The Eyes of Texas Are Upon YOU
The Texas Court of Appeals overturns a Panel ruling regarding the unconstitionality of its "Homosexual Conduct" law
by Deborah Levinson
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RELATED • About the Panel Ruling • Looking at 2001 • Sodomy Laws & Info • The Texas Law FROM THE FORUM "...that sodomy law in Texas which is ok to leave on the books as '...it protects children...' as one poster put it here in this forum, and '...it's never actually used, so what difference does it make...' as several posters have put it here in this forum...and other such accommodationist crapola." --- SARRELLEC |
Groups supportive of equal rights for all citizens of the United States, criticized a ruling from a Texas Court of Appeals Thursday that upheld the state's "Homosexual Conduct" law and reinstated the conviction of two Houston men for having sex in the privacy of one man's home.
"The government does not belong in people's bedrooms policing consensual adult intimacy, nor can it have one rule for gay people and another one, granting more freedom, for non-gay people," said the Director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education fund, Ruth E. Harlow.
Harlow, who argued the case before the Texas court, said, "The State here condemns lesbian and gay couples in a way that the Constitution does not permit."
Lambda plans to continue its challenges to the Texas criminal ban on sexual relations between people of the same sex.
The legal argument put forth by Lambda is that the Texas law poses "stark problems of inequality" that conflict with the basic constitutional right to equal protection. Along with the additional argument that this law is also contrary to the right to privacy that all Texans enjoy.
The dissenting Justices noted that fact, emphasizing that "Equal protection simply requires that the majority apply its values even-handedly."
A legal way of saying, "What's good for the goose is good for the gander."
The State had attempted to justify the law based upon so-called "moral grounds" and nothing more. In response to that argument, the dissenting justices concluded, "It makes no sense for the State to contend that morals are preserved by criminalizing homosexual sodomy while supporting sodomy by heterosexual couples, including unmarried persons."
This case began on September 17, 1998 when Sheriff's deputies, responded to a false report of an armed intruder and entered a private Houston apartment where they found the defendants engaged in sex.
Both men were immediately arrested and jailed for over 24 hours before being released on $200 bond each. A county criminal court both men of a Class C misdemeanor, which carries with it up to a $500 fine.
Last June, a panel of the appeals court held that the statute violates the Equal Rights Amendment of the Texas Constitution because it punished only certain couples for oral or anal sex without adequate justification. Texas has had a sodomy law since 1860, but decriminalized such activities by different-sex partners in 1974.
The state moved for a rehearing and the entire appeals court reheard the case, ruling 7-2 to overturn the ruling of the original panel.
Said Harlow, "Contrary to this decision, the courts' role is to protect individual liberties when the legislature and prosecutors have overstepped." She said that Lambda would petition for review in the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
One of the other attorneys on the case, Mitchell Katine of the Houston law firm Williams, Birnberg & Anderson added, "It's a sad day in Texas when our courts do not rise to the occasion of having to enforce vital constitutional principles."
Texas now is one of only four states, along with Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma, that prohibits consensual sex acts as only between same-sex partners. Lambda recently argued a legal challenge to the Arkansas law in the case Picado v. Jegley.
There are twelve other states which still prohibit consensual oral and anal sex between both different- and same-sex partners alike, despite the nationwide trend toward abolishing such invasive criminal laws.
In Pride,
Deborah
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