Sodomy laws and you: we're just one aggressive misguided prosecutor away from arresting gay men and lesbians.

IT'S MONDAY MORNING. YOU'VE JUST SPENT A ROMANTIC weekend with your significant other. You're at work. A police officer shows up and, clasping handcuffs around your wrists, announces that you are under arrest for violating a sodomy law.

Does this sound alarmist, or at least far-fetched? I thought it did. For years I wondered why the gay and lesbian community bothered to spend our limited resources trying to repeal sodomy laws -- seldom-enforced laws criminalizing oral and anal sex. When I lived in Boston, I went slack-jawed when an activist told me her group's next goal was to repeal Massachusetts's sodomy law. "Why waste your time on that?" I asked. "We just got a gay and lesbian antidiscrimination bill enacted. Who cares about those old chestnut sodomy laws?"

Then I started to care. I started to care when a Virginia judge denied Sharon Bottoms custody of her son and was able to base his ruling partly on the presumption that, because Bottoms is a lesbian, she has oral sex and is therefore a felon under Virginia's sodomy law. A felon, he stated, should not be raising a child.

I started to care when former Georgia attorney general Michael Bowers withdrew a job offer from Robin Shahar because she is a lesbian. In 1986 Bowers had taken a highly publicized stand in favor of prosecuting Georgia sodomites (remember Bowers v. Hardwick?) and said he could hardly employ one.

I started to care when I remembered that during the first few years of Hitler's rule, he did not need any new laws to take away the property and liberty of Jews. He used laws that existed in Germany for decades, laws no one bothered to repeal because no one thought they would be enforced.

I started to care when the new mayor of Montgomery, Ala., refused to apologize for publicly referring to gay men and lesbians as "queer." With one phone call that mayor can tell his police chief to start investigating and arresting us for violating the state's sodomy law. I started to care when I heard Rep. Vic Snyder (D-Ark.) say of Arkansas's sodomy law, "We're just one aggressive, misguided prosecutor away" from arresting gay men and lesbians. I realized he was right.

There are sodomy laws on the books in 20 states. In six of those states, the laws apply only to same-sex couples. If a prosecutor decided to enforce the sodomy laws in one of the 14 states prohibiting sodomy by anyone but brought charges against only gay men and lesbians, we might successfully challenge the prosecutions on the basis of unfair enforcement of the law. But that would leave our fate in the hands of the courts and, even if we were successful, would leave the laws intact. And in the six states where only same-sex sodomy is a crime, we would have no such defense.

How can these laws be enforced? Pretty easily. Federal courts of appeal are divided on whether police even need a search warrant to aim telephoto lenses into the windows of people's homes. They could gather probable cause from, for example, right-wing zealots who pose as gay men and answer personal ads and (legally, in some states) tape phone calls during which potential partners talk about blow jobs. Police can also get probable-cause rulings from plenty of judges who rubber-stamp requests for warrants.

If we're prosecuted under the sodomy laws, we can serve jail time, be fined, lose our jobs, lose our children, and -- if sodomy is a felony in our state -- lose our right to vote. In Idaho we can be sentenced to life in prison. That is why we must fight to repeal these laws in every state where they exist.

I used to think we didn't have to be afraid of some laws. So did the editor who wrote, "One can live under any law." He wrote that in 1941, in Germany, in a Jewish newspaper. He was wrong. So was I.