Courting immorality: contrary to the Supreme Court's revolutionary claim in Lawrence v. Texas, state governments have a compelling interest to protect against threats to public morality.

Has the U.S. Supreme Court struck a mighty blow for liberty and constitutional enrichment with its ruling in Lawrence v. Texas? One might suppose so, to judge from the bipartisan voices praising the High Court's June 26th opinion.

According to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's majority opinion, the Court's Lawrence ruling aims at liberty and justice for all and is perfectly consonant with the heart and spirit of the Constitution. "The liberty protected by the Constitution allows homosexual persons the right to choose to enter upon relationships in the confines of their homes and their own private lives," said the Court.

The Court liberals have arrived at this outlandish constitutional interpretation with some odd company. Neoconservative guru William Safire praised the decision in his New York Times column, proclaiming: "Sodomy ... when practiced between consenting adults, straight or gay, is none of the government's business." "Libertarian conservatives like me who place a high value on personal freedom," said Safire, "consider Lawrence vs. Texas a victory in the war to defend everyone's privacy."

Retired Republican Senator Alan Simpson likewise announced his libertarian sympathies in the matter and denounced the Texas anti-sodomy statute as "unfair" and "spiteful," asserting that it "forces the law into the most intimate precincts of the home, where we ought to be able to make our own decisions about how to conduct our lives." Simpson serves as honorary chairman of the Republican Unity Coalition, where, together with former President Gerald Ford, David Rockefeller, and other Republican heavyweights, he is leading the effort to drag Neanderthal GOP "moralists" into the new Age of Enlightenment. The Cato Institute, variously described as a conservative or libertarian think tank, provided a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the appeal to overturn the Texas law.

Understandably, the folks at the Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund are delighted that these fake conservatives have defected over to the lavender agenda. Lambda Legal is the group of homosexual legal activists that argued the Lawrence case before the Court. "Some of the most diverse and respected voices in this country have lined up to tell the Supreme Court that these laws are contrary to American values," brags the Lambda website, rejoicing in its new respectability.

The Privacy Con Game

But the states do have both a right and a duty to protect society against threats to public morality as well as to public health and safety. As pointed out in the previous article (pages 10-15), under our constitutional system, sumptuary laws (i.e., those concerning gambling, narcotics, adultery, prostitution, sodomy, etc.) are properly the concern of the state governments, not the federal government. Like most criminal laws, they vary from state to state, which is one of the protective checks and balances built into our constitutional order. If the laws become too lax or too oppressive in one state, citizens can move to another part of the union more congenial to their beliefs.

The Lawrence decision is an egregious example of raw judicial usurpation, freighted with deception. The Lambda militants and their allies on the Court and in the media knew that the most effective way to confuse, divide, and neutralize conservative opposition would be to entangle the issue falsely in the supposed constitutional protection of private conduct. This sounds so American and appeals to the conservative desire to be left alone by government. What could be more repugnant than the specter of sex police bursting into our bedrooms? If we allow the state to violate the "sanctity" of private, same-sex relations, their argument goes, it will not be long before the fearful tread of jackboots arrives at the boudoir of married heterosexuals.

Unfortunately, it appears that many who should know better have fallen for this pathetic sleight of hand. Most of the opposition expressed to the Court's Lawrence ruling has focused on the "slippery slope," warning that the decision will encourage additional attacks and lead to further court surrenders, most notably as concerns the supposed right to same-sex marriage. This is a valid concern, naturally, and, as we will show, it is an avowed aim of the sodomites' litigation strategy.

However, in focusing concern almost exclusively on this future threat, many, if not most, opponents have overlooked the present threat and the damage already done by the Court's recent decision. They appear willing to concede the Court's radical notion that the state has no compelling interest in prohibiting any kind of consensual adult sexual conduct.

According to the "tolerance" propaganda, homosexuals are, and ever have been, victims of homophobic persecution. So we must repeal the bigoted laws that harm and stigmatize their "private," "intimate" relations. Yet the Court's own ruling and the admissions of leading homosexual activists reveal the phoniness of this sympathy-soliciting myth. In Lawrence, the Court acknowledged: "In those States, including Texas, that still proscribe sodomy (whether for same-sex or heterosexual conduct), there is a pattern of nonenforcement with respect to consenting adults acting in private."

Likewise, Charles Francis, the homosexual founder and co-chairman of the Republican Unity Coalition, says that "the laws were seldom enforced but they stigmatized." Cases like Bowers v. Hardwick and Lawrence v. Texas, where homosexuals were prosecuted for sodomy performed in private, are extremely rare and have usually happened where police have been called to a residence because of a disturbance, wild parties, drugs, or some other legitimate interest. The image of police breaking down doors of private residences to arrest poor homosexual victims is a sham; that has never been the reality.

The reality is that homosexuals are notorious for promiscuity and for engaging in sex acts in public places: restrooms, parks, beaches, alleys, cars, schools, clubs, bathhouses, etc. This is amply demonstrated from police department records and reports from the Journal of Sex Research, the Lambda Report, and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The vast majority of arrests for sodomy result from public, not private, sex--an unpleasant fact that the homosexual lobby tries to hide. Even leading sodomites have decried the debauched excesses of their fellow reprobates. Famed "gay" playwright Larry Kramer, for instance, and homosexual political strategists Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen have exposed the rampant depravity typifying the homosexual "lifestyle."

In their book After the Ball, Kirk and Madsen state: "Of all the misbehavior we decry, self-indulgence is perhaps the most characteristic of gays, and of the gay community as a whole." "Indeed," aver the deviant duo, destructive self-indulgence "was institutionalized, long ago ... as a central tenet of gay liberation."

They confirm from personal knowledge what various surveys have shown: that the average homosexual engages in hundreds of anonymous sexual encounters. There is no parallel for this even in the most promiscuous heterosexual cohorts. Say Kirk and Madsen:

   As one gains experience, vanilla sex
   with one partner becomes familiar,
   tame, and boring, and loses its capacity
   to arouse. At first, the increasingly
   jaded gay man seeks novelty in
   partners, rather than practices, and
   becomes massively promiscuous;
   eventually, all bodies become boring,
   and only new practices will thrill.

The new practices, they note, tend to become ever more raunchy and aggressive. Harvard graduates Kirk and Madsen speak from personal experience of the "blatant cavorting about in almost every one of the university's larger general-access men's rooms" and the "ongoing lavatorial passion play" of their fellow homosexuals. As a result both of this promiscuity and the inherently risky nature of their sexual practices, the homosexual community is a huge incubator of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Reports from the CDC, the American Medical Association, the International Journal of Epidemiology, and other sources show that despite two decades of "safe sex" preaching, virtually all STDs are running rampant among the homosexual population: HIV/AIDS, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, gonorrhea, syphilis, human papillomavirus, proctitis, proctocolitis, enteritis, chlamydia, and shigellosis. It should not surprise then that homosexuals die much younger than heterosexuals. As the International Journal of Epidemiology reported in 1997, "life expectancy at age twenty for gay and bisexual men is eight to twenty years less than for all men."

Revising History

The Supreme Court's claim in Lawrence that anti-sodomy laws enjoy no "ancient roots" and "no longstanding history in this country" is patently ludicrous. America's legal tradition is clearly traceable through the English Common Law and the Natural Law tradition back to the Justinian Code and before that to the biblical injunctions against homosexuality in the Mosaic book of Leviticus and St. Paul's Epistles to the Corinthians and Romans.

Webster's 1828 dictionary defined "sodomy" simply as "a crime against nature." Black's Law Dictionary later defined it as a "crime against nature ... carnal copulation, against the order of nature, by man with man, or, in the same unnatural manner, with woman or with a beast."

In the Declaration of Independence, the signers stated their belief in "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." Founding Father James Wilson, who was a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, as well as an Associate Justice on the first U.S. Supreme Court, soundly expressed the Founders' vision of ordered liberty under law. "Human law," he noted, "must rest its authority ultimately upon the authority of that law which is divine.... Far from being rivals or enemies, religion and law are twin sisters, friends, and mutual assistants. Indeed, these two sciences run into each other."

Many of the state constitutions explicitly cited the English Common Law as the rule for their basic civil and criminal law. In the Founding era, no British jurist was considered more authoritative than Sir William Blackstone, whose Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) called sodomy "the infamous crime against nature." Going back further, to the 1500s, Sir Edward Coke, the dean of English law, called it "a detestable, and abominable sin, amongst Christians not to be named, committed by carnal knowledge against the ordinance of the Creator, and order of nature, by mankind with mankind, or with brute beast, or by womankind with brute beast."

Blackstone and Coke drew from St. Thomas Aquinas, the preeminent exponent of the Natural Law during the Middle Ages, whose Summa Theologica described homosexuality as a gross vice "contrary to right reason" and "contrary to the natural order." Preceding the work of Aquinas was the monumental Corpus Juris Civilis of Emperor Justinian in the 6th century, which incorporated the condemnations found in Leviticus 20:13: "If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination."

Yes, America's laws against sodomy do indeed have "ancient roots" and "longstanding history." It is facially ridiculous to argue otherwise. "The logic and the justification used by the Court in the Lawrence decision cannot be found in the Constitution or in sound legal tradition," constitutional scholar John Eidsmoe told THE NEW AMERICAN. Dr. Eidsmoe, a renowned author and law professor at the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law in Montgomery, Alabama, said of the ruling:

   The framers of the Constitution would
   be shocked to see our founding document
   so twisted, abused, and misquoted
   by the highest court in the land
   to advance the specious claims and
   immoral agenda of the homosexual
   lobby. Sodomy was considered not
   only a heinous crime but an abomination,
   under the English Common Law,
   upon which much of our law is based.
   Homosexual acts rightly have been
   considered criminal in every civilized
   society in history. Tolerance of this
   "unmentionable vice" has always signaled
   the moral degeneration and,
   ultimately, the coming downfall
   of a society. For the Supreme
   Court, on its own authority, to
   overturn thousands of years of
   history is an unconscionable and
   unconstitutional abuse of the
   most outrageous sort.

   A majority of six justices in Lawrence
   v. Texas launched this demolition
   derby, claiming that the
   "Court's obligation is to define the
   liberty of all, not to mandate its
   own moral code." Yet, incredibly,
   that is precisely what the Court has
   done: mandated its own moral
   code--contrary to the Constitution,
   the laws of nature and the
   laws of God. These it arrogantly
   dismisses because:

   The Nation's laws and traditions
   in the past half century are most
   relevant here. They show an
   emerging awareness that liberty
   gives substantial protection to adult
   persons in deciding how to conduct
   their private lives in matters pertaining
   to sex.

What authoritative sources does the Court cite for its revolutionary ruling on this wondrous "emerging awareness?" Nothing less than data, writings, theories, court decisions, and recent laws derived from the thoroughly discredited studies of sex pervert Alfred Kinsey.

After the publication of Dr. Judith Reisman's monumental 1999 expose of Kinsey's infamous deeds, Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences, Alfred Kinsey's name and his iniquitous work should have been forever consigned to the dung heaps of Gehenna. Instead, his insidious influence continues from the grave, cited in destructive court decisions that continue to deform our legal landscape.

"The Court's decision [in Lawrence] is a Kinsey triumph, pure and simple," Dr. Reisman told THE NEW AMERICAN, noting the abundant Kinseyite references. The Court's action in this case, says Reisman, "is already fueling even more brazen attacks on all remaining laws aimed at restraining the rising tide of depravity."

New Assaults Coming

One needn't look far to confirm Dr. Reisman's warning; the homosexual leadership is proudly announcing their new battle plans. "This ruling starts an entirely new chapter in our fight for equality for lesbians and gay men," crowed a triumphant Ruth Harlow, legal director at Lambda Legal Defense after the June 26th ruling. Harlow, lead counsel for the defendants in Lawrence, had good reason to swagger; the U.S. Supreme Court had just proclaimed Lambda Legal's outrageous legal theories to be the law of the land.

According to Lambda's Harlow, "this ruling will be an important precedent for future cases as we push for full liberty and full equality in every aspect of gay people's lives." The Lambda Legal website hails the decision as a "landmark victory" that is "putting us on stronger ground than ever before." But this victory, it insists, is "just the beginning." The Lambda activists triumphantly boast: "[W]e're forging ahead in this new era--defining the next battlegrounds where we'll use our victory to win more respect and real fairness for people in all 50 states."

Although the homosexual activists repeatedly have proven themselves masters of deceit, you can believe them when they say they are pushing "for full liberty and full equality in every aspect of gay people's lives"--and in "all 50 states." Rightly understood, this means, of course, that the militant forces of organized sodomy are demanding full license and special treatment under the law, to protect and promote their every desire.

Incredibly, the majority of the Court has decided to assist the homosexual lobby and Lambda's legal cadre in this all-out assault not only on laws concerning buggery, but on all of our society's moral codes. Justice Antonin Scalia's stinging dissent warned that the Court's ruling would undermine state laws "against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity." Said Justice Scalia, "Every single one of these laws is called into question by today's decision." Indeed, the Lambda attorneys, as well as many of the other lawyers providing amicus curiae briefs urging the Court to overturn the Texas sodomy statute, are leaders in the activist vanguard relentlessly assailing those laws Justice Scalia mentioned.