adults to express their sexuality, even in private, unless their sexuality meets standards laid out by the state legislature.
If you're straight, do you perhaps think this doesn't concern you? ... Seen as a privacy issue rather than a sex issue, the high court's decision in Texas impacts your right to oral sex, it impacts your right to masturbation, it impacts your right to contraception hell, it impacts your right to everything but the missionary position, man on top, and it may just impact that too. In short, it impacts your right to any kind of sexual autonomy, particularly if you happen to be part of a "second-class" relationship.
That's not my term, by the way. William Donohue, president of the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, classifies heterosexual marriage as "special" and all other relationships as second-class in other words, not just the cousin-fuckers and the wife-collectors, but committed homosexual relationships and, yes, unmarried, sexually active straight couples (uncomfortable yet?). And, as Donohue puts it in throwing his organization's considerable support behind Santorum, if the law allows those kinds of relationships, well then we may as well "just let everybody fornicate and let kids be born into a society of bastards."
Uh-huh. The way I see it, as long as Texas law and the U.S. Constitution fails to protect our most private rights, well, a society of bastards is exactly what we've got.
Even Andrew Sullivan (that poor "gay conservative" who has yet to exit the dark side and come into the light) gets it. And that's saying something. (Andy, darling, I'll wait for you! You're so brilliant, albeit misguided, it's only a matter of time before you join David Brock among the ranks of those healed of self-loathing!)
Now, let's get back to the case that triggered this historical moment. Here's how it went down, and why:
For more than 140 years, Texas has had a ban on private same-sex activity between consenting adults. Until 1973, the state prohibited sodomy between heterosexual couples as well, but changed the law in '73, and called it (I'm not making this up) the Texas Homosexual Conduct Law. Since then, any straight couple, married or not, could engage in oral or anal sex if they wanted, but two men or two women who did the same thing were violating state law, even if they were doing it in the privacy of their own home.
Taken to the extreme, this means that Willie Wanton can pick up Sally Slut at the local bar, take her to a motel room, and spend the night doing much more than anything Mickey Rourke did to Kim Basinger in 9½ Weeks, without fear that the cops would be burst in and haul them off to the pokey. Yet Kirk Castro and Mark Miami, who have been in a committed, monogamous relationship for the past 20 years, can't physically express their mutual love in the privacy of their Fort Worth condo, in the bedroom, in the dark, under the covers, with the shades pulled and the doors locked, without violating state law.
And they would be in danger of the cops breaking down the door and hauling them off to jail.
And that, my friends, save for the locked door, is pretty much what happened to John Geddes Lawrence and Tyrone Garner.
Around 11:00 p.m. the night of September 17, 1998, Harris County sheriff's deputies, acting on a bogus report that an armed intruder had broken into Lawrence's apartment, waltzed in through an unlocked door to find not an intruder, but Lawrence and Garner having anal sex. The cops arrested the pair (hauling one outside in his underwear), and they were ultimately convicted. They lost on appeal, and after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused to hear the case, they went straight to the top. (The neighbor who called the cops, incidentally, earned a 15-day jail sentence for filing a false police report. Good.)
Yesterday, in one of its last decisions before going on summer vacation, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Texas' sodomy law is unconstitutional, and that in the case of Geddes and Lawrence, "the state intruded on the 'liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions'."
Predictably, the dissenters in the five-four decision were anti-human rights stalwarts Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. (Sandra Day O'Connor also voted to strike down the law, but only on the basis that it was unfair to criminalize homosexual oral and anal sex without applying the same penalty to heterosexuals.)
But Scalia, Thomas, and Rehnquist are longtime bigoted jerks, and I have no desire to dwell for long on their anti-gay rhetoric right now. (You can, if you like.) In short, Scalia was practically hysterical in his assertion that the decision "effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation."
What Fat Tony and all the other homophobes now bemoaning the fall of western civilization refuse to acknowledge is the fact that this ruling applies to consensual sex between adults. We are not talking about (God forbid!) legalizing pedophilia or incest, as Rick Santorum would have you believe, or bestiality, necrophilia, or kiddie porn, as Bush judicial nominee and Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor wants you to think.
And so, as much as gay people are celebrating this victory, and rightly so, this ruling is not merely a gay-rights issue. We're talking about limiting a state's ability to legislate your private life -- whether you're gay or straight.
If you don't believe that, then you need to look at the reasoning behind the conservative push to retain and enforce sodomy laws that apply only to homosexuals. On the surface, it appears that those who back sodomy laws do so out of concern for the health and welfare of the general public, citing higher rates of HIV and other sexually-transmitted diseases among gay men than in the general population.
It is true that unprotected anal sex is one of the quickest and surest ways to HIV infection. However, if the sodomy-law proponents were motivated solely by public-health concerns, then all sodomy laws should apply to heterosexual activity as well.
And in many states, they do. Until today's decision, which effectively overturns all U.S. sodomy laws, nine states -- Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia -- (as well as Puerto Rico) have prohibited sodomy, regardless of whether the participants are homosexual or heterosexual. Four more states -- Texas, Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma -- prohibit only consensual homosexual sodomy.
Nevertheless, whether the law applies to homos and heteros equally or not, the arguments for retaining sodomy laws are gossamer-thin. There is no evidence that sodomy laws reduce the rate of STD infection; in fact, the Centers for Disease Control's list of the ten states with the highest number of cumulative AIDS cases as of December, 2001, ranks Florida third, Texas fourth, and Puerto Rico eighth. That's not much of an endorsement for the idea that sodomy laws reduce HIV infection, is it? (Of course, New York and California rank first and second, and always will in any top-ten list, by virtue of population alone.)
It's also telling that that anti-gay forces focus their efforts on the sexual activity of gay men. Sodomy laws aimed solely at homosexuals are indeed enforceable against lesbians, too; the legal definition of "sodomy" varies from state to state, but almost always includes oral sex (and, in some states, any sexual activity that is not strictly penis-into-vagina intercourse is sodomy).
But mention of "protecting the public" through the criminalization of lesbian sex is noticeably absent among the arguments of sodomy-law proponents, which is understandable, as there is no basis for the "public health" argument. Evidence of HIV transmission between women is nonexistent; of five suspected cases of woman-to-woman HIV transmission reported over a 15-year period, not one has been irrefutably confirmed. The CDC reports that a "study of more than 1 million female blood donors found no HIV-infected women whose only risk was sex with women." (Yes, it's tempting to throw these statistics in the faces of those who claim AIDS is God's punishment for "immoral behavior"; if that's true, then God must like lesbians more than He -- or She -- does any other group on the planet!)
So, if sodomy laws are based on an interest in public health, why are lesbians included in this "criminal class"?
Thus, for thinking people at least, the rationale for homosexual-only sodomy laws falls apart, just as it does for sodomy laws that apply to heteros. If you want to argue about morality, like Sen. Santorum does, let's look at the argument that decriminalizing sodomy will (to deliberately mix metaphors here) pave the way down the slippery slope to decriminalizing such acts as bestiality (having sex with animals) and adultery (cheating on your spouse by having sex with somebody else).
Well, guess what, boys and girls? Adultery and bestiality (as well as fornication, which is simply sex between an unmarried couple) are already perfectly legal in the state of Texas. That little fact was brought to the forefront in Justice John Paul Stevens' questioning of Harris County District Attorney Charles Rosenthal "on whether Texas prohibited fornication for unmarried heterosexuals, and whether there was a criminal law against adultery. Rosenthal admitted that, no, Texas allows both. Breyer then demanded to know why the homosexual-conduct law exists, asking if the rationale wasn't a bit arbitrary."
Oops! There goes the Santorum argument.
Well, what's next? The "sanctity of marriage" and "preservation of the family"? Frankly, the cagiest right-winger in the world has never been able to explain just how the status of same-sex relationships have any bearing on the "sanctity" of heterosexual marriage. Does it work on some sort of sliding scale, in which the more "equal" gay people become, the less valid straight relationships are? That doesn't say much for the validity of any straight relationship, does it? If I were straight, I'd take that argument as a huge insult from the Right.
What about "preservation of the family"? Well, I guess if you're of the mind that the only acceptable form of sexual activity is for the purpose of procreation, then we'd better start annulling all those marriages between couples who can't bear children for one reason or another. That's going to piss off a lot of Texans with low sperm counts, but, hey, that's tough.
Adds Jennifer Vanasco:
Santorum and other advocates of banishing the right to privacy don't explain how regulating personal, consensual behavior at this level will strengthen families. They just assume it will. They don't see that putting the finer points of individual and family life in control of the state practically ensures unhappiness and pushes us closer to a dictatorship than to a democracy.
So what are the anti-gay conservatives left with? The idea that homosexual activity is "unnatural," or an affront to God?
I'm going to stop right here. If you're a liberal, I don't need to explain the meaning and importance of separation of church and state. And if you're a Christian conservative, you're not going to listen to a word I say on the subject.
Oh, don't worry, "right-thinking" Christians -- someday, I'll dive into all the reasons your leaders are dead wrong about there being no wall between church and state, and give you plenty of reasons to send me hate mail, and cyber-condemn me to hell.
But today is not that day. Today is a day for celebration -- for all Americans.
So when I say, "We won," I mean, "We all won."
We won. We actually won!
You cannot subvert your neighbor's rights without striking a dangerous blow at your own.
Carl Schurz
The right to be left alone -- the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by a free people.
Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. U.S., 1928
I have always claimed Americans didn't want a drink as bad as they wanted the right to take a drink if they did happen to want one.
Will Rogers
Related articles:
SodomyLaws.org
Exhaustive resource; highly recommended
Sodomy Laws (U.S.)
DataLounge
U.S. Sodomy Laws
GoQueer.com
The Last Gasp of Jim Crow
Jonathan Rauch, November 21, 1998
Governor Bush, Sodomy-Law Defender
Dale Carpenter, Sept. 13, 1999
Kansas 'Romeo & Juliet Law' Gives Gay Teen 16 Years More In Prison than Heterosexual Would Serve
ACLU, September 28, 2001
What's Changed Since Hardwick?
Paul Varnell, January 15, 2003
Lone Star Hate
Dale Carpenter, January 23, 2003
Moral Quackery in the Senate
Paul Varnell, April 30, 2003
After Santorum
Dale Carpenter, May 1, 2003
State-by-State Breakdown of Existing Laws and Repeals
ACLU, June 9, 2003
Supreme Court Strikes Down Gay Sex Ban
AP, June 26, 2003
Supreme Court Rights Egregious Wrong of 17 Years
ACLU, June 26, 2003
HRC Lauds Landmark Supreme Court Ruling
Human Rights Campaign, June 26, 2003
Landmark Victory
Lambda Legal, June 26, 2003
More on Supreme Court's Historic Decision
DataLounge, June 26, 2003
High Court Ruling has Broad Implications
DataLounge, June 26, 2003
Lawrence et al. v. Texas: Certiorari to the Court of Appeals of Texas
Argued March 26, 2003 Decided June 26, 2003
Comments
Posted Fri, 27 Jun 2003 23:55:24 GMT
LGBTBinat:
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh! What is that noise I hear? Is it Santorum kicking up a stink? No! Is it all those right wingers crying out that the world is doomed? No! It is the USA slowly creeping into the 21st century.
Great read DT, ya did good exlaining it. :)
Posted 4:04:17 AM 
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