In early July 1982, Atlanta police officer Keith Torick issued Michael Hardwick a citation for public drinking after witnessing Hardwick throw a beer bottle into a trash can outside the gay bar where he worked, allegedly observing him violating the city's ordinance that prohibits drinking in public.
Bowers is now sometimes included in lists of the worst Supreme Court decisions. Texas, and held that anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional. Hardwick, the Supreme Court directly overruled its decision in Lawrence v. The legitimacy of secular legislation depends, instead, on whether the State can advance some justification for its law beyond its conformity to religious doctrine."
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Blackmun's dissent accused the Court of an "almost obsessive focus on homosexual activity" and an "overall refusal to consider the broad principles that have informed our treatment of privacy in specific cases." In response to invocations of religious taboos against homosexuality, Blackmun wrote: "That certain, but by no means all, religious groups condemn the behavior at issue gives the State no license to impose their judgments on the entire citizenry. The senior dissent, by Justice Harry Blackmun, framed the issue as revolving around the right to privacy. Powell later regretted joining the majority but thought the case of little importance at the time. Burger concluded: "To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching." Justice Lewis F. Burger cited the "ancient roots" of prohibitions against homosexual sex, quoting William Blackstone's description of homosexual sex as an "infamous crime against nature", worse than rape, and "a crime not fit to be named". A concurring opinion by Chief Justice Warren E. The majority opinion, by Justice Byron White, reasoned that the Constitution did not confer "a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy". Texas, though the statute had already been struck down by the Supreme Court of Georgia in 1998.
This case was overturned in 2003 in Lawrence v. 186 (1986), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court that upheld, in a 5–4 ruling, the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law criminalizing oral and anal sex in private between consenting adults, in this case with respect to homosexual sodomy, though the law did not differentiate between homosexual sodomy and heterosexual sodomy. White, joined by Burger, Powell, Rehnquist, O'Connorīlackmun, joined by Brennan, Marshall, Stevens Eleventh Circuit reversed and remanded.Ĭhief Justice Warren E. 1986)Ī Georgia law classifying homosexual sex as illegal sodomy was valid because there was no constitutionally protected right to engage in homosexual sex. Vacated and remanded, 804 F.2d 622 (11th Cir. reversed and remanded, 760 F.2d 1202 ( 11th Cir.