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WillyT

(72,631 posts)
4. No Man... They Cleared THAT Hurdle...
Tue Apr 3, 2012, 12:31 AM
Apr 2012
Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003),[1] is a landmark United States Supreme Court case. In the 6-3 ruling, the Court struck down the sodomy law in Texas and, by proxy, invalidated sodomy laws in the thirteen other states where still existed, thereby making same-sex sexual activity legal in every U.S. state and territory. The court overturned its previous ruling on the same issue in the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick, where it upheld a challenged Georgia statute and did not find a constitutional protection of sexual privacy.

Lawrence explicitly overruled Bowers, holding that it had viewed the liberty interest too narrowly. The majority held that intimate consensual sexual conduct was part of the liberty protected by substantive due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. Lawrence has the effect of invalidating similar laws throughout the United States that purport to criminalize sodomy between consenting same-sex adults acting in private. It also invalidated the application of sodomy laws to heterosexual sex.[2]


Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas






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