State sodomy laws that make it a crime for gays to have consensual sex in their own bedrooms violate constitutional privacy rights, the US Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a landmark decision.
The nation's highest court by a 6-to-3 vote struck down a Texas sodomy law, a decision applauded by gay rights advocates as a historic ruling that overturned sodomy laws in 13 states.
By a separate 5-to-4 vote, the Supreme Court took the rare step of overruling one of its own decisions, one in 1986 that upheld a Georgia sodomy law and declared homosexuals have no constitutional right to engage in sodomy in private.
The 30-year-old Texas "homosexual conduct" law makes it a crime for same-sex couples to engage in oral and anal sex, even if it is consensual and occurs in the privacy of a person's bedroom. Violators face a maximum punishment of a US$500 fine.
Other states with sodomy laws are Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia.
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court majority that the two gay men who were arrested under the Texas law "are entitled to respect for their private lives."
"The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime," he wrote in the ruling handed down on the last day of decisions of the court's 2002-2003 term.
In a scathing dissent, however, Justice Antonin Scalia said the court had "largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda" and had "taken sides in the culture war."
He said the ruling called into question "state laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality and obscenity."
Scalia also said the reasoning of the court's ruling "leaves on pretty shaky grounds state laws limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples."
Scalia was joined in the dissent by the court's two other most conservative members, Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas.
The case involved John Geddes Lawrence and Tryon Garner. In 1998, police officers entered Lawrence's apartment in Houston while investigating what turned out to be a false report of a disturbance with a gun. The officers found the two men engaged in anal sex.
Lawrence and Garner were arrested and charged with violating the Texas law. They pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor charges and each were fined US$200. The two men then challenged the law's constitutionality.
Kennedy said the nation's laws and traditions in the past 50 years show an emerging awareness that privacy gives substantial protection to adults in deciding how to conduct their personal lives concerning sexual matters.
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