Justice for Matthew Limon

August 2003

People who care about sexual freedom and civil liberties can celebrate this summer’s Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence and Garner v Texas striking down sodomy laws. The repugnant notion that the government can police our bedrooms to dictate how we use our own mouths, assholes, and genitals has, at long last, been recognized as legally impermissible.

Most politically aware gay people are familiar with the case: Houston police, responding to a neighbor’s erroneous weapons report, forced their way into John Lawrence and Tyrone Garner’s bedroom. There, they discovered the two men having sex. Police arrested Lawrence and Garner; they were charged with sodomy, and later fined $200 each. The couple challenged their conviction all the way to the Supreme Court– and won on a 6-3 vote on June, 26, 2003. Their victory is all the more remarkable given that just 17 years ago, the Court had upheld sodomy statutes in a similar case (Bowers v Hardwick).

It is astonishing, however, how little attention has been paid to a case decided by the Court just one day after their historic sodomy ruling. In Matthew R. Limon v Kansas, the Court ruled that Kansas needed to reconsider Matthew Limon’s sentence in light of their sodomy decision.

Readers will be forgiven if they’ve never heard of Limon’s case; unlike the Texas defendants, Matthew Limon did not have any national gay legal groups rallying to his side, calling attention to the inequity he had suffered. And Limon faced more than a $200 fine: he had been sentenced to 17 years and two months for violating Kansas’s sodomy law by performing homosexual fellatio.

Limon, in a special needs school because of mild mental retardation, had just turned 18 in February 2000 when he had a consensual– by all accounts– dalliance with another male student who was just shy of his fifteenth birthday. Had Limon and his partner been of opposite sexes, a so-called “Romeo and Juliet” provision of Kansas law would have applied (if, indeed, the police had ever gotten involved). Kansas lawmakers had explicitly exempted heterosexual teens within four years in age of each other from the Draconian penalties of their state’s sodomy law. But gay teens had no such exemption, and Matthew Limon, who had done nothing more than suck a willing– but same-sex– classmate, was sentenced to over 17 years in prison. Additionally, because Kansas defines sodomy as a “violent” sex crime, Limon’s sentence means his life-time registration as a “sexually dangerous person.”

The current Supreme Court has certainly not distinguished itself as a friend of the Bill of Rights, but even they got the Limon case right. Selectively punishing teens only for gay sexual expression is unfair. And the injustice is monumentally compounded given the staggering harshness of the penalty.

While we can rejoice that Matthew Limon will not serve 17 years for an affectionately offered blowjob, we must be alarmed that gay legal and political groups have all but ignored his case. Matthew Limon’s homosexuality made him the target of brutal, bigoted laws– reason enough for any gay rights group to intervene as his advocate and defender. But instead of rallying cries from our legal organizations, we have heard… nothing.

It has been the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that has spearheaded Matthew Limon’s campaign for justice. In case after case wherein gay groups have been craven, the ACLU has kept focused on fundamental issues of civil liberties and sexual freedom. The next time you’re solicited for a donation for “gay rights,” remember the ACLU’s unique dedication to justice for all, not just the politically convenient.

Let us use this summer’s Court decisions to remind us that we struggle against prohibitions against sodomy and other such laws not for abstract theoretical concerns, but to prevent any of us from being treated as horribly and unfairly as Matthew Limon has been.

Pasted from <http://guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=4FEF46F8-CE6C-410D-964CF0C704946EF1>