Texas Injustice

January 2003

Imagine yourself at home some evening, in your bedroom, getting down to some serious love-making with your boyfriend. You’ve played often, so you know just how to use your mouth and cock and ass to get each other off real good. Just when you’re as connected as two guys can get, in burst the police, guns drawn­ “You’re under arrest for deviate sexual intercourse­ you’re coming with us.” Then you and your boyfriend are cuffed, taken to the police station in your underwear, and charged with sodomy. You are found guilty, and face a fine and registration as a “sexually dangerous person,” meaning police can notify your neighbors, employer, and landlord of your “criminal” history for the rest of your life.

This is not some horror tale from the distant past, or some far off land­ it is what happened to John Lawrence and Tyron Garner in Houston in 1998. Police, who claim they were acting on a dangerous weapons tip, entered Lawrence’s apartment. They found no weapons, only two guys going at it. Instead of profusely apologizing (and then investigating who’s turning in false tips), the police booked the fags under a Texas law that outlaws same-sex (and same-sex only) oral and anal intercourse.

The couple appealed their conviction, and now the US Supreme Court is to decide (in Lawrence and Garner v Texas) whether the Texas law is constitutional. In 1986, the Court upheld the conviction of two Georgia men also convicted of sodomy in their own home (also after police supposedly entered the apartment erroneously); the difference this time is that the Texas law applies only to homosexual sex.

We can cheer all those who’ve worked to rid us of sodomy laws. Making people into arbitrarily defined “criminals” is a hallmark of despotism. How people choose to use their own bodies with others similarly inclined is absolutely no business of the government. By creating crime where none existed before, sodomy laws poison employment contracts, child custody cases, lease agreements, and all other court and civic proceedings wherein one party is unfairly branded a sex criminal.

Because the Texas law specifically targets homosexual expression, many gay groups have joined the appeal effort, citing the law’s discriminatory effect.

There is, however, a danger in approaching Lawrence and Garner v Texas as a “gay rights” case. If the only problem with the law is that it is inequitable (by applying only to homosexual conduct), then one obvious remedy would be to make the law “equitable” (by applying it to all oral and anal intercourse, homo- and heterosexual). Indeed, several states’ sodomy laws do just that.

But Lawrence and Garner v Texas needs to be won not to protect a select class of people from sodomy laws’ discriminatory effects; it must be won to free everyone from a government so despotic­ in matters sexual­ that it asserts the right to send armed cops into your bedroom and to judge your sexual practices by religiously inspired proscriptions inimical to civil liberties.

And there is another disturbing aspect to the Texas sodomy law challenge: even amongst those clear that the compelling argument in Lawrence and Garner v Texas is liberty, not equity, there is virtual silence concerning the proliferation of so-called “sexually dangerous persons” laws. Even as sodomy laws are being repealed and struck down, all fifty states now criminalize far more citizens for consensual sexual conduct than ever before. Arbitrary and varying ages of consent, laws against “public” sex, prohibitions against prostitution, crusades against leathermen and S and M aficionados, all mean that record numbers are imprisoned for non-violent, sex “crimes.”

Let us be clear that we oppose Texas’s sodomy law not because it is applied unfairly, but because such sexual regulations are inherently offensive to any decent concept of ordered civil liberty. And let us be equally clear that our work has only begun: there are a lot more sex laws we need to repeal.

Pasted from <http://guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=3BD8C3E9-8C3E-4BCF-8DE08486B19D1A97>