Prop. 8: Supreme Court may redefine gay rights [View all]

[William769]

2 page article I highly recommend reading the whole piece

Nine years ago, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who may soon decide the fate of same-sex marriage in California, pondered the case of two Texas men who had been arrested in an apartment at gunpoint and charged with sodomy.

Seventeen years earlier, and two years before President Ronald Reagan appointed Kennedy to the court, the justices had upheld a law against gay sex in Georgia. One member of the majority, Chief Justice Warren Burger, wrote that the court would have to "cast aside millennia of moral teaching" to find that "homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right."

But by 2003, Kennedy said, most Americans, and a majority of the justices, had come to realize that gays and lesbians deserve "respect for their private lives" and freedom from government intrusion in their bedrooms.

"Times can blind us to certain truths," he wrote in Lawrence vs. Texas, "and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress."


Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/11/MNO51N5108.DTL#ixzz1mF9P5kFC