Right to Privacy and Consenting Adults: Examining the Sodomy Cases
The 1986 case of Bowers v. Hardwick represents the continued legacy of homophobia of the era. This case demonstrates how homophobia has amounted to longstanding oppression for gay people, and has continually thwarted justice from protecting them or ever serving them. Michael Hardwick was in his late 20s when he was bartending at a gay bar in Georgia. He threw a beer bottle into an outdoor trash can and was written up by the police for public drinking (Bazelon, 2012). The terms of this citation come under suspicion as its possible that the police officer who wrote the ticket was just targeting him because he knew he was gay and worked at a local gay bar. The details of this citation of extremely dubious. The police officer that wrote the wrong day on the citation, ensuring that Hardwick would not show up as a result. This meant that a warrant for Hardwick’s arrest was issued (Eskridge, 2008). An officer arrived at Hardwick’s apartment to deliver the warrant; a person who had been sleeping on the living room couch asserted that they weren’t sure if Hardwick was home. This caused the officer to search the apartment, and he soon found Hardwick in the bedroom, having oral sex with a man: both men were immediately arrested in the name of sodomy (Bazelon, 2012).
In the 1980s Georgia still defined oral or anal sex between people—be them heterosexuals or homosexuals. This was actually not uncommon at the time, as other states had official laws in place: “…but none really enforced them against consenting adults who were acting in private. In fact, the county prosecutor dropped the charges against Hardwick” (Bazelon, 2012). This official dropping of charges was what most people expected at the time. Many of the laws that were officially on the books and intolerant and unjust weren’t actually enforced. Many people presumably viewed them as relics from another time, and while latent homophobia probably stopped people from wanting to change them, they were passively unenforced.
In the case of Hardwick, things became more complex, as the gay rights movement had wanted an opportunity to officially spar with the constitutionality of the sodomy legislation. Leaders of the gay rights movement encouraged Hardwick to sue and he did (Bazelon, 2012). However, the ultimate ruling in this case showed that homophobia ruled the day and still...
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