Awaiting judgment day: Lawrence v. Texas could take out sodomy laws for good--or it could set a precedent for increased infringement of gay rights. (Cover Story).

John Lawrence and Tyron Garner were taking advantage of the privacy most couples take for granted one night in 1998 when Houston police stormed Lawrence's apartment. The officers had been tipped off by a disgruntled friend of Garner's that there was an armed black "going crazy" in the apartment. But some might say it's the police who went crazy that night. Instead of finding an armed man, they found two men in each other's arms.

Lawrence and Garner were engaged "in deviate sexual conduct, namely, anal sex," according to police records, and were immediately handcuffed and taken to the police station. They were released the following day on $200 bond and charged with violating the state's Homosexual Conduct Law, which classifies anal or oral sex between two men or two women as "deviate sexual intercourse."

Although it sounds like a nightmare scenario from a fictitious Orwellian world, this story is at the heart of Lawrence v. Texas, a case being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court this spring. Besides examining gay people's right to privacy, the case will ask justices to decide if the same-sex sodomy laws in Texas--and by association, the three other states that have same-sex-only sodomy laws--enforce separate classes of civil rights protections, one for heterosexuals and another for homosexuals.

"There are two issues here," explains Patricia Logue, senior counsel for Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, which has helped represent Lawrence and Garner since 1998. "One is a privacy issue about whether the government should be in any of our bedrooms and examining consensual anal sex. The other is about Texas law, which applies only to same-sex sex and has discrimination built into the law."

If the court rules against the Texas law on both counts, Lawrence could be the final blow for the same-sex sodomy law there as well as those in Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. And experts say it also could result in the overturning of sodomy laws in nine other states--Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia--which, along with Puerto Rico, outlaw both same-sex and opposite-sex sodomy.

On the other hand, Logue says a ruling in favor of the Texas law could establish a precedent for increased infringement of gay fights. "It would be a slap in the face of our relationships and families, and I am sure it would be abused by our opponents," she says.

In hearing Lawrence, the court will revisit another infamous case, Bowers v. Hardwick, in which it upheld Georgia's sodomy law in 1986. Bowers has an eerie similarity to Lawrence. Police had barged into the Atlanta home of Michael Hardwick while investigating alleged wrongdoing and found him engaging in consensual sex with another man. Both men were arrested and charged with violating the state's sodomy law, which did not apply exclusively to same-sex sodomy. (At the time about half the states had sodomy laws in place. Georgia declared its law unconstitutional in 1998.)

However, experts say Lawrence diverges significantly from Bowers because Georgia's law was not same-sex specific. As a result, in 1986 attorneys could only pursue a case based on a violation of privacy, whereas in Lawrence they also will pursue the 14th Amendment issue of equal protection. "A lot of people have said that if Bowers had been an equal protection case, we may have gotten a different result," says Kathleen Wilde, who was one of Hardwick's attorneys at the time and now works as litigation director for the Oregon Advocacy Center in Portland.

Few people question that cases such as Bowers and Lawrence--in which people actually are arrested and charged with violating a sodomy law--are rare. "The issue for decades has never been that we were rounded up and charged with sodomy," says Paula Ettelbrick, a New York University law professor specializing in sexuality and the law. "The issue is the existence of these laws, which lend support to the stigma and discrimination that lesbians and gay men face--and that allows judges to say you are a criminal and you have no rights."

Those words certainly ring tree for Linda Kaufman, a 52-year-old Episcopal priest living in Arlington, Va., who works for the District of Columbia Department of Mental Health. In 1999, Kaufman and her partner were informed by a state adoption agency that they could not adopt a child because their same-sex relationship violated Virginia's sodomy and cohabitation laws.

"I was really angry, and I was sad," Kaufman says today. "The more I thought about it, the more I thought, This is the U.S., and we are not guilty by default; we are innocent until proven guilty. Nobody had accused me of anything other than to say, `There is this law, and we can't consider you.'" (Since August 2002 a court-mediated settlement with the state has allowed Kaufman to proceed with an adoption.)

"Bowers gave the right wing and conservatives another tool in their arsenal to use against us," says Kevin Layton, general counsel and legal director for the Human Rights Campaign. "So from that perspective, `[a favorable opinion in] Lawrence is tremendously important."

Losing the case, of course, isn't an outcome gay advocates are eager to entertain at this point. "I hate to think that way," Logue says.

But losing is certainly something Michael Hardwick's former attorney Wilde understands. "I wish them luck on this case," she says. "And I am just crossing my fingers we are going to get a better outcome this time."

Quittner also writes for Business Week and the New York Post.