One for the Supreme Court!

It’s been the kind of week for gay people that the Emancipation Proclamation was for African-Americans and the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave women the vote, was for the ladies. It was a revolutionary week in which the high courts of two countries declared that gay people are human beings and, as human beings, may do what virtually every other human being does – live their lives.

First, there was the ruling from Ontario Court of Appeal that gay people have the right to get married. Then there was the United States Supreme Court’s ruling by 6 votes to 3 in the case of Lawrence v. Texas that adult gay people, in the privacy of their own bedrooms, can engage in consensual sexual relations. The law in Texas had specifically targeted gays with a statute that declared illegal “deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex.”

But the most significant aspect of this decision was who voted for it and why. In the past, the Supreme Court has been criticized for going off on narrowly decided 5-4 benders, upsetting some settled principle of American jurisprudence in a badly worded decision that only guaranteed another 100 yeas of more lawsuits.

But not this time. Because in Lawrence v. Texas, something more than the right to privacy for gay citizens was affirmed – the cause of gay rights itself was officially mainstreamed.

For example, look who sided with the majority in Lawrence: Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, both of whom are often found voting with the Court’s conservative wing. Not only that, but even Clarence Thomas, one of the court’s most conservative judges, while voting to uphold the Texas statute on narrow constitutional grounds, nevertheless admitted that the Lone Star state’s law was “silly” and that if he were in Texas legislature, he would have voted against it.

It is more than symbolic that the majority’s opinion was written by Kennedy – I believe that the Court was sending a message to the public that, on this issue, there is substantial agreement among the left and the responsible right about gay rights. And there was nothing ambiguous about Kennedy’s opinion. Declaring that Texas’ statute “demeans the lives of homosexual persons,” he added that defendants “are entitled to respect for their private lives.” His summary left no doubt and no room for future litigation on this issue. “The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime,” Kennedy concluded.

What are the implications of this decision? First, the 17 or so other states that have sodomy laws will have them sent to the dustbin of jurisprudential history, there to join Dred Scott (“a Negro has no rights which a white person is bound to respect”) and Plessy v. Ferguson, the scandalous ruling that upheld Jim Crow in the schoolhouse by blessing the racist fraud of separate-but-equal.

Second, and most importantly, this decision will further mainstream the cause of gay rights, and with it, I predict reconsiderations of such issues as gays in the military and gay marriage. And in the end, whether that will be in five, 10 or 20 years, most of us will look back and see state sodomy laws, the Pentagon’s “Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell” rule and Vermont’s effort to sneak “virtual marriage” through the subterfuge of civil unions for gays as quaint, puzzling expressions of a bygone era. Our children’s children will look upon their grandparents’ brouhaha over the issue of gay rights, and wonder what the fuss was about.

Some (a very, very few) of my conservative friends have been decrying the Lawrence decision as a victory for the “gay lobby” or the “gay agenda.” This is utter nonsense. It’s really a victory for every single American who doesn’t want the government in their bedrooms, who believes in the right to privacy and who understands that barriers between government’s monopoly power and a citizen’s right to privacy may be all that distinguishes us from some of our enemies – a few of whom punish the mere fact of homosexual status by death.

Lawrence v. Texas is a long overdue ruling that finally boots cops out of the bedroom. And that’s a good thing, because cops in bedrooms – now that’s deviant!