Dale Carpenter: "Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas"
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-03-15/dale-carpenter-flagrant-conduct-story-lawrence-v-texas
Until 2003 it was illegal to have intimate relations with someone of the same sex throughout much of the U.S. It was in that year the Supreme Court case ruled in Lawrence-v-Texas. John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner were not ideal plaintiffs. Their story began in 1998 when one man, jealous that his male partner was friendly with another, called the police outside Houston, Texas. The officers who arrived at Lawrence’s home that night claimed they saw him and Garner having sex. The case could have been settled, but gay activists sensed victory. Diane and her guest discuss how a bedroom arrest became a landmark case for gay rights in America.
Guests
Dale Carpenter
professor of civil rights and civil liberties law at the University of Minnesota Law School.
Related Items
Program Highlights
Lawrence v. Texas has been called the most important Supreme Court decision on individual rights in half a century. A civil rights attorney has written the story behind the landmark Supreme Court case. It deals with sexual privacy, personal dignity, intimate relationships and shifting notions of family and America.
Case Background
Until Lawrence V. Texas, the state had a "homosexual conduct" law that forbade certain types of sexual intimacy, Carpenter said - but only between persons of the same sex. Opposite-sex couples could legally engage in the same activities. The law was used in Texas and around the nation, along with similar laws, to discriminate against gay men and lesbians, Carpenter said.
The Origins Of The Case
Police received a call in 1998 about a disturbance involving a man with a gun in an apartment outside of Houston, Texas. Several responding officers said they saw some kind of sexual activity going on between two of the men in the apartment; others said there was no sexual activity going on; and the two men in question, John Lawrence and Tyrone Garner, denied that anything sexual had happened. Based on his interviews and research, Carpenter believes Lawrence and Garner.
How Did The Case Reach The Supreme Court?
"You're looking at this from the 3,000-foot view. I think it went up all the way to the Supreme Court because on the one hand, the prosecutors in Harris County had no interest in challenging the word of their own police officers, who I believe did not see any sex, but one of whom did report having seen sex. And because I believe gay rights attorneys saw a golden opportunity that comes along maybe once in every generation to take the police at their word, do not hold a trial, so do not challenge the factual basis for the arrest, but challenge the constitutionality of the law on the grounds that the state has no business in the bedrooms of consenting adults and that's exactly what they did," Carpenter said.
Changes On The Court Itself
Carpenter believes the Supreme Court ruled the way it did in the 2003 case because of both societal changes and changes on the court itself. For example, in the mid-1980s, it was possible for Justice Powell to say, "I never met a gay person," Carpenter argued. But in 2003 it was not possible for any justice to say the same. And there had also, by 2003, been huge changes in American society regarding attitudes toward homosexuals. "There was over time a much greater respect for the idea that people should not be judged on the basis of their sexual orientation. Their individual merit did not depend on whether they were gay or straight," Carpenter said.
You can read the full transcript here.
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Wouldn't it be nice if the world stayed out of the bedrooms of consenting adults. What adults do in the privacy of their own homes should never have been the business of the courts or the state.
Unfortunately both of the people who were litigants in this case have left this world.
Important program to have now, on the "it's not really enforced, but what you're doing is icky" mindset of law enforcement discretion (sic).
Especially since the "small government right" seems determined to fight "Griswold v. Connecticut" all over again: To paraphrase, "Arrest two 'people' for doing nothing (but simply who they are)."
What is at stake is not merely our sexuality, but the freedom of our bodies. Just as with the drug war, contraception and every other aspect of our personal choices are being denied, which is unfathomable in the 21st century from the country who supposes to be a bastion of freedom worldwide. Stand up for personal freedom of body and mind.
Kudos to Diane and her guest for highlighting these important elements in the unavoidable mainstreaming of gay sexual practices as an inseparable part of same sex attraction. It's simply not possible to imagine a world where, as soon as someone like a child or a teenager is made aware that there are people of the same sex sexually attracted to one another, their curiosity doesn't immediately take the next step of wondering what that same sex attraction leads to next.
This must obviously expand the scope of things taught in those health classes in late elementary school where boys and girls learn about the birds and the bees. Now, not only will penis-in-vagina reproductive sex have to be taught, in order not to be blatantly discriminatory so will non-reproductive sex between gays and Lesbians. How long will gay teens and pre-teens sit still and accept being told that their straight schoolmates are being taught what adult sexuality holds for them, but that the equivalent knowledge is forbidden to them, something dirty, something that no decent person will talk about.
Of course, these are also activities which heterosexual couples have also long practiced as well. So, in a real sense, the liberation of gay sexual practices into common knowledge among all but the most very young children will result in a liberation of these practices for all people: oral-vaginal, oral-penis, and oral-anal sex, penis-in-anus sex, between men and women and between men and men, dildo in vagina and anus sex, between men and women, women and women, and men and men.
It's hard to see how this inevitable flowering of every possible sexual practice between humans into the sunshine of everyday understanding and acceptance can't help but be a good thing for all involved, right? It certainly should cut down on sexual hangups and neuroses, particularly among young people just becoming sexual themselves.
Thank you Diane for discussing this topic. Too often LGBT history sits on the side line.
I think it would be refreshing to give time to people who believe that sodomy (semen in the digestive system) is a harmful addiction. It makes sense that semen would have evolved to contain addictive chemicals. A male could use sodomy to alter a natural sexual aversion of a female into an artificial predilection towards him if there be a sort of love potion in semen. Similarly, a male could with the right chemical neutralize with homosexual sodomy a male competitor's sexual desires and encourage the competitor to care for him. And chemicals that increase sensitivity to pain would be useful to males who use physical abuse to force girls into undesired sexual behavior, making their violence and torture more terrifyingly painful.
There's a good deal of evidence for all this if one takes the time to look. Chemically, semen contains anandamide, the receptors for which are responsible for the highs of marijuana and chocolate, and prostaglandins, blocking which are believed to decrease drunk rodent righting reflex time. But there is better evidence. E.g., that mammals with a few exceptions lack cloaca, instead having separate openings for the reproductive system and the terminus of the digestive system suggests a reason for mammals having done so well—the vagina (not being lined by simple epithelial tissues as the rectum is) being comparatively immune to absorbing chemicals could allow female mammals to have a more natural sex response amounting to increased sexual freedom, encouraging meaningful sexual selection in mammals. That crossover stopped happening between the X and Y chromosomes, mostly stopping evolution on the Y chromosome, is advantageous if that's where the sodomy chemicals formerly were encoded. Much otherwise bizarre human behavior can be explained as misplaced or misunderstood anti-sodomy defenses. E.g., some people get relaxed if cutting themselves suggests an absence of the pain-sensitizing and platelet-aggregation effects of prostaglandin E2.
Dale Carpenter was a first-rate guest with a first-rate story, but this show might have left listeners misunderstanding some facts about American sodomy laws today.
After Lawrence v. Texas (2003), many Americans think the remaining state sodomy laws are invalidated and unenforceable. But the fact remains that state sodomy laws continue to target LGBT Americans, and straight Americans too, as the Center for Constitutional Rights shows here.
That CCR web page describes a current case (Doe, et al. v. Jindal, et al.) involving Louisiana using a sodomy law to punish solicitation for oral and anal sex more harshly - and with far more stigma - than solicitation for vaginal sex, by considering oral and anal sex to be a Crime Against Nature. That CCR web page also shows that after a person is convicted under the sodomy law, their driver's license identifies them as a SEX OFFENDER in bright orange letters, and they "must disclose the fact that they are registered as a sex offender to neighbors, landlords, employers, schools, parks, community centers, and churches. Their names, address, and photographs appear on the internet."
From that CCR web page - 40% of registered sex offenders in Orleans Parish are on the registry as a result of such a conviction, and of those individuals, 76% are women.
To interpret those statistics - Those women were charged with offering men fellatio for money, and Louisiana convicted the women of Solicitation of Crime Against Nature (SCAN) instead of Solicitation of Prostitution for vaginal sex. And this made those women registered sex offenders, as if they were a threat to the community like rapists.
The CCR case shows some states still consider Crime Against Nature to be a valid concept, and one way states enforce the concept.