Lawrence v. Texas: the case that decriminalized being gay
Two men were arrested in a Houston bedroom in 1998, and five years later their case erased every sodomy law in America.
The call was about a weapons disturbance. What the police actually found, inside John Lawrence's apartment in Harris County, Texas, in September 1998, was Lawrence and Tyron Garner having sex. They were arrested under a Texas statute that made same-sex intimacy a crime. Held overnight. Fined.
The reported disturbance turned out to be false. The arrests were real. Two adult men, prosecuted by the State of Texas for what they did in private, and that prosecution became the vehicle for one of the most consequential gay rights decisions in American history.
On June 26, 2003, the Supreme Court struck down the Texas law and, with it, every remaining sodomy statute in the country. The vote was 6-3. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion.
Kennedy grounded the decision in liberty. The Constitution's guarantee of due process, he wrote, protects the right of consenting adults to private sexual conduct without state interference. The state had no business in the bedrooms of the men it had arrested. The petitioners, he wrote, were entitled to respect for their private lives.
Then the ruling did something the Court rarely does. It overruled itself. Seventeen years earlier, in Bowers v. Hardwick, the Court had upheld a Georgia sodomy law and refused to find any constitutional protection for gay intimacy. Kennedy declared Bowers wrong when it was decided and wrong as it remained.
The practical effect was immediate. Sodomy laws still on the books in more than a dozen states became unenforceable overnight. For decades, that conduct had been a pretext to arrest, fire, deny custody to, and surveil gay people. After June 26, it was no longer a crime anywhere in the United States.
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the principal dissent and read part of it from the bench. He warned that the majority's reasoning had no logical stopping point, and that it would lead to constitutional protection for same-sex marriage. Twelve years later, in Obergefell v. Hodges, Kennedy proved him right.
John Lawrence and Tyron Garner were not activists. They were two men arrested in an apartment because of a false report and a law that should never have existed. Their names now attach to the decision that ended the criminalization of gay people in America.