Michael Hardwick was a bartender in a gay bar in Atlanta, Georgia who was targeted by a police officer for harassment. In 1982, an unknowing houseguest let the officer let into Hardwick’s home the officer went to the bedroom where Hardwick was engaged in oral sex with his partner. The men were arrested on the charge of sodomy. Charges were later dropped, but Hardwick brought the case forward with the purpose of having the sodomy law declared unconstitutional.
Bowers was a response to a particularly insulting police action and repeal advocates had hoped that the case would put an end to sodomy laws in the United States when it reached the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, the 5-4 decision found that nothing in the Constitution "would extend a fundamental right to homosexuals to engage in acts of consensual sodomy."
Justice Lewis Powell was the swing vote in the decision, switching from supporting invalidating all sodomy laws to denying homosexuals any right of privacy. In October of 1990, three years after his retirement, Powell told a group of New York University Law students, "I think I probably made a mistake in that one." He told the National Law Journal, "That case was not a major case, and one of the reasons I voted the way I did was the case was a frivolous case" brought "just to see what the court would do" on the subject.
Bradford DeLong <delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
>> > Not all Mr. Sinnott's actions concerned legally prohibited matters
>>> like blasphemy.
>>
>>Just out of curiousity, is blasphemy still in the books as a crime in
>>Boston, as sodomy still is in so many states?
>>
>
>A Russian friend of mine some time ago asked me if what he had read
>in a newspaper about a man in Alabama (?) in the 80s having been
>arrested for havinn sodomy was really true. His reaction was, "Not
>even in the darkest days of Stalin!"
If it were Georgia, then it would have been a joke... ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
--------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20030503/f224d05f/attachment.htm>